Rowdy Rally In Nashville

I'm starting to really like my 2007 Rockwood Signature Ultra Lite 8293SS trailer(http://www.alsmotorhomes.com/show.php?id=186). It's white, 29 feet long, has two sinks in the bathroom, and in the perfect setting for me, the Pepsi Field parking lot. My commute to the stadium is about 5 minutes by foot. They say most car accidents occur within 2 miles of somebody's home. I can avoid all of that as long as I don't trip.

Our Thursday game was a bummer, since we got pounded, but the fans apparently had a great time. After the game, I showered and dressed and hung out for a few minutes talking to Mario Gutierrez, a Venezuelan who, at 26, is just about too old to get a chance to make it into the big leagues. At least that's what conventional wisdom, and he, said. I told him I was almost 40 and I was in the minors. Stop complaining. My point was to keep trying and throw conventional wisdom out the window. If you can pitch, you can pitch. Age shouldn't matter.

I left the locker room hoping I'd given him hope, although I know the baseball business. What I gave him was probably false hope.

Leaving the stadium, I saw a handful of fans who were looking at me. These weren't young kids. The most youthful was probably in his fifties. They approached me and starting giving me a Nashville Hounds history lesson. They'd been in Nashville all their lives and had followed the team, and its players, the entire time. They wanted to make sure that I understood their passion and didn't quickly turn around and sell the team to the wrong person as soon as Charlie Walker died. I told them not to worry. The plan was to hold onto it for a while. Or they could buy it on the spot for $20 million. They laughed and said Social Security doesn't pay enough.

I thought we were done, so I said goodbye and began the long 5-minute trek "home." The parking lot was full. Not with cars, but with other people who had brought their trailers. There were some like mine. There were RVs. There were station wagons with hitches and pop-up tent houses built into their trailers. There were pickup trucks with little houses in the beds. Then it hit me. This was a rally. A rally, not for the Hounds, but for me.

This was pretty cool. Somebody counted and said there were forty some-odd trailer type vehicles in the parking lots. There were about 200 people participating, everyone cooking tailgate style. There was a guy who played banjo, another the fiddle (Nashville is the country music capital of the world in case you didn't know [I didn't]). After an hour or so, they joined forces, met up with a harmonica player, and did some bluegrass standards (I'd never heard the songs, so they were new releases to me).

When I thought they'd be done, it got rowdier. People were drinking, more trailers drove in, smoke rose from grills... By 9:00, I'd be given 27 chocolate cakes. I like chocolate cake, but that's a lot for me to eat in sitting. The freezer in my Ultra Lite's kitchen is about as big as a catcher's mitt, so I had to start giving the cakes away.

I wanted to go to bed by 9:30. The party seemed to be just starting. It got a little louder, a little rowdier. It got a little younger. The mix started to turn a little sour.

At around 10:15, the first gunshot went off. By the time the police arrived 5 minutes later, about 10 shots had been fired. Whoever had the gun, or guns, was hidden well. Most people were either under their vehicles, hugging the blacktop of the parking lot, or in their trailers under the covers. It's eerie when the sounds you hear go so quickly from music and laughter to gunshots to police radios breaking through the silence.

No arrests were made, although it took the cops about 90 minutes to have every trailer, but mine, vacate the parking lot. Then they asked me for my permit to park where I was. I lied and said the team had it in their office. They told me I'd need to show it to them the next day or have to find another place to park.

By around 1AM I was in bed. To my calculations, I'd lost out on 3 1/2 hours of sleep. Not good because I had to be in the locker room this morning at 8 AM for a rehab session with the team's trainer, Russell Katz.

Woke up this morning and my head was numb; hangover numb, and I hadn't even had anything alcoholic to drink. I made it in to see Russell and thought through my haze if it was worth staying in a trailer anymore. I was getting visitors all the time, problems were arising, my sleep pattern was off. Before I knew it, it was 10:30. I'd been asleep on the trainer's table for over 2 hours. Yes, I thought, something had to be done. I had to stop this before it ruined my focus.

You could tell my focus was off when I came into the game today in the 9th, trying to protect a 2-run lead. By giving up 5 runs in my second appearance of the season, I helped us lose by three.

There was no party after the game. Just a police escort to my trailer. They'd seen the permit (it really was in the team's office) and told me it was okay to stay in the parking lot, but I needed security. It flew in late Friday night in the shape of a 300 pound African-American blues singer who can also put you through the hardest workout of your life: Andy Gambell, my former personal trainer, who would now be my personal security guard.

Don't worry. He's got his own trailer. Mine may have two sinks, but he needs four to be happy. And now I'm happy too. It's hard to be homesick when your security guard is singing the blues all night long.