Take me out to the ballgame

I can still remember my first baseball game. It was at Tiger Stadium. Not Comerica Park, but the old stadium on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in Detroit. That day, the Tigers where facing the Texas Rangers and a future Hall of Fame pitcher by the name of Nolan Ryan.\nI was only 5 years old back then and didn’t understand why my dad was so excited to see this guy play.\nWhen I went to Indianapolis on July 20 this year to watch a game between the Indianapolis Indians and the Durham Bulls however, I knew a little more about the players on the teams I was about to watch than I did before that first game back in the early 1990s. But not much.\nThere were not 756 career home runs or 300 career wins on the line. The players in the AAA are playing in hopes of getting called up to the big leagues. These are players whose names you probably do not recognize yet unless you follow farm systems religiously. But that doesn’t mean you never will.\nThe list of former Indianapolis Indians includes names such as Randy Johnson, Roger Maris and Moisés Alou. The list of former Durham Bulls is just as impressive with Johnny Pesky, Joe Morgan, Chipper and Andruw Jones and of course Lawrence “Crash” Davis, who Kevin Costner portrayed in the 1988 movie “Bull Durham.”\nA game between teams in the Pittsburgh Pirates and Tampa Bay Devil Rays farm systems might not seem like something that would draw crowds, but 13,635 people came out to Victory Field that day. That’s only about 750 fewer than the Florida Marlins, a major league team, averaged in home attendance during the 2006 season. \nAnd while both teams’ parent club sits in the basement of their major league divisions, the same cannot be said for the Indians or the Bulls. At the time of the game, both sat in second place of the International League’s West and South divisions, respectively.\nWith the backdrop of downtown Indianapolis, fans were already filling up the stadium with more than an hour to go before the first pitch of the game. They filled not only the stands in the infield, but many also sat on blankets in the grass to enjoy the game from the outfield.\nThose who came enjoyed a tight game in which neither team held a lead of more than one run. The game ended in the bottom of the ninth, when the Indians’ right fielder Adam Boeve led off the inning with a walk-off home run to give Indianapolis a 5-4 win. \nFor many, going to a baseball game means a game at Wrigley Field, U.S. Cellular Field, Great American Ballpark or any one of the MLB’s other 27 ballparks. But we have minor league ballparks all over the country. Forty-five out of 48 states in the continental U.S. have minor league teams, and in Indiana, we have teams in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and South Bend. In addition to the minor league teams, we have independent teams in Evansville and Gary. \nSo almost anywhere you go, you can count on a baseball park being nearby.