This is an interesting level of baseball. Most of these guys are minor league rejects. Some are local guys who tried out and latched on. A few are former major leaguers.
We saw Gary take on the Schaumburg Flyers, who has former Pittsburgh Pirate Jermaine Allensworth playing center field. Allensworth (who is from my wife's hometown of Anderson, IN and a fellow Boilermaker), played a few years in the bigs, kicked around the affiliated minors for a few more, and has been in the Northern League for the last five season. He played two years for the Railcats.
Guys like Allensworth stand out. He's better than everyone else. He never blows the routine play in the field. He has a polished swing. He doesn't make the silly baserunning error. You can tell he played pro ball once. He's just not good enough to anymore.
The rest of these guys might not be good enough to play on the teams I watch in the College World Series. There is a fair amount of slop (the home pitcher, warming up right before the start of the game, threw a wild pitch and the catcher overthrew second base by 30 feet on the throw down). The players play hard though, so it's fun to watch. They certainly aren't playing for the money. They get paid, but nobody makes a living.
Gary plays at the US Steel Yard, which is a nice, relatively new minor league joint. It seats about 6000, but almost none of it is in the outfield. There are a few seats near the RF line, and a hot tub section next to that, but otherwise, all the seats are in foul ground.
Like most minor league parks, there is a lot geared toward the kids. They even have a playground behind the hitting background in CF. There is also train tracks that run just past the left field wall, so we'll get a train going by every once in a while that gets every kid's attention. There are also not one, but two mascots, Rusty and Rascal. Rusty was my two-year-old daughter's favorite. They have kids competing for prizes between almost every inning. They also get to run across the outfield during one inning break.
I missed quite a bit of this game (Gary won 6-5). I had the longest wait ever in a concession line - and I have been in a lot of concession lines. The line itself was short, but the guy right in front of me was ordering dinner for his family of six. It took the dimwitted woman trying to process this almost twenty minutes. Just waiting on this one guy, I missed the last two batters of the top of the fourth, the entire bottom of the fourth, and the first four batters of the fifth. I also spent an inning with my kids in the playground.
The game is almost besides the point though. The point is for the family to have a good night out without going broke, and we managed that.
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