A Sunny Look at the Game of Baseball

Colin Allan and Mike Morrill are roommates in Balboa, partners in a general contracting business and, as was plainly evident, genuine baseball fans. That is, fans of genuine baseball.

I met them last Wednesday at Anaheim Stadium. That morning they had been waiting for a load of lumber that was due at a job site by noon. When it hadn’t arrived by 10 a.m., they went to the ballgame.

This was a special ballgame, you see. On a Wednesday, the Angels were playing a day game, an uncommon and delicious treat.

A day game is a baseball game played in the daylight, that is, when the sun is shining. That is baseball’s rare but natural setting. Baseball is the reason God made the sun--and grass, for that matter. And since the sun shines on weekdays as well as weekends, it can only mean that God wants us to go to baseball games during week days as well as weekends.

Allan and Morrill, being righteous men, were in the right field stands at Anaheim Stadium with their shirts off and their minds floating in the sensuous delights of a sunlit baseball stadium more than an hour before game time.

This is what soaked into their senses, most of which would have been inoperative under the black sky and the perfectly even, shadowless, brittle electric light of nighttime:

There was hardly anyone in the stadium, so the sound of a bat whacking a ball into center field made a truly unique and pleasing sound, a resonant “pock” unlike any hit during a game.

The bands of empty seats, colored orange and brick red and tan, gleamed in the hot light and decorated the stadium like draped bunting.

The warmth of the sun, smoothed by a breeze just strong enough to make the pennants flutter, coaxed the men to slide down in their seats, lean back and lapse into quietude. On the field the players were ambling through their warm-up chores. No one was in a hurry.

“Baseball, this is what it’s supposed to be,” said Morrill to no one in particular.

Some of the boys and young men bunched together at the foul poles to wait for the occasional gift of a batting-practice ball hit into the stands. No usher checked their tickets or shooed them away. The ushers seemed to be enjoying the show. Ushers like day games, too.

A gaggle of them were sitting together near Aisle 43 just before the gates opened, and it took only one question--”Do you like day games better than night games?”--to set them talking, more or less simultaneously.

“They got less weirdos coming out here in the day than you do at night.”

“I think the Dodgers have got something, cutting off that beer at the eighth inning. We had more fights last night than you could shake a stick at.”

“I can’t believe people coming in here just to get crocked.”

“It’s an expensive way to get loaded.”

“You seem to have a different kind of people, for some reason.”

“You don’t get the people who’ve worked all day and come up here and then swallow them damned beers. That’s all they’re doin’, soppin’ up the beer.”

“It seems like they come up here to drink beer. They don’t come up to see the game.”

“So the day game, you get people who are actually interested in the game. And they’re less trouble.”

Some workers at the stadium say they actually dislike day games. Rod Carew, who tends first base for the Angels, said as he waited for his turn in the batting cage that he prefers night games. Fewer distractions. “I don’t know. I can see the ball a lot better at night.” Maybe he’s right. He went only 1 for 4 with an error Wednesday.

With all due respect, that is basically a selfish reason. More to the point, I think, is that fans are supposed to outrank players, and on that Wednesday afternoon 26,080 people came to the game and paid to get in. It’s not as convenient to come to a day game, yet they managed to make it. A woman in the expensive seats said she felt compelled to attend. “This is baseball weather,” she said. The uniqueness of day baseball is that there is pleasure in just being there, regardless of whether Mr. Carew goes 3 for 4.

There are 20 remaining day games scheduled at Anaheim Stadium, but only one will be on a real weekday--Wednesday, Aug. 7, against Seattle. The one on Monday, May 27, against Baltimore is on Memorial Day.

Six will be on Saturdays. The rest will be on Sundays, because that is the one day attendance drops if you play at night. “You’re talking about kids that have to get up and go to school the next day,” said Tim Mead, an Angels press spokesman.

“We have now tried to go to some Saturday day games early in the year to beat the weather. It’s still relatively cold at night in April and May. After that we go back to Saturday night games, unless national TV indicates an interest in covering us.”

This is Southern California, Mead said. “A lot of people want to go to the beach, then come to the game at night.”

Sad to say, those people probably think they prefer night baseball when all they really prefer is convenience.

But look what convenience did to the hamburger. Night games are baseball’s Big Mac. Come out in the daylight sometime and taste the real thing.