Close Encounters of the Smelly Kind.

This is another one of those " If you hang around long enough" entries. Saturday's game started off normal enough, 'normal' being a relative term, of course. There was no rain in the forecast until late night or early Sunday morning, so that was a huge relief. As I arrived at home plate, batting practice was just finishing up, so we packed it all up and go ready for pre-game,which was slightly delayed due to Portland taking infield practice,which is really unusual this time of year. As the season goes along, teams generally fore go infield practice and, a lot times, batting practice as well.
After they finished up, we got started. I set up everything to put down the baselines, then checked the chalker. I twas almost empty, so I headed to the cubby, remembering that there was a bag there from last night. When the guys came back with the truck, I noticed 2 other partial bags of chalk as well. I said to Frank " Are you lining tonight? Looks like we have enough chalk." (If you read my previous post, you'll understand that one.) Once the game got started I decided to stop and get a drink and some popcorn. Bad idea. The concession stand underneath the 3rd base grandstand was not all that packed, but the service was slow. God awful slow. (Note to SportService: your stands are understaffed, your customer service is bad) After that we just hung out in the cubby and watched the game. The boys put up a nice effort and staked themselves to a quick 3-0 lead after 3 innings, with some good pitching, timely hitting, and some good defensive plays. Hey good pitching, clutch hitting, good defense, sounds like good baseball. It actually is a pleasure to watch them play now. The first 2 months of the season were pretty hard to watch, with all the mental mistakes and just a serious lack of sticking to the fundamentals. They now do all of the small things that win games, making the routine plays and hitting with guys in scoring position. The pitching has been strong as well, even with all the movement to Triple A. They've been able to send capable replacements most times. That all translates into a bunch of wins. As I write this, they're only 10 games under .500 and 10 games out of a playoff. Depending on the mindset of the team, finishing at .500 or better is not out of the question, and if they can keep it up, they could match last year's 3rd place finish. Playoffs? I'm not even thinking about playoffs! It should be interesting. That said, the boys hung on for a tasty little 4-2 win. Afterwards, we had the usual post-game festivities, Launch-a-Ball, and the kiddies base race. Once we got all of that out of the way, the rest of the post-game work went pretty quickly and then it was time to tarp. because tomorrow it was supposed to rain. Imagine that... We all headed out back to unload and guess what was waiting for us. No, not beer. A skunk. We kept a close eye on it while Knute got the pellet gun. Just that quick, the little sucker disappeared. I didn't think anymore about it and headed underneath to the locker area to change. I heard some shuffling and chatter outside, so i started out to see what was going on. Knute yelled "Jeff, stay there!" Right after that, the skunk came scurrying in and ran right into the tool room. I got my stuff and got the hell out. We kept watching for it at the doorway. it kept peeking its head out, but Knute could never get a clear shot at it. In the meantime, one of the guys turned around towards the back fence and said" There's another one!" This one was a little bigger and almost completely white. Knute drew a bead on it and popped it once with a pellet. It seemed dazed and squeezed back out under the fence. It was wandering around in the grass behind the fence, when he popped it again. It seemed a little more hurt this time, so Frank decided to try and hit it with a cinder block. It took off and headed back under the fence towards the boardwalk. it was going up the ramp, stunned, when Frank got above it and tried to hit it with a bat. he missed it and the skunk headed underneath the boardwalk. We never did see it after that after a lot of very careful searching. We decided to declare victory and go home at that point. Too close for comfort, too many times. That is certainly one for the books. I won't be in Sunday, Monday is an off day, so I'll report back in after Tuesday's game. Until then, later.