Take Me Out To The Bear Game
If you are willing to brave the dangerous shoals of the mighty Mississippi, foreign delights await in a mystical land known as “Illinois.” The Gateway Grizzlies, a baseball team with a storied near-triple-decade history, puts on a show in 6,000-seat Grizzlies Park in Sauget. It is, without a doubt, the most family friendly thing to do in Sauget.
St. Louis is a baseball town. From the Lafayette Square Cyclone, to the Brown Stockings, to the Perfectos, we are the guardians of an ancient tradition. The Grizzlies are a little different. They play in the Frontier League, which has more “modernized” rules and employs technological gimmickry to keep the crowd engaged. The games sometimes devolve into a homerun derby. Baseball purists are advised to leave their stodginess at home – this is not a place for purists and doesn’t pretend to be.
Tickets are cheap. Twenty bucks for seats close enough to spit on the players. There’s a playground, face painting, and a clown making balloon animals. Older kids can have fun too – it’s open lawn behind the outfield, so teenagers can get to second base while waiting for a home run to land on ‘em. And the crowd is full of moms who don’t appreciate jokes about that.
I attended the regular season ending on September 1st. Normally when things are about to end, people are sad, even if we know the reasons why. Not this crowd. The last game of the season means something. Some kids wait all year for this. Baseball is great and all. And the Grizzlies are fighting for a wild card spot in the playoffs. But when the last out is called, the real mission begins: we are going to TP the stadium. Predatory 14-year-olds, backpacks full of toilet paper, stalk the stands. An eight-year-old, noticing that we are not prepared, offers us a spare roll during the seventh inning stretch. The entire stadium has bated breath for hours, waiting to break bad.
Tonight the Grizzlies are playing longtime rivals, the Florence Y’alls, from Florence, Kentucky. The Y’alls steam ahead to an early lead. They draw first blood with a bases-loaded walk in the first. Then homerun in the second. Then homerun again in the third, finishing their half with a 5-1 lead over our heroes. But the bears fight back.
The Grizzlies score two home runs in the bottom of the third to bring the score up to 5-3. The Grizzlies start their fourth inning with a two-run homer, and then Y’alls pitcher decides to start sucking and walks four batters in a row. Grizzlies up 6-5! And they hold the lead for the rest of the game. Next up is veteran player Kevin Krause who takes advantage of the situation to send one out of the park, clearing the bases with a Grand Slam.
The Y’alls limp along the rest of the game, even scoring three more runs in the sixth, but like most bear attacks, it is a futile attempt to avoid getting mauled. The final score is 16-8, with the Y’alls left to slink back to Florence in indignity.
And we wait for the fireworks – a truly awesome pyrotechnic display to cap a season where the Grizzly’s finish second, securing themselves a wildcard spot for the playoffs.
And then the real violence begins, as thousands of perfectly civilized families go fucking nuts. The crowd erupts, and white streams of one-ply, two-play, ultra-soft, woodchip-laden, it doesn’t matter, flying across the stadium like the perseid meteor shower on a clear sky. This is a packed house, 6,545 people – the highest attendance of the season, and they are here for mayhem. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of state-sponsored anarchy.
I feel for the maintenance crew. The field is covered. The stands are covered. The foul ball nets are covered. The outfield lawn is covered. We live in a world covered in toilet paper. And they have two days to clean it up. The Lake Eerie Crushers will be here on Tuesday to beat the Grizzlies in the wild card game. We missed it by a whisker, but there’s always next year.
Join the Gateway Grizzlies at Grizzly Stadium next spring for the Frontier League’s 32d season of family baseball!
