Take me out to the squall game

Alright, kids: settle down for a story that's probably past its expiration date already, and is a pretty superfluous telling, since about half of my regular readership experienced it first-hand, but it deserves to be put down in type, if only because Annie will probably enjoy it at least a little.

The cast of characters is three of the best friends a guy could ask for: Hans (visiting from Asheville), Doug (visiting from Nashville, aka Ca$hville, aka Asheville-with-an-N) and Christian (coming at you live from 13th street NW). The main point of the trip was to see God's Gift To Music Lovers on Sunday night, but we take any chance we can to get together and rehash the same 10 jokes enjoyed by approximately six people for well over a decade. Needless to say, it was a blast. I would say that you should wish you were there, but not being one of the four of us or Alex, I can't imagine you would have thought it was nearly as funny. By which I mean, "funny at all".

Saturday's baseball game was a must, partly because sports is a required feature of these weekends and partly because of Doug's near-obsessive Marlins fandom. We gave The Finger to the forecast of rain, headed to the stadium and settled in our cheap, upper-deck seats, which we chose in spite of Christian's absolute insistence that he would accept nothing less than the $150 Diamond Level seats.

It started to rain, of course. And then it started to POUR. By the end of it, the game had been delayed for over two hours, but the plus side was that there were only a few hundred people left in the stadium, which put us in Christian's precious Diamond Level seats: first row, directly behind home plate.

It was both a thrilling and a bizarre experience. Being right behind home plate gave us about as great a sense as possible of the sheer power that goes into the hits and the pitching. But we had these rich cat seats in an almost-empty stadium. There was a couple of kids heckling the Marlins hitters (Doug: "It's like watching a game with the Bad News Bears") and their heckles echoed off the empty corners of RFK. So sitting in those seats was like being a millionaire in a country where they don't take your currency.

Then the rain started falling, as rain does. It was cold and we were looking at another delay, so we figured we'd head out. Unfortunately, we listened to me and left just before the Nats went up to bat again. Hans, Christian and I hit the bathroom before we left the stadium, and when we were in there, a huge roar (well, as huge as a couple hundred people could get) filled the stadium. I figured, Classic. We miss the one good thing. I just didn't know how good until Doug walked into the bathroom with that you're-not-going-to-believe-this look that he does so well.

"Yeah," he said. "That was an inside-the-park home run."

"No it wasn't," I said, and I really didn't believe him.

"Yeah. It was."

Sure enough, we get to the monitors outside the bathroom just in time to hear the announcer say, "...and that was an inside-the-park home run for the Nationals!"

We couldn't stop laughing about it on the wet walk back to the Metro. We stick out a 2-and-a-half hour rain delay only to miss the most exciting play of the game. We started imagining all the ridiculously thrilling plays we were going to miss by heading home.

The rain fell even harder as we headed home, and we assumed that there was no way they were going to finish. Finally back at my place, we checked the score again, and it showed the Marlins up 3-2 in the middle of the 9th with play suspended. As we all went to bed with the sky opened up, there was no reason to think that game was anything other than over.

The next day, at brunch on the roof of The Reef, half-full of mimosas, we figured that we might as well get Hans to dial up the final on his fancy-pants internet phone.

"Weird," he reports back. "It says 7-3, Nationals".

That couldn't be right, we thought. It was impossible, we thought, but we were already laughing as we added the runs and figured out what happened. Did we really leave a game that was won by a walk-off grand slam after the Nationals had tied it? Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

Maybe it's not that funny when taken as a whole. The game ended at a quarter to two in front of maybe a dozen people. There's no way in hell we would have sat through another rain delay. But sitting there with my best friends on a sunny roof top deck, there didn't seem much in the world that was funnier than us missing out on a game whose exciting ending we had predicted as a ludicrous exaggeration. Maybe you had to be there to appreciate why it was so funny that we weren't there.