Heaven is a Place on Earth
Family, heartbreak, and hot dogs with tiny parachutes: life lessons and a bit of serendipity at the ballpark
Note: if this is your first time reading The Enni Way, start here to understand my summer of going (strategically) insane about baseball.
April 12 - Rangers @ Mariners (W, 9-2)
In December 1989, when I was four years old, my mom and I got on a plane to Tucson, Arizona. She was eight months pregnant and we were moving to the southwest because my dad got a promotion. When we arrived at the apartment he found, he’d already set up a Christmas tree.
We were the only family of all our relatives or friends to leave Washington state. For most summers of my childhood, we flew to Seattle to visit for a week or two. That meant I saw my extended family only as part of a package deal: my mother, my brother, and me. That led to an unconscious belief that my mom was the arbiter of who I saw and when during my visits to the PNW. In the last few years, I’ve realized that staying close to family as an adult who lives far away means making the effort to reach out to my aunts and uncles and cousins directly, without my mom as mediary. So when I finalized my plans to go up to Seattle in April, I messaged the family group chat: Who’s down for a Mariners game?
My aunt and uncle, and my cousin and her husband were in. We met at the ballpark, our seats at field level, just a bit above home plate. Sitting to my right were two lanky, silly dudes in their early 20s who didn’t seem to know a ton about baseball, but were really trying. I found them extremely charming.
Every baseball team hosts about 81 three-hour games a year; At T-Mobile Park, the Mariners have come up with very specific and delightful nonsense to fill all that air time.
Last newsletter I mentioned Cal “Big Dumper” Raleigh, who is in the running for American League MVP and on track to log the best season for an MLB catcher in history. The Mariners fanbase has fully embraced Cal, and the marketing team is making the most of the nickname. Last year, they released a series of ads featuring Cal driving the pitching staff to work in a dump truck.
And this year, the team debuted a new bit where, mid-game, Cal appears on the jumbotron and reads aloud messages of love lost. You can get dumped by the Big Dumper.
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This bit shook the two guys beside me to their cores. The stress and dismay they experienced as the Big Dumper read out the messages was something to behold; two men young enough to both feel the bitter sting of spurned love and actually imagine that it could happen here, in public, at a game, mid-inning… to them! It was too much. They were swept up in the nightmare, utterly gobsmacked that this was being tolerated. I don’t know why their horror struck such a chord in me. Maybe I wanted to protect them, these two young people so early in the brutal wack-a-mole of life. I’m turning 40 next month and I can tell you, a jumbotron doesn’t need to be involved for you to feel like the world is making light of your worst moments. I hope those two are okay.
Later, after the seventh inning, we experienced a Mariners home game moment of nirvana.1 The team had just strung together a series of strong hits to score four runners, putting them up 9-1 over the Rangers. Then the night air filled with Belinda Carlisle’s classic, “Heaven is a Place on Earth.”2 And all heads turned up because floating down from the top decks were gifts from heaven. Specifically: ballpark franks tucked in aluminum pouches, attached to parachutes, were being launched into the crowd. The night was crisp with the sharp-edged promise of spring. I was together with family I see just a few times a year. Our team was about to sweep a division rival. And, shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands, I reached skyward, hoping for the wind to blow a hot, free snack my way.
One wayward dog floated out into right field, settling on the grass near outfielder Luke Raley. As he retrieved it and handed it off to the ball boy, the entire stadium came together as one, Mariners and Rangers fans alike, to express a shared desire. The chant started slowly, then grew louder and louder: Eat it! Eat it! Eat it!3
The Mariners won and mom drove home in the slow lane. All was well and I felt at peace.
⚾ 🔱
🗣️ This weekend I sent this podcast episode to a friend: Magical Overthinkers, “Overthinking about Burnout.” On this ep, Amanda Montell talks to Amelia Nagoksi, co-author of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, about how we can start working through our backlog of pent-up stress. It isn’t all crying and relasing your psoas; moments of awe count, too. Moments like, I don’t know, snatching a hot dog out of the sky.
📖 I’m just starting bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, the first of a few books I’ll be reading about men, masculinity, and friendship as part of my research for the fantasy football book. More relevant reading: this weekend’s “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” by Sam Graham-Felsen for the New York Times. Men aren’t okay, and feminism is for everybody!
Not capital N. Just because this is a Seattle team doesn’t mean I’m always making a grunge reference, grow up!
Apparently Belinda is aware of the promotion and loves it. “[A] possible collaboration [is] coming in the future,” per KOMO News.
Apparently, after the game Luke said the aluminum pouch was empty! We may never know if, given the chance, he would actually have eaten it. Also, I found this video from the POV of the fan who threw it onto the field. Who throws an empty hot dog package onto the field?? Be better!!
you KILL me why do I care about baseball when you write about it
okay "eat it eat it" is so funny, you gotta love humanity