Katie’s First Baseball Game

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Katie’s First Baseball Game

Monday, June 9th, 2008 | East Tennessee, Home Life, Photos |

We took Katie to a Tennessee Smokies game against the Chattanooga Lookouts Saturday night. It was Katie’s first baseball game, first baseball hat, and first ice cream helmet, which turned out to be the highlight of the day.

We discovered Katie had a major misconception about going to a minor league baseball game.

“OK, Katie, here’s where the baseball game is going to be.”
“I’m going to win!”
“Oh, uh, Katie, you’re not going to play. We’re going to watch the team play.”
“Aw, man! I wanna play!”
“We’re going to watch some big boys play.”
“Only boys?”
“Yeah, tonight it’s only big boys.”
“Like daddy?”
“Right. Big boys like daddy.”
“When does daddy go play?”

I’m hoping that Child Protection Services doesn’t find out we took a three year old to a baseball game and charge us with child abuse. Kid was bored out of her mind.

Mostly she just hadn’t taken a nap, so she was punchy. She wanted this, she wanted that. If I left the seats she cried for me. If mommy left the seats she cried for her. Whatever side of the seats she was on she wanted to be on the other side. We left after three innings.

So, OK, we’ll try that again in a few years.

This was our first visit to Smokies Park, the new home of the Smokies. Before the team moved from Knoxville to Sevierville in 2000 they played in Bill Meyers Stadium. The new park isn’t as big as it looked from the interstate. It had been a decade since I’d seen a game at Bill Meyers, but it seemed like the new stadium was no bigger. Those Wikipedia links confirmed it: the capacities were 6,400 for the old stadium and 6,412 for the new.

Photography notes

I took the picture above with a Nikon 70-300mm F/4-5.6. I bought the 70-300mm as a wildlife lens, but it makes a passable sports lens if, like me, you’re an amateur on a budget and don’t mainly want it as a sports lens. It isn’t a fast lens, so I was shocked when I took the first picture of a swinging batter and captured that pic above with no blur on the bat.

Turns out I got a little bit lucky on that first shot. At that point in the swing the bat has essentially stopped moving. All of the other pictures I took with the swing earlier in the arc had a little bit of blur in the bat, but not too bad. As long as I kept the shutter speed as fast as I did in the picture above (1/640th sec.) they looked OK. Here’s another pic at 230mm, F/5.6, IS0 800 and 1/640th sec. It’s earlier in the swing so the bat’s moving faster, but the blur isn’t too bad by amateur photography standards:

For comparison, in the picture below I was fiddling around with my settings and had the shutter speed set to a slow 1/40th sec. with ISO 200 and F/7.1. The black bat is so blurred it looks like a cloud of smoke. Even the numbers on the batter’s shirt are blurred.

Sports photographers use fast lenses like an F/2.8 to freeze motion. With lenses that fast you can stop the action even when there isn’t much light (and with indoor sports there never is). I need to get an F/2.8 telezoom one day, but at those prices I reckon it won’t be today, and it won’t be tomorrow, either.