Surfing the Inner N8

What a beautiful, beautiful day on the Eastern Shore! I went to the Delmarva Shorebirds game (local Class A minor league baseball team). They played the Lake County Captains, and it was a pretty lame game until the eighth inning. It was so bad I almost left before the action started. It didn’t help that I’d brought a pen and notebook to do some church planning between innings, and my lone pen died. Lesson: always bring back up.

Coming into the bottom of the eighth, Lake County was thrashing the Shorebirds 9-2. The Captains didn’t even look that great except for their pitching, but the Shorebirds were having a lousy game. They walked several people every inning, and two of their opponents’ runs came on passed balls. In fact, I’m not even sure if any of their 9 runs were earned.

Then in the bottom of the eighth, Delmarva got a series of solid base knocks to score three runs, narrowing the gap to a 4-run deficit. With the bases juiced and two men down, Brandon Tripp went long with a 400-plus-foot blast to dead center. His grand slam tied the score, and with a 7-run eighth inning, the game suddenly got interesting.

Lake County added two unanswered scores in the top of the 10th on a two-run homer to wrap it up, but it still turned out to be a pretty good game overall.

However, I do feel–and look!–like such a dummy. I was sitting along the first base side the whole game, and the sun was to my right side. I didn’t realize just how sunny it was. Turns out I should have switched over to the third base side after a few innings, because now my right side is very bright red.

Guess I’ll have to go to another game soon and sit on the other side, so I’m burned evenly.