Stay Loose

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Every summer my family and I go up to Maine for a week.  My parents rent a beautiful house on the coast of southern Maine, and we go up to relax, eat lobster, read books, body surf, and sleep in.  It’s a great family tradition.

One of the facets of this tradition is going to see a baseball game.  The Portland Sea Dogs are the AA team for the Boston Red Sox.  They play a very competitive brand of baseball against other teams in the Eastern League: Williamsport, Altoona, and towns like this.  We love to spend an evening watching a game and rooting for the home team, even though we would never root for the Red Sox against our beloved Cleveland Indians.

The Sea Dogs play their home games at Hadlock Field, just off I-295 in downtown Portland.  It’s a cozy field that seats about 7,500 people.  Most of the fans are local and some are Red Sox fans who’ve come up north for vacation and want a glimpse of their future heroes.  The games are usually packed, and the recent success of the Red Sox had only accentuated that.

Last summer we didn’t buy tickets in advance, and we had to resort to purchasing scalped tickets in front of the entrance to Hadlock Field.  This year I resolved to be prepared, so back in March when we set the dates for our annual visit to Maine, I got onto the Sea Dogs website and bought six tickets for the Friday night game of our week there.  Six tickets would accommodate my family and my parents.

The day of the game, my daughter fell ill and did not feel well enough to go to the game.  My mother leapt at the opportunity to stay back with my daughter and keep her company.  So we had two extra tickets to scalp.

 

We got to the game uncharacteristically early and I set about the task of finding buyers for the two extra tickets.  Here is where the cultural differences between the Midwest and New England started to show up.

First, I approached the people who were standing in line to buy general admission tickets at the ticket window.  One of the Sea Dogs employees told me via his microphone that if I wanted to sell tickets, I had to move away from the ticket line.  Of course; the Sea Dogs did not want to compete with the scalpers, I thought.

 

I stood mute with two tickets held up in the air and waited for someone to snatch them up.  I figured it would be five minutes before someone bought them, ten minutes tops.  Ten minutes went by, then another ten.  I shifted positions to catch a different stream of people walking from the parking lots to the single entrance at the front of the park.  No luck.

 

Then I started watching the people who were standing in line at the ticket window, and I saw people who had walked right past me without expressing the slightest bit of interest in buying my tickets.  What was going on here?  Did they all know I was a Cleveland Indians fan in sheep’s clothing?  Was it the bright orange golf shirt I now regretted wearing for the night’s festivities?

 

A fellow ticket seller commiserated with me.  “Back in Milwaukee where I grew up,” he said, “my dad had season tickets for the Brewers.  On the nights when he and I couldn’t go to the games, he would drive me down to the ballpark so I could scalp his tickets.  I got to keep whatever money I could raise.  I don’t ever remember a night when I couldn’t sell the tickets.  If I didn’t sell them to a father and his young kid to use, at least I could sell them to a budding entrepreneur who would resell them for more than he’d paid me.”  This wasn’t happening here, not in Portland, Maine.  Not tonight, anyhow.

With ten minutes left until the first pitch, and with my father, son and wife safely seated inside, I gave up and gave the tickets to the fellow playing banjo for tips outside the gates.  “Can you use these?” I asked him.  “Maybe,” he said.  “We’ll see.”  He didn’t sound too convinced and I didn’t blame him.

 

I found our seats, which were up high just below the press box almost straight up from home plate.  After I bought food and drinks for the family, we all settled in to enjoy the game.

 

The crowd was curiously quiet, except for the moments when the Sea Dogs scored to take a 6 – 0 lead over the Harrisburg Senators.  It was a big difference from what I’d experienced at Cooper Stadium in Columbus, where the Columbus Clippers toiled in a AAA league for the New York Yankees and later the Washington Nationals (the same MLB team with which the Harrisburg Senators are now affiliated.)  At the Coop, the crowds came to have a good time and beat on their cowbells at the slightest provocation.  And it was very different from seeing the Cleveland Indians at Jacobs Field, especially during their run of almost six seasons where the every game was sold out.

 

The most interesting thing about this game was the antics that management had dreamt up to keep the fans interested between half-innings.  There was the John Deere tricycle race for adults (ouch!).  There was the chance to toss a baseball through an opening and win a free pick up truck (nice!).  And there was my favorite stunt: two people stood with a lobster trap and tried to catch as many fake lobsters as possible being hurled at them by college kids with lacrosse sticks standing mere feet away from them (huh?).  Between innings was when the fans really came alive.  It was as if they tolerated the game in order to be entertained (and possibly enriched) by the promotions.

