Baseball

Today we worked hard.  Cleaned the Jeep on the inside and washed it.  Even checked the air pressure in the spare tire!  Then we washed the RV.  A very big job.  A few days earlier we had heard about a baseball team in Portland area.  So I checked it out online.  The Hillsboro Hops are a single A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks and they were in town for the weekend.  So Saturday evening we went to the game.  They were hosting the Spokane Indians, a single A affiliate of the Texas Rangers.  A great night for baseball, weather was sunny and warm.

We get to the stadium and walk up to the ticket window only to see a sign that says all reserved seating is sold out!  But there are tickets for the outfield grass and we can sit on the hill side.  So we stepped away to discuss this when someone gave us 2 tickets for the grassy area for free.  Nice!  So we went in and began looking around.  What a nice stadium.  Much nicer than the one the Richmond Flying Squirrels play in and they are AA.  It is even nicer than some of the older spring training parks in Florida.  We stood in the grass in foul territory of left field for awhile but it was in direct sun so we moved to some shade in the walkway on the 3rd base side but close to home plate.  We noticed one of the ushers had a sign that read "STOP Hops at work" and he would not let fans enter the seating area while there was any action on the field.  It was calls a "Hops sign" and ushers all over the stadium were enforcing the rule.  I loved this, if you are wondering why check out a previous post called Major League Baseball and Bob's rules for watching baseball.

We soon learned that the Hops are not named for the ball bouncing on the field but rather for that special ingredient in beer!  Gotta love that!  And the mascot, who is in fact dressed like a hop flower, is named...Barley.  So I love this team.  They had a nice selection of local beer and as a minor league team the prices were very nice.

By the end of the 7th inning we found some shaded seats behind the 1st base dugout.  The game went 11 innings and the home team won 5 - 4 on a single that scored the runner from third.  There were 4,506 fans at the game.  By the way, the guy that hit the walk off single is hitting .167!  Baseball is a great game.