I had to catch some form of live baseball this holiday weekend so we decided to go to the Lakewood Blueclaws game at 1:05pm. It was the last game of the minor league season and the weather was absolutely beautiful.

Everytime we take Lillian to a ballgame someone asks if it’s her first baseball game. I’m proud to say that today it was her 4th. What can I say - the kid loves baseball.

We left the house about 11:00am and got to First Energy Park at abut 11:34am. Parking was still $1 and we got a nice spot. I picked up our tickets at Will Call and then we entered through the gates. Monday’s at the ballpark is usually ‘kids eat free’ day for kids 12 and under by no one gave one of the coupons to Lillian. Come on! She’s 12 and under!

The sun was beating down on pretty much all of the seats so Debbie grabbed a couple of the handicapped accessible seats at the edge of the seating area since they were in the shade and I went off to wander the stadium. I walked by the front row of the visitor’s dugouts and walked through the picnic area. My main motivation was to look for any stray balls that might have been left unaccounted for. I then walked next to the fence out in left field and looked between the fence and ad boards to see if any balls got stuck there. No luck. I walked to starightaway center and the extra fenced in area by the batter’s eye with the mass of bushes. I spotted a ball stuck waaay out in almost dead center trapped between the ad boards and the fence and I remembered that a ground rule double had gotten trapped there 2 weeks ago when we last saw a game. I guess they don’t go in there and clean them out after every game. Just as I thought that I looked down and saw a ball about 10 feet down and about 6 feet away from me. I took out my glove from the backpack I’ve been borrowing from Debbie, tied some rope to it and swung it out. It took about 4 tries but I was able to swing the glove out enough to roll the ball right beneath me. Then I stuck the rubber band on and put the Sharpie in and lowered it over the ball. 30 seconds later I reeled it back in and inside my glove was a beautiful South Atlantic League ball with the letters LWD in permanent marker written on it. This indicated to me that this was a Lakewood batting practice ball - marked so they could get them back.

I spent the next 30 minutes watching the DelMarVa Shorebirds play catch and warm up. Debbie and Lillian came down and said that they’d been nicely kicked out of their seats. They left so Lillian could feed and then I went and grabbed my ticketed seat for the game.

Debbie called an inning later and we found some seats down the 3rd base line. I left to grab some jumbo dogs with saurkraut and later Debbie got a big funnel cake.

The game was amazingly quick ending a shade over 2 hours. Since it was the last game of the season I was wondering if the batters were just swinging away so they could pack up and go home. I’ll have to recheck my scorecard.

After the game they had a horseshoe toss contest. the person who could toss a horseshoe onto home plate the most number of times would win partial ownership of a racehorse.

After that they had a helicopter cash drop contest. A small copter flew over, around and onto the field and dropped a couple bags of fake cash while some preselected people ran around gathering as much as they could.

After the cash drop we left up one Rawlings baseball and another baseball memory for the kid.