Better Off Jed

On Labor Day, we took the kids to the final home game of the Bowie Baysox, which is the Orioles’ AA minor league affiliate.

Minor league stadiums are a lot of fun. They are much smaller than a major league stadium, so every seat is great. You can clearly hear the umpire calls. The players are minor leaguers and the players often make some entertaining errors. The other benefit of being in a small stadium is that the chance that a foul ball comes your way is probably 10 orders of magnitude higher than in a major league stadium.

Just before the game started, I went to get some food for the family. I come back to our seats along the first baseline with the game just underway.  We were with another family and we had all of our kids on the bleachers in front of us.

I had my hands full when I hear the crack of the bat. Something made me look up. Here’s what I thought to myself as everything suddenly went into slow motion:

Wow. That ball is high.
Hmm…I think it’s coming our way.
Uh…I might have a chance to get that if I wasn’t holding the food.
Wait…I think it might hit my daughter and she’s not looking.
Oh…s**t!!

Yes, the ball did hit my daughter. She wasn’t even facing the field. It hit her right on her trapezius muscle between her shoulder and neck. We were very lucky that it didn’t hit her collar bone or her head. Thankfully, it was a pop fly and not a line drive, which could have been much more dangerous. Of course, she was stunned and started crying. A paramedic came over from the First Aid station to check her out. She had some swelling in the area and a light bruise, but otherwise she was fine. For those wondering, yes, I did recover the ball after the commotion died down.

Before we left home for the game, we contemplated bringing gloves, but decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Hindsight is always 20/20 although I’m not sure it would have helped given the way things played out.

My daughter wanted to go home and was very upset. I showed her that I had the ball, which — all things considered — was pretty cool. She was still too upset to care. After she calmed down, she became really interested in the ball. We thought it would be cool to have the guy who hit it autograph it for her. Unfortunately, it started to pouring rain in the 5th inning and we didn’t get the chance.