Insider Baseball

Lately, I've been working on a project that's in the final weeks of analysis and polish.  Whenever we discuss data issues and decide that it's something too technical to for the Client to care about, the big and little bosses say that it's too "inside baseball."  

Last night, we went over to Rachael's for a "clean-out-the-freezer" cookout then strolled over to Camden Yards for a game.  Our discussions were definitely not too inside baseball.  It took awhile just to establish what inning it was and Liz kept clapping for the wrong team.  Though I wrote in the fall of how fun it was to go to a game and how everyone cared about baseball, that was not the case last night.

We did stand and hoot and yell, but the loudest roar went to the ketchup, mustard, and relish scoreboard race (I had my money on Mustard and he delivered). By the start of the 8th inning, we were worn from an exhausting semester, a long day of work, and a barbecue bickering over who ate that wedge in Julia's cheesecake.  The O's were down 12-4 (my yelling "stop scoring" at the Rays didn't do the trick), and we started making our way home.

Then a guy jumped onto the field and it took the grounds crew quite awhile to catch up with him (and the cops awhile longer-- those guys are not in peak running form).  We left, but that apparently was just the start of the fun.  The O's ended up rallying, though not quite enough.  They scored 6 runs in the last 2 innings.  I took that hard and blamed myself and our absence for their inability to overcome the deficit.  Susan took a different approach.  She blamed the guy running shirtless across the field.  Had he been a full streaker, she reasoned, that would have energized the team enough to win.  Hard to argue with that logic.