30 : 6 : 440 : 1 : 6

Puck was prepared to begin a round of review multiplication tables that morning. Maybe not super enthused about the idea, but did it anyway.

“I don’t need to know this,” he insisted while he finished breakfast.

“Sure you do, Puck!” Gloria encouraged him. “This is great stuff to know!”

“Nana? Did they even have multiplication tables back in your time?”

Many hours later, Oxbear and I sat in the soup of thick, heavy summer air at the ballpark. The heat index had crawled to 102 or higher that afternoon, and even at 7:15 game time and a slight breeze, it was dense up in the nosebleeds.

In the 3rd, I walked down three levels to greener pastures to visit Julia and Heidi, full of cotton candy and Dip ‘n Dots. It was American Girl Doll night at Busch Stadium, so Heidi would leave with a new t-shirt for her doll. Our talk paused briefly as Tommy Pham jumped for Padres’ Matt Kemp’s line drive home run, about snapping his arm in half in the process.

I walked back up to Oxbear in the 4th. He was working through a bag of pistachios. Yuck.

As the innings progressed and we got to the bullpen, I explained how badly our relievers had been pitching lately.

“Well, they should just reverse them,” Oxbear said.

“You mean… have the relievers start the game and the starters end it?”

“Yeah,” he grinned.

“I don’t even know if that’s allowed.”

“I should be a guest speaker on your podcast,” he concluded.

It was about the 8th inning. Oxbear had recently come back with a ten-dollar soda in a collector’s cup.

“It’s okay,” he told me. “I’ll drink out of this cup for years.”

The score was 9 – 2 in St. Louis’ favor.

Oxbear, always the idea man, turned to me and said, “Why don’t the Padres just give up?”

“You mean, as in quit the game?”

“Yeah.”

“They have to finish the game. They don’t have a choice.”

“Yeah, but they should have the option of quitting if there’s no way they can win the game. I mean, they’re seven runs back. They should just have a “Good effort, boys; good effort.” button in the dugout for the manager to press.”

My husband, the true baseball fan.