Our Night with the Bisons

The other night I fulfilled one of my northern sports town fantasies by convincing Tina to join me at a Buffalo Bisons game. They’re the local Triple-A team, affiliated with the major league Cleveland Indians.

I go crazy with the ballpark food

A nice-looking park — shortly to be overrun by seagulls

Tina enjoys some old-fashioned soft-serve

I try to convince T. there’s something disturbing about our new home town

We had great seats — $7 each for a pair right down the first base line and only a dozen or so rows back. Close enough to yell at the players when they screwed up, as the Bisons did to the tune of 5 errors for the game. Yes, this was some of the ugliest baseball I’ve ever seen, rivaling at times the ineptitude of our intramural softball crew at Texas State.

The Buffalo News captures it here:

Five different Buffalo players committed boots on the infield, leading to four unearned runs and plenty of catcalls from the crowd. It was the first time the Herd has won a game with at least five errors since it made six while posting an 11-10, 15-inning win at Nashville on April 11, 1997.

“It’s not easy when everybody is making an error,” said second baseman Andy Gonzalez, whose gaffe trying to one-hand shovel Pedro Lopez’s routine grounder to first in the sixth allowed Syracuse’s final run to score. “It’s not like we’re trying to make an error. We’re trying to make plays but today it just didn’t work that way. We’re just glad the pitchers did their job, got outs for us and we got hits when we needed to.”

Ah well. At least they managed to pull out the victory, which hasn’t been the case very often this season. We had a good time enjoying the crowd and the atmosphere — not to mention the junk food, which was quite spectacular. I don’t know about Tina, but I’ll definitely be back to support the ‘Herd’ this summer.