A Night At the Museum

We're back in Rancho Cucamonga for this final weekend of the season, where the press box has no separators for the radio announcers and everybody else in the press box.

It has the potential to make you very self conscious, but I've gotten over myself enough to no longer care. Besides, the guys in the press box are super cool. In fact, tonight we had a lot of fun up there between innings -- which spilled onto the air.

A family was sitting three rows in front of the press box. The mom was watching a portable DVD player with the movie, "Haunted House." Later, they switched to, "A Night At the Museum" -- and it was hard for me to suspend my disbelief. The kid spent the whole game looking at his phone, playing some game. The dad listened to his ipod.

Just think of all the things to distract you and entertain you at a minor league game -- two mascots, a videoboard, the interns throwing t-shirts into the stands, crazy between-inning promotions ... oh yeah, and the game.

But this family wanted nothing to do with anything from the game. My friend Jeff Levering, the Quakes announcer, was talking about it on the air. He pointed it out to me, and I started talking about it as well.

Then another spontaneous, cool, funny thing happened. I was talking about how Jeff Kindel (our first baseman) and Cliff Remole (the Quakes first baseman) were teammates at Georgia Tech. I was looking at what years they were drafted and how old they are. Then I realized it was Kindel's birthday, and blurted it out on the air.

The official scorer laughed at how I said it, just before a commercial break, and then during the break we realized that Jason Van Kooten (our third baseman) was also celebrating his birthday ............. and, so was a player on the Quakes (whose name I can't remember right now, but that's OK because that's not important to the story). That got me going on a mini-birthday rant.

So naturally, I keep talking about the birthday boys throughout the game, whenever given the chance. And in one of those beautiful/lucky moments on air, Van Kooten singled home his fellow birthday buddy Kindel in the ninth inning for the go-ahead run.

As for the family ... they missed it. The battery ran out on their DVD player and they went home before the game ended.