marathon baseball game

So I got to cover some baseball today. On the whole, it was pretty exciting. Baseball is my favorite sport. I haven’t actually ever covered a baseball game, so I was pretty excited to cover the NDSU versus SUU doubleheader tonight.
And really, it wasn’t all too bad. Sure, only one game got played because it lasted five hours and 26 minutes and went 17 innings. And sure, it was cold in the press box and I had to wear my coat and walk around to stay warm. But overall, it was a pretty good game to cover.
Anytime a baseball game lasts 17 innings, it is something pretty rare. So to see that was pretty cool. But the coolest thing about the game was the pitchers. Often times in an extra inning game, almost all of the pitchers get used. That was not the case tonight. The Two teams combine to use only seven pitchers. Not bad for a 17 inning game.
But what was most interesting about the seven pitchers was that four of them threw more than 100 pitches. That is unbelievable. In a MLB game, rarely does a pitcher throw more than 100. Tonight, I saw four do that, highlighted by a 176 pitch performance by a kid from NDSU.
That’s right, 176 pitches. He went 11 and a third innings and struck out 11. He was incredible. From about his 6th inning on, we in the press box marveled that he was out there to begin the inning. That included his eighth, ninth, tenth and 11th innings. We couldn’t believe he kept going out there. Oh, by the way, the wind chill was in the 30s most of the time he was out there. It was amazing.
But not to be outdone, Southern Utah had their own pitching ace up their sleeve. The Thunderbirds had a pitcher come into the game in the ninth inning and pitch all the way through the 17th. Out of the 25 outs he recorded, 18 of them were strikeouts, including the last three outs of the game. He finished with 146 pitches, quite impressive.
Those two pitchers made the excruciating long game bearable. But I will tell you what I remember most from the evening, and it has nothing to do with the game.
The evening was scheduled for a doubleheader, so it was going to be a long night. With that in mind, the sports information people knew they needed some food. So they ordered pizza, the same pizza the players got. That is all fine and good, except they didn’t offer me any. Now for those of you not in the sports media business, that may not sound like a big deal. But here’s why it is. When you cover sports, specifically college, and D-I college at that, it is common place for the school to provide food for the media. They don’t always give us food, and that’s find. That isn’t what I’m complaining about. What really gets me is how something like six people got food in the press box, and failed to offer any to the one media person who was there with them all night.
Really, it isn’t about not getting free food that irritates me the most. It is how they, the sports info people, got food brought to them and didn’t offer the press any. If food was not available to anybody, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. That is pretty common for the “off” sports like baseball. But that wasn’t the case tonight. People got food, and never offered any to me. I would have been willing to pay my share of the cost, so I could have a slice or two to sustain me through the evening. I wasn’t even offered the chance.
I don’t understand how people can either be that stupid, ignorant or inconsiderate. They must have suspected I was hungry, I had been up there for something like three hours. If they didn’t suspect I was hungry, that makes them stupid, which might just be worse.