Baseball Goes to the Dogs

While I was on the phone this evening, I heard the music of tone-based dialing over our conversation, and I quickly figured out that it was Ian. Within a minute, he was standing in front of me, the phone in one hand and, unsurprisingly, holding in his other hand a brochure for our favorite minor-league baseball team.

Once I hung up, he called and then reported to me something along the following lines:

"It ringed for a long time, and then I asked them when the dog was going to play baseball, and she said she didn't know, but she thought it would be soon."

As a result, Ian wanted me to visit the team's website to determine on exactly what date(s) "the dog" would be playing.

I assumed he was talking about some goofy guy walking around the baseball diamond in a dog-mascot outfit during the seventh-inning stretch, or something similarly wacky, but he wasn't - he is anticipating that there will be a time when at least one (real) dog will play baseball, and he wants to know when it will be, so that he can attend that most unusual of games. In fact, at this moment, he is annoyed that I'm blogging (or "doing what *you* want to do"), rather than scouring the team's website to track down when the dog will be playing baseball.

I thought he was delusional, or something, until he showed me the brochure itself, which actually *does* show a real dog - probably a golden lab - with a baseball bat in his-or-her mouth. When Ian saw that, he concluded that there are times when they let actual dogs out onto the field to play baseball, for all to admire, and the worse-than-useless answer from the lady on the phone only reinforced that belief.

So I have to figure out how, or whether, to explain to him that they don't actually let dogs play baseball, even in our own rather hokey little corner of the world.

(July 14, 2010)