Just take me out to the ballgame

Bruce Ward
The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, August 05, 2008

The ballpark on Coventry Road is one of my favourite places, and if I were a brainy Op-Ed dude like baseball sage Thomas Boswell, maybe I could give you some deep and meaningful reasons why this should be.

Can't do it, though. I never like the stuff academics and intellectuals write about baseball. My guess is Boswell got picked last a lot as a kid because he was scared of the ball, and that's why he goes on about the perfect parabola of the infield metaphysics, or whatever. I don't like obsessive number-cruncher Bill James either and I hate his stats, even though .OPS may be an irrefutable way to measure a player's offensive performance. I don't need a pocket calculator to know if a guy's hitting or not.

My baseball philosophy is Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh all the way. "A good friend of mine used to say, 'This is a very simple game'," LaLoosh says in the movie Bull Durham. "You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains."

Sitting in Rapidz Stadium on a cool mid-July evening, it strikes me that the team has plenty of players who can throw, catch and hit. Not many of the guys can do all three with proficiency, but then, that's why they call it semi-pro. The upside is pretty much anything can happen in a game.

And that's how things turn out tonight. The home team is playing the Quebec Capitales, so it's Rapidz vs the Caps. Quebec is in first place, the Rapidz are a distant last -- 18 games back. After four innings, the Capitales lead 6-1. But Ottawa roars back, and the game is tied after nine innings. Then the roof falls in. The Caps score five runs in the tenth, winning 12-7.

There was one bad error by the Rapidz, a few bonehead calls by the umps, a fantastic running catch by the leftfielder. There was good pitching, awful pitching, some clutch hitting and some truly horrible swings.

I had a swell time, even though I went tout seul. I have the happy facility of making friends wherever I go -- so long as it's in a ball yard, I mean. I've been going to games at the former Lynx Stadium for 15 years now, and every time I'm there I remember how the late great George Carlin got it exactly right in his classic baseball vs. football routine.

Football is martial, Carlin said, but baseball is a soothing pastime.

"In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defence by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line." In baseball, Carlin goes on, "the objective is to go home! And be safe!"

In the stands during a baseball game, "there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness." But in football, the mood in the stands tends to be murderous at times.

That picnic atmosphere is all over the ballpark tonight, like hot-dog mustard on a kid's face. Baseball relaxes me. As a stress reliever, baseball is way better than prescription pills. It's much cheaper, too. An evening's entertainment at the ballpark cost me $20 or so. That's for the ticket, parking and the eats. That same $20 would buy about seven minutes of a Senators' game.

Your mind can wander a bit at the ballpark and it doesn't matter. For the last few minutes I've been trying to think up a motto for the Rapidz. All I've got so far is "The 'pitz are all right." This probably won't save baseball in Ottawa, I know.

The announced crowd tonight is just under 3,000. There's not anything like 3,000 fans in the stands, though. Closer to 2,000, I'd say. Still, they are real fans and definitely into the game -- people of all shapes and sizes having fun on a summer night.

In the glory days of the Lynx, sellouts were not uncommon. There were 43 sellouts in 1992, but four years later there were none, and attendance had dwindled to 5,000. It didn't take a genius to see that the Lynx were doomed.

I've been at the ballpark when all 10,332 seats were occupied. I've attended many other times when it seemed there were only 332 of us there. More fans means more fun, of course, but I have no explanation as to why the city lost interest in Triple-A baseball. I blame soccer, but I tend to blame soccer for everything, including global warming.

I'm not sure a fan base of 2,500 or so will be enough to keep the Rapidz going beyond the end of next season. As an at-risk senior -- at risk of being bored to death by TV shows like Dancing With the Stars -- I hope the team survives. I can hardly stand the thought of summer without the prospect of going out to Coventry Road for a ball game.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008