When the minor league baseball season started five months ago, I was so optimistic.
“I’m gonna get to Portland, and Pawtucket, and Lowell, and Vermont, and Tri-City, and New Britain…” I told myself as I made a list of every home game that those nearby teams would be playing. I was gonna be a positive northeastern Ben Hill, a minor league version of a minor league baseball writer (and Ben is a major league minor league writer, if you want to confuse things even more).
Alas, it was not meant to be. The reasons aren’t important. Some family stuff, some work stuff – the usual. The upshot is that I visited three new major league stadiums (Nationals Park, Yankee Stadium, and Citizens Bank Park), made a second trip to Camden Yards, and attended several games as both fan and “media” at Merchantsauto.com Stadium in Manchester, but reached the beginning of September without scratching any new minor league facilities off the list.
That just would not do, so last Friday, my wife and I rounded up our nephew and ventured north to Portland, Maine’s Hadlock Field to watch the Sea Dogs take on our hometown New Hampshire Fisher Cats. It wasn’t just a battle between two Eastern League rivals, but another installment in the ongoing brawl between baseball and Mother Nature, with Hurricane Earl barreling up the eastern seaboard. Though the Red Sox and White Sox were postponed in Boston before Portland’s game even started, this brawl turned out like most baseball fights: uneventful. While the threat of wind and rain helped keep the fans away, limiting the attendance to 4,025 hardy souls, it only showered three times in the two hours and twenty-four minutes it took to play the game: once in the third, once in the fifth, and once in the seventh. The first burst brought in a nice layer of rolling fog that made it impossible to track fly balls off the bat.
Hadlock made a solid impression right off the bat, with $5 parking right across the street from the ballpark and a big statue of the mascot, Slugger, outside the gates. It felt like the minor leagues, in a good way. The concourses were wide, easily able to accommodate the fans in attendance (all 2,500 or so of us), and decorated with a variety of Sea Dogs-related photos and plaques, including the team’s Hall of Fame, team photos dating back to the early 1990s (when the team was the Marlins Double-A affiliate) and a list of players who had gone on to play in the major leagues.
There was also a team store, where my nephew soon bought a Red Sox hat (he wanted a Yankees hat, but my wife talked him out of it), and a bored-looking vendor selling programs for $3. I bought one, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to commemorate my first trip north of the border, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had won a free set of 1995 Sea Dogs baseball cards, featuring such luminaries as Antonio Alfonseca, Edgar Renteria, and Carlos Tosca. Suh-weet. This prompted me to look long and hard at the 2009 ($5) and 2010 ($8) team sets, but I just couldn’t pull the trigger. Not at those prices.
We did pull the trigger on food. A lot of food. BBQ chicken sandwich (excellent), fried dough (best I’ve ever had), fries, Sea Dogs biscuits (aka ice cream sandwiches with chocolate chips), and whatever the kid packed away. I’m selling it short by only mentioning it for four sentences, but the concessions at Hadlock were some of the best I’ve had at a ballpark (the only negative: it was tough to find some stuff because stands closed early due to the attendance, and most stands didn’t carry stuff like fried food or sausage).
Our seats were on the 200-level, just to the left of home plate, and offered a fantastic view of the field. Two things immediately stood out: one, a giant Green Monster replica (cleverly dubbed the “Maine Monster”) serves as the left field wall, complete with Citgo sign and Coke bottle on top, and two, a large brick building sits off the right field line, fairly close to the field (although not close enough to effect balls in play). I asked an usher about it after the game and he identified it as The Expo, home of Portland’s D-League team, the Maine Red Claws. He also noted that it had been there for a long time (he, a man who appeared to be in his sixties, had played there as a boy; Wikipedia says it was built in 1914), that Hadlock had replaced a high school baseball field, and that there were still high school football fields beyond the right field wall, which explained the whistles we heard late in the game.
I had just returned from watching the Red Sox play in Baltimore the day before and couldn’t help but continue noticing how strange it is to watch one’s home team play on the road. It always feels like the crowd is cheering at the wrong time, and my wife noted on several occasions that she was the only one openly supporting the Fisher Cats.
That said, it was nice to see and hear the passion of the fans. They 
challenged umpires’ calls, shouted encouragement to their players, expressed delight at a perfectly timed pitchout, and exhorted the home team to bounce back from an early 3-0 deficit. While it helped that New Hampshire starter Zach Stewart left after three innings, the Sea Dogs never quit, setting the tone for a weekend sweep that helped keep New Hampshire from taking over first place in the division. I think my favorite person was a crazy lady behind home plate who kept jumping out of her seat and walking around and cheering loudly, waving her arms to get the crowd involved. For the last two innings, after Portland had surged ahead, her chant stayed fairly constant: “We never give up, New Hampshire! We never quit!”
To this, my lovely wife responded, “Even though you’re fourteen games behind?” Her first “Scoreboard” comment. I couldn’t have been more proud.
Near the end of the game, we sent our nephew on a recon mission to see if it would be possible to sneak down to the largely empty seats behind home plate. We quickly learned that he is the worst seat-upgrader ever. He bounded down the steps like a colt that had just discovered its legs, turning around every few steps to flash us a huge grin. He sat down in a seat, turned around, grinned again, jumped up, ran back up the stairs, crossed to the other end of the row, ran back down the stairs, chose another seat, turned around, grinned again. It was nice to see such unbridled joy from a kid who was just happy to be within spitting distance of actual professional baseball players, even if it made him totally conspicuous.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. It was foggy and a little rainy and the home team was winning – no usher, not even Biff, was going to kick us out of seats that hadn’t been occupied all night. It might as well have been general admission. So we watched the last couple innings from the first and second rows behind home plate, Section 108. Once, my wife said how nervous it made her, even with the screen. I pointed to David Cooper, waiting in the on-deck circle almost directly in front of us, unprotected by anything but his reflexes. “Imagine how he feels,” I said.
