So the Toledo Mud Hens have given me a media pass for the whole season— complete with field and locker room privileges. It’s this powerful and exciting access that I naturally don’t deserve, but I am going to make good use of it, nonetheless.
Over the course of the season, I will be attending as many games as I can to bring you Mud Hens and Jeff, my column celebrating the best franchise in minor league baseball. I don’t know what that means exactly, coverage-wise, but I figure there are other publications you can turn to if you just want the game play-by-plays. I want to bring you my insights on the Great American Pastime as I experience them.
Saturday’s game was a good one to attend. All those fake Mud Hens fans had crowded up the home opener on Thursday, April 13, so by Saturday only the purists were showing up, which is how it ought to be. I don’t know what the attendance was and I’m not very good at guessing. There was lots of open seating in the upper deck, the lowers were pretty packed— a good sign of hometown blue-collar support, I guess. (At Fifth Third Field, upstairs is Club Level, so the “cheap seats” are actually the better, field-level seats, which I dig).
I don’t remember too much of the game— Omar Infante made a great diving catch for an out, but also sucked at the plate, and we’re good at pop fly outs (hitting into them, that is).
I didn’t explore the stadium as much as I could have, but I have a whole season to discover the seamy underbelly of Mud Hens b-ball. For the time being, I was content to sit in the crowd and observe.
So what did I observe? For one thing, a food vendor stepped in a girl’s fresh nacho plate that she’d set on the stairs next to her aisle seat. He had that big box of beer hanging in front of him and his foot came down right through the cheese and chip goodness, decimating them. “I wondered what that was,” he said by explanation after the fact and kept moving. I bet she never again leaves her nachos out, I know I won’t. Lesson learned.
My day at Mud Hens stadium also suffered because of food though. I wanted the Pot Roast Poutine from Gilhooley’s in section 108. Over the roar of typical stadium noise, the guy told me they were all out. It was the one thing I had been frothing over since they unveiled the new menu, and to find out I wasn’t going to get it, well, let’s just say that Toledo baseball has a long way to go in terms of undoing the scar they etched on my soul that otherwise sunny Saturday.
I will be back, but I want my g-damn pot roast poutine, folks.
Finally, I got to watch that sort of schadenfreude moment where a fan went from fun drunk (inviting everyone to join him in their clubhouse at the Walleye playoff game that night) to cringey drunk, yelling profanities as his buddies awkwardly urged him to leave with them. That’s the real Great American Pastime, the game within the game.
Several little kids got souvenir foul balls and that brief splash of rain that hit in the early afternoon stayed gone during a beautiful afternoon. It’s great to have baseball back in Toledo; it’s going to be a hell of a season.
Oh and the Hens won that day, 6-3 against the Indians of Indianapolis. So, good times.