 

As I was sucked into the torpor that the rest of the crowd felt while the action was happening on the field, I started to play with my trusty Blackberry.  This thing, for those of you who don’t have one, is a kind of narcotic.  It sits in your pocket or on your belt and taunts you not to pull it out and look at it, use it, get lost in it.  It is truly the Great Escape, for only $29.99 per month (plus extra for excess text messages.)

 

I justified my use of the Blackberry at a baseball game because I was using it to check on the progress of the Cleveland Indians’ game that night against the LA Angels.  The Angels had the best record in MLB and they were going up against our ace Cliff Lee, who was cruising towards the Cy Young award.  I could keep my eye on the action on the field while I checked on my beloved Indians.

 

That’s where I was wrong.  Out of nowhere, I saw a foul ball hurtling towards my right hand, the hand that held the device delivering me my narcotics via the Blackberry.  In the split second I had to react, did I throw down the Blackberry and catch the ball?  Did I manage to put my fielder’s mitt back onto my left hand and catch the ball the old-fashioned way?

 

No, I did not.  All I could do was to turn my right wrist slightly to shield my Blackberry from damage.  The ball slammed into my wrist and off the knuckle of my father, who was sitting to my right.  Then it bounced down into the hands of the twenty-something woman sitting in the row in front of me.  Chance squandered.

 

The fans around me did not boo, as they should have.  They just looked at this dumb Midwesterner in an orange golf shirt holding up his Blackberry, shook their heads and grinned at each other.  I did not make matters any better by explaining “But I was checking on the Cleveland Indians score!”  A couple of ushers offered me ice bags and I was too embarrassed or too proud to accept their help.

 

Now, I have been to about 100 Cleveland Indians games since I became part of a group of guys who bought four season tickets back in the halcyon days of 1994, when the Tribe was just moving into brand-new Jacobs Field on their way to their glory years of the late 1990’s.  Our seats are thirty rows from the field, just past third base.  It’s prime foul-ball territory for left-handed hitters.  I have seen my guests in the three other seats catch foul balls about six or seven times during that stretch.  But I had never had a ball hit directly towards me.  This was my chance.  Squandered.

 

We got up to leave in the seventh inning, with the Sea Dogs comfortably in control with a 6 – 0 lead.  One of the guys sitting around said all that needed to be said: “Hey, buddy…….keep your eye on the ball next time.”

 

P.S.  After we left, the Senators scored seven runs in the eighth inning to take the lead.  The Sea Dogs tied it up with a lead-off homer in the bottom of the ninth, and then won with a bases-loaded single by a guy named Iggy.  We were blissfully driving back to the beach and missed the action.

Jury Duty

I’m not sure why I was kind of excited when I got called to serve on a jury. Maybe it’s because I never got to serve our country in the military or in any other meaningful way. Maybe I was curious to know if I would actually get seated for the jury, since I’d heard that attorneys do not like to have professionals on their juries. Or maybe I was just channeling the old Henry Fonda movie Twelve Angry Men, and hoping I could bring reason and order to a group of eleven of my peers.

 

I got to Federal District court in downtown about five minutes late. There were about 80 or 90 people in the room already. They were busy filling out their forms or drinking the free coffee or eating the free bagels and doughnuts up front. It looked like a pretty diverse group to me, even though I assumed the selection from among registered voters was totally random.

 

The person in charge of getting us organized was wonderful. She was funny, clear in her instructions, and generally put a positive spin on the whole affair. I had expected a tired, bored bureaucrat. Instead I got a federal employee who clearly enjoyed her job and was not on a power trip. She was even forgiving when I realized I’d left my reading glasses on the table at home, and she allowed me to call my wife to bring them down to the court house. She called the security guards up front to let them know to expect her.

 

When we finally got into the courtroom, the crowd became solemn. There hadn’t been a lot of jocularity prior to this moment, but whatever fun people had been having with asides and rolling eyes simply ceased when we entered the room. It was fairly recently remodeled in a style that was neither ostentatious nor tacky. Some people sat in the jury box and most of us sat where the public would sit during the trial.

 

The judge was a white male who appeared to be in his early to mid 50s. He had a sense of purpose and a sense of humor. He thanked us for the first of many times for being here to perform our civic duty, and then began the long process of explaining how the jury selection would work. Eventually he made it clear to all of us that he wanted us to stand up and say so if we had any doubts about whether we could be impartial in this case. Some of us probably came into the room scheming about what we could say to get ourselves excused from the trial. It became clear as the judge continued his instructions and then questions of us that what he really needed for us to do was to simply tell the truth. If we had a legitimate excuse why we should not be on the jury, he would listen.

