ring your bell

For a while now I’ve been working on other projects that are taking too long, and I’m afraid you miss me. Or more afraid you don’t. Anyway, here’s a post about nothing.

I’m back in Ohio. As always, I’m checking to see if my city is gone. So far it’s still here. It is certainly not taller. We were driving past downtown on Sunday evening, and I realized there hasn’t been a skyscraper constructed in downtown, or anywhere else in the area, since I was living here more than thirty years ago. That’s just not a thing we do anymore, I guess.

Columbus is not taller but it is denser - a lot of three- and four-story apartment complexes are bringing urban density to places that used to be empty lots or dilapidated single-family homes, or in a lot of cases factories. I have no quarrel with that kind of density. But downtown still seems to be trying to find itself after the urban renewal of sixty years ago. One of the skyscrapers used to have the logo of Bank One on it; then Bank One was bought by First Chicago, which was bought by Chase, and now Chase has 12,000 people working in low office buildings outside of the beltway, across from a mall where there used to be cornfields.

There’s still one bank headquartered downtown, and that one has put its name on the baseball stadium where the Columbus Clippers play. I have fond memories of the old Franklin County Stadium on Mound Street, but the new1 joint is six or eight cuts above.

You don’t have to twist your legs to fit in narrow rows of seats, for one thing. You can see the game while you wait in line at the concession stand, for another - or you could, if the lines for people waiting for hotdogs on “dime-a-dog night” weren’t so long. I’m astonished they still have dime-a-dog nights. I was pleasantly surprised that the hotdogs were decent, although they weren’t especially hot.

I was shocked, but not surprised, at the quantities of hotdogs people were carrying away. I chose to believe they were ordering for families, but even so ….

The stadium is located in a corner of town I no longer recognize. A “new” hockey arena; a genuinely new soccer stadium, a whole new neighborhood of those three- and four-story apartment buildings with bars and restaurants underneath. No sign of the penitentiary that used to house “Old Sparky,” along with an embezzler named William Sydney Porter. All of this new development is intended to make downtown less moribund, and I suppose it’s working, although it was hard to tell on a Tuesday night.

If the streets outside Huntington Park, and the stadium itself, were unrecognizable, everything happening at the ballpark made me feel at home again from the first pitch. Lineups consisting of a couple guys I’d heard of, trying to work their way back to the big leagues, and a huge number of no-names. A lot of strikeouts, some terrible blunders on the basepaths, and the occasional ringing double to the fence.

Despite walking up to the ticket window just as the East High marching band was starting to play the national anthem, I scored a seat in the fourth row next to the dugout. I was close enough to watch the third-base coach mouthing along during the between innings singalong - maybe not something a coach does at Dodger Stadium, but a way to keep oneself in harmony, if you will, throughout the endless, day-after-day, year-after-year life of a minor league coach.

I could watch the Clippers’ manager at the top step of the dugout having a long and earnest conversation with erstwhile Cleveland Guardian Brayan Rocchio, now in Columbus trying to get his groove back. I could almost hear the conversation in the on-deck circle between Rocchio and a rising prospect named Jhonathan Rodriguez. Maybe I’ll be telling people I sat here watching Rodriguez study the new pitcher intently, the way I remember seeing Cookie Carrasco firing wild but unhittable pitches a couple decades ago, the way we watched Don Mattingly and “Bye-Bye” Balboni when I was in middle school. Or maybe Rodriguez will turn out to be fools’ gold, a “four-A” player, tattooing pitches at AAA Columbus but unable to hit a big-league slider, the way Karl “Pongo” Pagel turned out to be.

From the fourth row, you can see the difference between a 93-mph fastball and the 97-mph one thrown by Andrew Walters, who will not be in Columbus for long. Triple-A hitters can catch up to the former, but most have no hope against the latter. The difference between stardom and Dom Nuñez is that fine.

And from the fourth row, you can hear the crowd behind you. The ones familiar with these players, who argue that C.J. Kayfus deserves to replace those right-fielders in Cleveland who aren’t hitting a lick (he’ll get a shot, but not this year), and the other ones who vaguely know there’s a game going on at this overpriced bar with watered-down beer. Two girlfriends sat, legs over the seats, a couple rows behind me, one shouting “Yuuuuup!” at every strikeout or base hit in the Clippers’ favor. Folks slapped hands with the Clippers mascot, a pirate-attired parrot2, and screamed for the pizzas he tossed to the crowd. The crowd shouted loudest for a kid named Petey Halpin, a light-hitting outfielder with curly hair and a winning smile, but those attributes do not put one atop a team’s depth charts.

The cheers, as one of my college friends from New York once noted when we were over on Mound Street, remained a good octave higher than those at Yankee Stadium.

Columbus was a small town with big-league aspirations when I was a kid. Now it has NHL hockey and Major League Soccer and good Mexican food and endless suburbs and traffic and crime. Big league-ish. It still has minor league baseball, though, and for nine innings I was home. Even if they no longer play “Columbus Clippers, Ring Your Bell” during the seventh-inning stretch.