Day or night, there is something about the first glimpse of a ballpark’s lighting standards, something to do with the promise of green grass tucked into the urban sprawl beneath them, like an oasis under a pocket of palm trees. The odd thing is, this cheerful association is so strong for a baseball fan it is even noticeable as one approaches Philip Elfstrom Stadium at the Kane County Events Center in Geneva, where the lights rise against a backdrop of flat farm fields and a mountainous landfill.
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After the family fiasco of Father’s Day, we resolved we would no longer try to convert the reluctant to baseball this year. Who needs them? As a general thing, this is turning out to be an excellent summer for the devoted sports fan. Walk-up tickets are routinely available at both Wrigley and Comiskey, and early reports from Arlington Park are that the crowds are down and the pleasure level is up with the shortened season. So much the better for people who really care about baseball and playing the ponies. Yet nowhere is the concentration of devoted sports fans so dense as in Kane County this summer. The Cougars drew 11,038 fans to cozy little Elfstrom Stadium last Saturday night, giving them a league-leading total attendance of 231,380 for 35 games. There were 8,572 there Sunday afternoon, and the Cougars were expecting another 10,000 Monday night on the eve of the Fourth of July. Even with the relatively large crowds–large for both the ballpark and for Class A baseball–the outing was delightful.
We got there a little more than an hour before game time, and we bought a bratwurst and a beer and sat down on the lawn beyond the first-base line. Elfstrom Stadium proper is built into a slope, and the grandstand runs around home plate from just beyond first base to just beyond third base. To the sides is the lawn, which naturally banks toward the field. We sat down and watched families come in and take positions all around us. “Here are your seats, sir,” said one boy to his father as he spread a blanket on the grass, and the father responded, “Excellent choice.” From there, however, the kids were on their own. They kicked up clouds of dust as they went up and down the bare dirt at the bottom of the slope and as they ran back and forth along the chain-link fence surrounding the field. One pair of two-year-old boys went down the slope on their rear ends and up the slope on their bellies time after time, while their parents turned a blind eye and no doubt plotted a twilight bath.
Records, however, are almost inconsequential at this level; it’s a game of raw talent mixed in with dreamers who don’t have a prayer of making the majors. In one typical sequence in the top of the fifth, Kane County third baseman Tony Darden booted a grounder, then second baseman Walter White started a nifty double play on a high hopper, crisply turned by shortstop Victor Rodriguez to erase the error.
The one sad thing to report is there is no escaping “Y.M.C.A.” at baseball stadiums this year. It has even infected bucolic Kane County, like an asp crawling through paradise.
