The Postgame Remains The Same

There were at least two extra-inning baseball games played on Saturday. One of them was a heart-pounding, fantastic finish that had a capacity crowd roaring. The other was played by the Cleveland Indians.

Ordinarily, unless the game involves Willie Mays Hayes, Rick Vaughn or Jake Taylor, a Cleveland Indians game wouldn't be particularly interesting. But this one had some local significance, as former Carolina standout Alex White was making his major league debut as Cleveland's starting pitcher. Asher has long been enamored with White, who came along in Chapel Hill just as he was starting to really pay attention to individual college baseball players. He's followed him from Chapel Hill to Omaha, so Cleveland made sense.

Watching the Indians-Tigers game, in which Cleveland won their 12th straight home game, it was startling how different it was from the epic Mudcats/Scrappers game we'd watched a few hours earlier. Over 26,000 people were there. The stadium was huge. The concession stands had something called a "fried trio," which included a mix of fried Twinkies, fried cookie dough and fried funnel cake. After the Indians won 3-2 in 13 innings, virtually no one in the crowd left, because the team celebrated with a 10-minute fireworks extravaganza coordinated with musical highlights from the 1970s.

In other words, it was largely a show with baseball mixed in--a tremendously enjoyable show, but still a show. It did not bear much resemblance to what we're accustomed to seeing at Nowell Field.

But then, after the game, it was equally remarkable how much the scene looked exactly like a Mudcats game. Somewhere on the bottom level of Progressive Field, they have a room set aside for families and friends of the players. This room could be a carbon copy of the area around the West Raleigh concession stand after a Mudcats game. Players mingle with players from the other team. Kids run around. Parents look proud.

The only difference is there are slightly fewer cupcakes and/or biscuits, but maybe they only bring those out for the really big games.

After he'd pitched in front of 26,000 in person and countless more on television, after he'd had his picture flashed up on the 120 foot by 200 foot HD scoreboard, and after he'd made himself into a household name in Cleveland, there were almost exactly the same people waiting for Alex White that had often stood around waiting after his Little League games in Greenville, N.C.: his parents (his mom, Catherine, keeps score at all his games) and a few friends. Somewhere outside the walls there were fans talking about him and wondering about his future. Inside the walls, he was just a 23-year-old wearing an untucked shirt, cowboy boots and jeans, rehashing another game the same way he'd done many times before.

You half expected him to ask them to wait while he went to pick up his free drink at the concession stand, or maybe dash off to play a little wall ball with Grady Sizemore (speaking of which, Alex says the game the Mudcats call "the hat game" is actually called "flip," which it will now be known as). After four hours of marveling at how different baseball could be at the highest level, it was striking how similar baseball could be at the highest level.

"I really wasn't nervous," Alex said as the group pressed him for details of his once-in-a-lifetime day. "I saw a lot of familiar faces out there."