The A's were facing their rival, the dreaded Los Angelheim Angels --easily my least favorite team. These days I've taken to calling them the Porsche Cayenne of baseball (ie, they're expensive and high-performance, but they're also ridiculous, ugly, and fundamentally pointless). The day before, the Angels had managed to come back from a 7 to 2 deficit to beat the A's 12 to 7, so I was actually not very optimistic about our chances.
We arrived early, which made sense for two reasons: 1) we were likely to leave early to accommodate a potential very sleepy three-year old, and 2) because the first 15000 fans to the game were to receive a Sonny Gray gnome with a solar-powered glowing baseball (I'm not going to try to explain that --it's too much). After we got our gnomes and checked out our seats, we went straight to the A's Fun Zone, the children's place space on the second level behind the concession stands. It's not much of a place space, really. It has four coin-op mechanical rides (two were broken for much of our time there), a small mediocre play structure, and some random toddler toys (mostly lawnmowers, for some reason). I would generally rate the space as inferior to our local playground, but I think Theo considered about a hundred times better than actually sitting in our seats to watch a baseball game. We spent a lot of time there.
I went off to buy us lunch, and we were back to our seats before the first pitch. I forced Theo to stay there for two whole innings, during which the A's manufactured a run. Then it was back to the Fun Zone for us for the next two innings. Theo spent much of that time running to the play structure for a trip down the slide and then climbing up on a broken coin-operated elephant, because, hey, why not?
I convinced him to head back to our seats by the top of the fourth inning. He still wasn't into the game, so Duckie got out her phone and turned on Netflix. Theo watched Curious George instead of watching the A's and Angels fail to score any runs for the next couple innings. Arguably the right choice.
Then, in the top of the sixth, Angels superhero Mike freaking Trout, tied the game off a single by Erick Aybar, and I was expecting things to get ugly. But A's pitcher Jesse Hahn locked things down, and no more damage was done. And better than that, the A's strung together some hits in the bottom half of the inning and ended up with a three run lead. In fact, they hit three consecutive doubles -- the first with a man already on base. It was pretty great. Theo even managed to clap along with the crowd and give us high fives.
At the end of the 6th, we decided it was safe to leave. I didn't want stick around to watch the Angels come back, and if the A's blew the game open later I wouldn't have felt bad for missing it.
Theo watched Duckie's iPhone pretty much for the whole walk out of the stadium to the car. He once yelled at the crowd for being too loud because he couldn't hear his videos. We stopped by a souvenir stand on the way out so I could buy a new A's cap (a more traditional one, this time), and we drove home. Theo fell asleep in the car, the iPhone blaring away in his hands.
As it turns out, no further runs were scored that game. Somehow, I was at my seat every time a runner crossed home plate, despite missing two full innings hanging out in the Fun Zone and leaving after the sixth. I rarely get that lucky when it comes to watching sports.
