Winning Chants

Sarah and I wanted to take Craig and Wendy to a typically Canadian event. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work and we weren’t able to go to an Ice Hockey match, so we went to a baseball game instead. It was mine and Sarah’s first baseball game too so everyone was looking forward to it.

Ottawa’s baseball team is called the Lynx. They aren’t a major league baseball team, but this is great news for fans as the smaller stadium means you are really close to the game. The attendance wasn’t great, possibly because the game was on a weekday evening, and this meant that the crowd was mostly quiet as they didn’t want to be singled out or have conversations overheard. As with all North American sporting events, there was a mascot, a Lynx cat called Scratch and he did his best to excite and entertain the crowd. He danced and waved and, well danced, but his most entertaining performance was when he tried to beat up a teenager in the crowd who had pulled his tail. It can’t be easy trying to fight whilst wearing a huge padded cat-like suit. Certainly the teenager was laughing, not crying, which only aggravated Scratch all the more.

The game itself was pretty slow. Each pitch only lasting a couple of seconds if the batter hit the ball and a fraction of a second if he missed. And there are long pauses between pitches while the pitcher and new batter get set up, teams huddle to talk tactics and other stuff that is probably really important to the game but we didn’t understand it. So the club owners do their best to keep crowds entertained. As well as Scratch and his cushioned physical abuse of the crowd, there was a kids musical chairs competition, fan-who-travelled-the-farthest competition (some guy from Oz beat Craig and Wendy) and our personal favourite was the mini umpires’ refreshment van (the van was mini, not the umpires, as you’ll see in photos 9).

The Lynx were losing midway through the game and didn’t look like they could come back to win. The crowd was doing its best to inspire the team and cheered every good play loudly, but the greatest effect the crowd had was on the opposition (Scranton Red Barons). A section of the crowd had picked out one of Scranton’s best batters and every time he stepped up to bat they would chant his name in a long, low tone. Hhhhooowwwaarrrdd, hhhooowwwaaaRRRDDD. You could almost see this poor guy crying as he stood to bat. It worked as well as Howard only hit the ball once all night. We felt so sorry for him that when he made his one hit in the last innings, we were cheering for him and we were really sad after he’d made it round the third base and was running for home when his teammate got caught, ending the innings before Howard could score a run.

For the record, Ottawa did come back to win the game 10-7.