Indie Ball

Whenever you think about a sport like baseball, you automatically think of the major league.  Professionals that get paid millions of dollars to do the thing that they love and the thing that we love to watch them do.  You also think of overpriced tickets, overpriced souvenirs, and overpriced food and drink.  You might also think that the players get overpaid.  Personally, I think all of those things from time to time.  Yes, they have worked their entire lives to get to this point and their talents and efforts have paid off.  But what about the guys that never make it to the show?  What about the guys that haven't quite given up on the dream?  The guys that are playing just to play and maybe have an outside chance of signing with an MLB team?  Those are the guys that are playing just to play. 

When we bought our house I couldn't help but notice that we are about a ten minute drive from such a team.  The St. Paul Saints.  They built a new stadium in 2015 in the Lowertown historic neighborhood of St. Paul moving away from Midway (which is for the best).  I also noted how dangerous this could be because the tickets are normally pretty cheap unless it's a holiday weekend.  

The Saints play in the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball league.  A bit of a mouthful.  Basically it's independent league baseball and encompasses teams from Texas to Canada in the central part of the continent.  There is a lot that goes on because these games aren't to be taken too seriously.  They do a lot of little fun games in between innings with the fans.  Lots of interacting keeps things fun and loose. 

I'm sure that I've written about this before, but my all time favorite memory revolving around baseball happened at a Saints game several years ago.  It was a Friday night game so they had fireworks like plenty of teams do.  It wasn't anything crazy extravagant and didn't go into the wee hours of the night, maybe twenty to thirty minutes.  In the process of the fireworks going off players from both teams, still in their uniforms, after playing a full game, came out of their locker rooms to watch the fireworks.  Just a bunch of guys coming out to watch the fireworks.  It was like that scene in the Sandlot when they were playing baseball on the 4th of July and Benny hits a home run and all the players look to the sky to watch the ball then stop to watch the fireworks instead.  And Ray Charles' version of 'America the Beautiful' plays.  It was magical. 

Here's a shot of the new stadium.  It's very open.  It still has the new stadium smell. 

A post shared by Michael Litzner (@melitzner) on Jul 1, 2017 at 5:13pm PDT

I even bought a hat to support the team!  It's my first non-Tigers organizational hat.  This is a big step for me.  I figure as long as it isn't a team the Tigers play against I'm not breaking my self imposed rule of not buying non-Tigers gear. 

A post shared by Michael Litzner (@melitzner) on Jul 1, 2017 at 8:36pm PDT