Just my luck - Weekend Edition Sunday had a story about summer road trips! I should have written in but then my trip has been a little hard to believe as it is. Tuned into Yellowstone Public Radio's Sunday Classics to keep mellow while driving into Montana, which many people warned me is a dangerous place to drive. None of the people who made this warning have actually been to Montana, but whatever.

My aunt and uncle are here in Billings and seem good. The whole town seems excited about the new baseball field - Dehler Park - which is the new field for the Billings Mustangs. Today was the park's official opening day, though the Mustangs don't play there until Tuesday. Instead we saw some little league clinics and then a game in the American Legion league between the Billings Scarlets and the Bozeman Bucks - or, rather, we saw most of a game, until the game had to be called on account of darkness - the new lights didn't come on as scheduled and so that was that. (Here's a local news story about the whole thing)

We went with a friend of my uncle's, who is about the biggest baseball fanatic you could ever meet. He's been to a park of every team, even if they're not the team's current home field, so he was telling us story after story about games he'd seen in different states. The best story was at Wrigley Field. "I'm sitting behind this guy who'd had too much to drink," he says, "and the Cubs were having a bad game. So the drunk guy says, 'If that pitcher gives up a home run I'm gonna punch him in the face.' Sure enough, the next batter hits a home run, and here comes this drunk fan onto the field. The thing was, though, the pitcher was some kind of martial arts student, and so the fan was the one who got knocked down."

So clearly having the lights fail at a park isn't the weirdest thing that can happen in baseball.

Now listening to: Steve Goodman, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame"

Update: here's audio of my uncle's friend (with a few extra touches from Andrew P. at NHPR and Ken Siebert at Yellowstone Public Radio).

(Photo courtesy Ken Siebert of Yellowstone Public Radio)