Take Me Out To The Ball Game!

Last night my son was among some students who were recognized for a summer reading program at an on-field, pregame ceremony  at our local minor league farm team, the Vermont Lake Monsters!

 

We met up with The Armchair Squid, Wikes and their daughter for a pleasant evening of baseball and good conversation.

They arrived with a puzzler....apparently they play a license plate game where one takes the letters found on a plate (Vermont starts with 3 letters and then a space before 3 numbers) and try to think of a word that contains those letters in the same order (but not necessarily consecutively).  They arrived having seen a plate like this:

Any guesses?  It took us a while....and some help from the lady sitting in front of us, but I eventually got TWO and the flood gates opened!

(On the way home we spotted a plate with ZXF.  However, it was from Quebec which raised several questions around foreign plates and foreign languages!)

Now the two highlights of the night were BOTH baseball related!

First, we found out that the first 500 ticket holders each received an AJ COLE bobble-head!  I'm still not sure why I should be excited about that!  Cole was a member of the Lake Monsters in 2010.  He pitched in one game, facing 4 batters, walking one, striking out one and giving up one hit.  If you think about it, that's only one more inning than I have pitched for the team!  Where's my bobble head!?!?

Second, when I looked at the team's website before the game I was underwhelmed.  The Monsters were coming off a losing streak, were 11 games under .500, and the starting pitcher, JC Menna, sported a 0-9 record with an ERA north of 5!

However, he threw a gem!  He walked a few and had an error behind him in the field when he gave up his first hit in the 5th.  The Squid and I debated the ruling but didn't linger on it.  Shortly, we noticed the call had been reversed....the hit was gone and there was a second error on the board!

Menna gave way to Deyvi Jimenez, who kept Tri City hitless in the 7th and 8th before Ryan Dull came in for a perfect 9th! It was rather exciting and the first no-hitter in the history of the Vermont Reds/Mariners/Expos/Lake Monsters!

I have been to probably 50 major league games....and maybe the same amount of minor league games and this was one of the most exciting nights at the park for me!  It was cool to be a part of "history".

Ken Griffey Jr. game through our system for 17 games back in 1988.  The number of people who claim they saw him here continues to grow to near impossible numbers....I wonder if the 2,800 in attendance last night will swell in the same way?!?1

Why I HATE Swimming in Lake Champlain!

I live on the shores of Lake Champlain, America's so-called sixth Great Lake. However, I rarely avail myself of its many "wonders" choosing instead to swim in our pool and turning down ALL invitations to boat or water ski.

It has always been this way for me. I do NOT like lakes or deep water. I can't really articulate why. I don't like the weeds in lakes, in general, and I always fall back to the story of the sturgeons that can grow to lengths of larger than SIX FEET in Champlain. But really its just a sense of...unease...I feel, especially when the water gets deep.

Through all of this, though, "Champ" has never been a real fear. I always secretly hoped that The Loch Ness Monster would turn out to be real, but never gave any credence to our own monster.

Even the below photograph never amounted to much for me. I could "see" something if I tried but...

The story of the above photograph is essentially that a woman named Sandra Mansi from Connecticut was vacationing in St. Albans (north of where I live) in 1977 and spotted the creature and took the above photograph.

Today, while goofing around on the computer, I was on Chive and saw a link to a story on "10 Famous Monster Photographs". I clicked on the link and while EVERY other "monster" was pretty much debunked, there was this nugget about Champ:

"The spot where the photo was taken is reported to be shallow waters (roughly about 14 feet deep) causing many to suggest that the photo is of a floating tree or is simply a hoax. The photo gained some clout though in 2003 when the Fauna Communications Research Institute recorded a sound that was similar to that of an Orca’s call, but had several differences that made it unidentifiable. This has led many to view this famous photo differently and instead of the neck of a plesiosaur-like lake monster, they are now seeing the fin of a large unknown whale-like creature living in the lake."

So instead of being a creature's neck, this photo shows its FIN? And according to the University of Vermont they didn't just pick up just "a sound" but instead made recordings on "three separate occasions, using high tech equipment...(and) the team picked up an echolocation signal on all three occasions".

And there is footage from two fisherman, that aired on ABC, who captured Champ on video in 2005??

Ummmm.....AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Buster Olney and The Lake Monsters

Cousin Lars and his son invited Logan and I out to see the Vermont Lake Monsters play on Friday. I hadn't been to a game yet this year and had just finished two weeks of a summer program with some "heavy hitters", so I thought it would be a good little reward.

We arrived and found out it was Buster Olney night! I enjoy watching the ESPN and Olney is rather insightful. Plus I am EASILY starstruck. We didn't arrive early enough to get an Olney Bobblehead, but I did muster up enough courage to wander over and ask for a picture (after a group of 10 year old boys, leading Lars to begin making fun of me.....)

It was announced that Olney grew up in a town here in Vermont that is home to several distant relatives of ours, so I dropped some names and had a good laugh with Buster.

Here is a video montage of the event from the Lake Monsters official YouTube account. I caught a little story at the end of Baseball Tonight Friday, but I can't find it on-line....