Dell Diamond, Round Rock, Texas (AAA #8 - If Weather Had Permitted)

 

When the Sun is obscured by the Moon, as happened yesterday, it’s a total eclipse of the Sun. If it’s in the U.S., it’s a national event, although what kind of event depends on the part of the country you’re in. Most places celebrate it, but in Texas, several local goverenments declared an emergency (they couldn’t have known it was coming yesterday more than 100 years in advance), and some schools were canceled.

When the Sun is obscured by clouds, it’s a typical Pacific Northwest day, a reprieve (for people who have lived in Arizona for decades), or a frustration for people who have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to see a total eclipse of the Sun.

When those clouds drop rain, it refills the dwindling reservoirs, but it’s a problem if you want to watch a baseball game outdoors. We knew going into this endeavor that rain could be an issue for our baseball watching, and tonight was the third time in two years that it has been.

Last year, the start of the very first game of our trip, in El Paso, was delayed more than an hour by a spectacular storm, and then we had a long rain-delay in the ninth of a tie game in Denver a few days later. We left that one, thinking the game would be suspended, but they managed to restart the game long enough to have a walk-off. Tonight, the idea was to go to a game in Round Rock, an Austin suburb, before spending a day and a half driving home.

We’ve been watching the weather forecast for Austin for nearly two weeks, starting when the time of the eclipse (1:34 p.m. local time in Austin) came within the 10-day forecast window. Watching a weather forecast evolve can be fascinating. Sometimes, the window when there’s a chance of rain becomes smaller, and the percentage chance either higher or lower, as a weather system gets closer. In this case, the time when the chance of rain (though not of cloud cover) started going up moved from about noon on the day of the eclipse until about 2 or 3 o’clock by the morning of the eclipse.

The place we went to, Horseshoe Bay Resort, about 50 miles outside Austin, was cloudy in the morning. The clouds started to break up, then they started getting thicker again in the hour before the total eclipse, after the partial phase of the eclipse had started. It seemed like some kind of a bizarre competition. We’d see the Sun clearly for a while, then through thin clouds, then it would be completely blocked, then those clouds would pass and it would be visible until the next cloud passed by.

I kept looking at my watch. I saw the crescent of the Sun 10 minutes before totality, then it disappeared. I saw it 3 minutes before totality, then it disappeared again. I sort of saw it a minute before totality through the clouds, and it disappeared again. And the world got dark, and we waited to see if it would show again during the four minutes of totality. Two minutes in, a hole in the clouds appeared, and we could see a spectacular view of the eclipsed Sun, with the solar corona sticking out like a bad hair day, and one very obvious solar prominence. Then the eclipse ended, and the clouds gradually went away. Some people in the Austin area that we talked to or heard from saw it, others could not.

But our weather watching wasn’t over. There was a possibility of rain this morning, then a prediction for clear skies in the afternoon, and then the chances of rain would be going up as the evening, and baseball game, wore on, hitting 50% at 10 p.m. No, 9 p.m.

Would we get a game in? Would we get part of a game in and then have a three-hour rain delay before they suspend it? Would it get rained out? If either of the first two occurred, we decided that we’d declare that we’ve been to Round Rock. If the third, we’d stay for tomorrow night, then do a 13-hour driving day in Thursday, so that we can make Friday morning commitments in Tucson.

It was drizzling at about 5 o’clock when we went out to dinner, then stopped. We went to the stadium. At 6:30, about the time the picture was taken, they announced over the PA system that the start had been delayed from 7:05 to 7:15, even though it wasn’t raining at the time. At about 7:10, it started raining lightly again, and at 7:15 they announced that the start had been delayed again (no time specified) while they watched the weather. At 7:30, it was raining harder, and the PA system had switched from their C&W playlist to 70s rock like “I Can See Clearly Now” (“the rain is gone”), and “Have You Ever Seen Rain”, and “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

The answer seemed to be that no one would stop the rain. The forecast called for increasingly heavier rain until about 1 in the morning, then easing up by morning. At 7:48, they announced that the game has been postponed until tomorrow, when it will be part of a double-header.

And then the rain stopped.

By the time I'm writing this, it has started again (and I hadn’t mentioned the lightning, which is always exciting if you’re standing in the middle of the outfield as the tallest object within a hundred feet), so I think it was the right call.

We canceled our hotel in El Paso tomorrow night and extended our stay here. We’ll go to the first game of the doubleheader tomorrow, then get up early Thursday and do what we hope will be the longest drive of the whole adventure.

In case you’re wondering, no, we won’t go to the second game, since we have to get up early the next morning.

If you’re one of the real baseball cognoscenti, you may know that games in minor league doubleheaders are only 7 innings each, and wonder whether a 7-inning game counts as having been to a ballpark.

The answer is that it absolutely does, by our rules. And we’re making the rules for this. Remember, we had decided that if they even started the game tonight, we’d count it. Of course, we were in the stadium for more than an hour and a half, so maybe we should have counted that.

But I already canceled that room in El Paso.