Goodreads Bookshelf
Extreme Baseball
I suppose it's something of a truism that we only really understand things by their opposites. We don't really know happiness without knowing sadness; good without evil; and we can't know well-played baseball without seeing the Indians and Reds play.
My point, though, was not the quality of game-play, but the experience of sensation. When we got to the ballpark (the one that will always be Jacobs Field to me, no matter how they whore out naming rights), the sun was beating down mercilessly. I paid too much for sunscreen at the park since I'd forgotten it, and it felt and looked like I might still get burned. For my fair skin, it was quite uncomfortably sunny.
First, this made the occasional clouds that passed in front of the sun absolutely heavenly. The brief respite they provided was greatly appreciated--far more so than a uniformly cloudy day would have been. Then, around the fifth inning, the clouds got serious and started dropping rain. From my perspective, this too was divine. If the whole game had been rainy, it would have been miserable, but a bit of cool rain falling on skin over-heated by the sun? It was a wonderful contrast that allowed me to appreciate the rain--and, for that matter, the sun when it returned. The rest of the game, we alternated between sun and rain, until late in the 8th or early in the 9th when the rain started really falling. Since the game had been so disappointing and didn't look likely to get exciting anyway, we went ahead and left.
Still, for my part, I was able to appreciate each extreme because of the other. But then, perhaps the lesson is not about extremes illuminating each other so much as it is about moderation in all things?
I'll leave you with a few more pictures from the game, just to show off my fiancee's amazing zoom capabilities.
We think the image that comes up with a mouse-over is the home run Grady hit, but it might be a different picture we have where he's just hit and the catcher is watching it sail up, up, and away.