In true form, it started in and for the community. Along with Friends of Raimondi Park, we had another lively cleanup day at the ballpark and its surroundings. Credit to my son, 4-and-a-half, who took home more garbage (“for art”) than he put in our bag.

(Seriously: picking up trash, with a trash-grabber, with the immediate reward of a donut or drink, is honestly waaaay more fun than it sounds. Maybe it’s the slight sense of competition, the mystery of what you’ll find, or—my best guess—the fact that most of us walk around all the time wishing we could pick up trash, but we’re on the way to work, dressed in our finery, speeding by in a car, whatever, and here we’re ready and prepped for battle. In short, we won, and it was a bad day to be trash.)

Strangest and most memorable items:

a single marble
a baby rocker and car seat (I’m still amazed these “expire”)
a Chewy box and a Farmer’s Dog box (ok, if you’re going to be fancy for your pooch, you gotta also throw the junk away!)
a newspaper from 2017
one totally full Ben & Jerry’s (melted, of course, swarming with ants)
a baseball (not from the Ballers; possible turf war brewing)
several Home Depot-style circular container lids but no buckets (who has the buckets; what was RELEASED from the buckets?????)

Add to that, post-cleanup, a watch party at Almanac in Prescott Market for our B’s in action in Kalispell, Montana taking on the Glacier Range Riders.

I was in the back of the room, where I could see the crowd grow, greet each other, share trash-based war stories. But I could also see the “volunteer” backs of all the bright yellow shirts provided by the 68s, such a neon reminder of what brought us together. I know I don’t need to convince anyone reading these dispatches, but isn’t this what baseball should be, must be, all about? A team on the field—in this case, a thousand miles away—bringing all sorts of other teams together to make their community better, kinder, cleaner? But I’ll add this, the little moments that not everyone will see:

one of your co-founders physically wincing when a B’s player got hit by a pitch, feeling that pain 1k miles away
your VP of fan entertainment, no days off, watching Montanan mid-inning hijinx and brainstorming ideas of what might make the next Ballers game even more fun
fans with local food and drink, half it it named after the B’s (the Baller Burger or today, for me, Prescott Meats and Delicatessen’s B’s Fish Taco, with red snapper from the fishmonger out in the farmer’s market on 18th at the very moment)
fans—and these are diehards, of course—talking to civilians, just out on a Sunday, about the B’s, being eager ambassadors of Town baseball

And if I’m really going to be sappy about it, when the B’s ended up winning (8-4, their sixth win in the last seven), it felt like we earned it. That we aren’t just fans, spectators, watching from the side. That through whatever this is, the good we make, the Town is a better place this afternoon than it was this morning. And like baseball, with its marathon season, it’s not enough for this to happen once: on the field, around it, beside it, on blocks up and down, behind the Raimondi soccer goal or in its playground, this is the kind of winning we should get used to.

68s Day

Overheard Week Two