Halloween In May

An early game yesterday (10:30 AM) marred by two things:

1. We lost 5-1. I did not pitch.
2. Halloween in May

We were a flat team yesterday. Teams do that sometimes. Everyone just picks a day, subconsciously, to have no energy and go through the motions. We did that yesterday. Dusty Graves, our manager, was furious by the 4th inning because of this. He was tossed by the 5th. We didn't even see him after the game until we got on the bus that took us to the airport for our flight to Tucson. He was already on the plane as we boarded. He said nothing, just stared straight ahead. That's about all a manager can do on days like that.

The other thing that brought us down was a Halloween in May promotion the team ran. It got fannies in the seats (about 6500 in attendance), but it also distracted the hell out of a bunch of the guys. First, there was this:




These two were sitting right behind home plate.





Then there was this kid:


He never sat, the whole game. Just kept running up and down the aisles, screaming, "I'm dead! I'm dead!" It got worse when he'd start screaming it in Spanish. "Soy muerto! Soy muerto!"

Rey Marcos, our 17 year old superstar in training and my trusty ward, was freaked out. He kept looking at me from out on the field at shortstop, like I could do something. When he'd come in, I'd tell him to relax. But since my Spanish is about as good as my cooking, I don't think I got through to him. As a result, he went 0 for 5 and made two errors, one leading to a 3-run fifth for Salt Lake.

Finally, there were these two young ladies:


If you weren't Rey Marcos, then your eyes were here. Lots of chatter in the dugout about the costumes these femmes elected to wear to a 10:30AM minor league baseball game. They also put on a pretty interesting show during the 7th inning stretch. We went down 1-2-3 (on 5 pitches) shortly thereafter. Maybe Dusty should have been focusing more on the goings-on off the field. Or maybe that was his problem too. Maybe he was just as bad as everyone else. It's tough to be 50, I assume. I'm only 40, so what do I know.

Since the Jimmy Scott Foundation now owns the Nashville Hounds, I'm thinking of aborting future Halloween in May promotions. Why let the fans have fun when there's a ballgame to be played? Or maybe we'll just have it at night and make it harder for the players to see. Or maybe we turn the promotion into Nun Day. We can make a new habit of it. Get it?