 

The first person he excused was a woman whose 90-year old mother was in the hospital. He wished her luck. The second was a woman in her twenties who explained that her husband had just left her with two children and she didn’t think she could concentrate because she was emotionally distraught. Other people voiced their reasons for conflicts, and the judge listened with interest but did not excuse them. Most of these people either needed to provide child care or had an important business meeting during the week.

 

His questions kept coming, slowly but surely. Did we have a relative or friend who was in prison? If so, could we look at the entire judicial system without a jaundiced eye? Had we been on jury duty before, and did the process or the outcome turn us off to the point where we could not go through it again without rancor? Did we know the defendant, the attorneys, the witnesses, or the company that had allegedly been wronged by the defendant? Did we have a family member or friend in law enforcement? If so, could we listen to the testimony of a law enforcement officer without thinking he was more likely to tell the truth just because he wore a badge? Two FBI agents were set to testify.

 

The questions were designed to make it clear that if for any reason we thought we’d be unable to be impartial in this matter, we needed to speak up. We went from thinking that if we said the right thing, we’d get excused from the jury to hoping he would not ask a question that would get us excused from the jury. At least that’s what was going through my mind.

 

Then the judge said that for us to be effective jurors, we had to be able to answer the following question: If the roles were reversed and we were sitting at the front table as the defendant, would we be the kind of person we would want to sit in judgment of us? If the answer was no, we needed to say why now, not after we were seated as part of the jury and the trial was underway.

 

Finally a fact was revealed that made me question my ability to be impartial. The defendant had been accused of committing mail fraud by billing an insurance company for losses incurred by a trucking company and not giving the insurance proceeds to that company. (He was also accused of lying to the FBI agents who questioned him about the alleged mail fraud.) The insurance company was one in which I once owned an amount of stock that was significant to me. I knew I had to reveal this to the judge and attorneys.

 

I had listened as my peers told the judge varying tales of woe. One man stood up and said that his son had just been convicted of child pornography and had begun to serve a thirty-year sentence. He said his son was also awaiting trial on charges of child abuse. When the judge said “this must be very difficult for you,” the man said in a matter-of-fact tone “I just wish I could be alone with him for ten minutes.” You had to wonder what the father was feeling. Was it anger, remorse, guilt over failing to instill the proper values in his son, or a combination of all three? It wasn’t quite an O’Henry story, but it was close to the pathos that I remembered feeling as I read those stories.

 

I was not about to tell my story in front of a room full of 100 people. So I requested a sidebar, which allowed me to go up to the judge’s platform and speak with him and the attorneys without being heard by the rest of the crowd. The judge even had some pre-recorded music to play during the sidebar to make it even more difficult for others to hear the conversation.

 

When I revealed my issue, the questions came at me like bullets. Did I think the case might have affected the value of my stock? Not, I said, if the loss was an insignificant number, as the market would not react to a minor fraud loss. Would I think the value of the company had been diminished? Yes, I replied, unless the company had recovered the full amount of the cash it had paid out because it had allegedly been defrauded by the defendant. Did I think I could be impartial because of all of this?

 

Normally I am quick with a reaction to a question. Some would say I think with my mouth. In this case, I had to stop and think. This was the crucial moment in my involvement in the case. Part of me wanted to say that I could not remain impartial. I had plenty to do back at the office, and it was not going to go away just because I was doing my duty at the courtroom. The other part of me wanted to say that I could remain impartial because I wanted to be on that jury, damn it. I was infatuated at this point with the process, the pure professionalism of it, and the chance to be part of making a decision that would mean something to the people involved. I probably saw Jimmy Stewart flash in my mind’s eye.

 

What I said was “Look, I’m a Libra. I can balance both sides of any argument.” The attorneys exchanged slight smiles as the judge thanked me for bringing this to his attention. Just like that, I was back in my seat.

 

The judge excused us from the court room and said they would have a jury selected and seated by 1 p.m., and then the rest of us would be free to go. Since this was the last week we could be called for jury duty and this was the only case to go to trial in the court this week, those of us who were not seated were truly done with jury duty until fate hit our number again.

 

I went outside for some fresh air and realized I’d joined all of the smokers out in front of the court house. One of them was talking to a friend on her cell phone and I overheard her say “God, I hope they don’t choose me, because I am in way over my head.” I realized that I was strangely aware of and focused on the details of what was happening in the court room and wanted very much to be part of the jury to keep this intellectual stimulation going.

 

When we sat back down, the judge began to call off the names of the twelve people who would constitute the jury and the two alternates who would also participate in the trial. I think I knew as he started to call the names that mine would not be one of them. And I was right. None of the people who had spoken up during the question and answer session were called. The law of large numbers had proven itself once again. Ninety registered voters who showed up that morning were more than enough to provide a pool of fourteen people who were truly convinced that they could be impartial in this case. And that’s justice in action.