The Blowfish people try to make life at the Cap enjoyable for those not patient enough for sustained observation of the game, including Little Leaguers, often in uniform, equipped with gloves, who rather than sitting and watching prefer a perquisite thrill, the pursuit of free foul balls.
Though I have no kids, I appreciate the activities devised as family fun, and my favorite has always been when the ballpark urchins are invited to gather at the fence by the left field line to be released through a gate, like a gaggle of flying geese, to run all the way across the field. The children are led, at least for a time, by mascots Pockets and Blowie. Pockets is a kangaroo impersonator employed by Palmetto Health, an abiding corporate sponsor, and Blowie (of course) is the home team icon, a huge cartoon-fish-face baseball-head with human arms and legs.
The activity is called—in promotion of another sponsor—the Time-Warner Blowie and Pockets Chase. It is billed as a kind of competition, the kids attempting to outrun the mascots, who feign taking advantage of a head start, and it often includes some straggling toddler whose bipedal skills, doubtless phenomenal at home, are not quite up to snuff for a foot race in a stadium. The little one will be scooped up by an attending adult, who jogs encumbered after the others with his bewildered burden.
One evening last season, or the season before, one of the kids in the mascots chase—no toddler he, I assume, but a bike-riding, skate-boarding, foul-shagging Tom Sawyer of Summer—went for some time missing. His father came up to the concrete slab where I reside, tapped on the window of the press box and asked the chief impresario to provide an attentive father the assistance of a public address. And soon there resounded throughout the stands and across the field and into the concourse of the Cap the gentle command of a nice man named Eric Cheney that Johnny So-and-So meet his father at such-and-such a spot. Upon additional petitions, Cheney repeated the announcement, two or three times, albeit at prudent intervals, and being privy to the reason for its instigation I found myself—involved. As an experienced eavesdropper and a veteran spectator of the 3-2 pitch, I was able to affect a look of disinterest, but the suspense was after awhile a little disconcerting, for the reunion of the kid with an angry or anxious or surprisingly sanguine dad, which happened (beyond my witness) soon enough, was never announced, the boy having never been, for want of a proclamation, “missing,” and although, privately inquiring, I got a happy ending, I still have in mind from that distant evening a residue of thoughts then at first repressed or better left unsaid.
What was said, though, through the PA system, before the next mascots chase, and has been said before most of those ensuing, is: Parents please be sure to meet your children at the right-field side.  And there was also, I noticed, whether by intention or not, an alteration, perhaps not all at once, but gradually, in the choreography of the race. Many of the children now began to run in a rather straighter line between the gates of departure and call, cutting across the top of the diamond on the bare ground of the base paths, thus denying me the pleasure I had taken in their stream of multi-colored motion against the constant green, and I began to wish the kids would keep to the outfield, I did, I really did, and still do, the paternal pathos of a childless fan in silent sympathy with a father having given way to the crankiness of a culture critic protective of his meditative preferences, compulsively perturbed when the head groundskeeper in drawing the batting boxes before the game puts down chalk lines too thick and in crooked relation to the plate, good enough for a kiddie drawing, he mutters to himself, but not for a real baseball field, where the illusion, at least, of geometric certainty must always reign supreme.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."