Bee-ing There (Chase Field, Phoenix)

 

 

April 30, 2024

This is mostly a blog about a quest to see all 60 MLB and AAA ballparks, but I realized that when I go to my home park and see one of the most unusual, and entertaining, game delays ever, I have to talk about that. That’s beecause what happened was almost unbeelievable, and you had to bee there to fully appreciate it. So here's the story, a couple of weeks after the fact.

Let me set the stage. It’s a game between the Diamondbacks and their archrivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. I should mention that in any sport, “Beat L A” is a common chant in Phoenix, but many of us who live in Tucson would argue that Phoenix is a city which has aspired to “be LA” for decades, with the massive urban sprawl and the emphasis on an ever-increasing number of freeways. In all fairness, though, it’s also true that Tucson has aspired to not be Phoenix since a time when Phoenix was a fraction the size that Tucson is now, but that’s a whole other discussion. We’re talking baseball, though, and from a baseball perspective, Arizona was Dodgers territory until the Diamondbacks came along, despite the best efforts of the Angels and Padres. That means that many Arizona families are Dodger fans for two or three generations (you can’t go much deeper than that unless you’ve got someone who followed the Dodgers in Brooklyn). So at a Dodgers game in Phoenix, more than half the crowd is Dodger fans, and it’s a loud and raucous affair. But this is a Tuesday night game, before school is out for the summer, so the crowd is “only” 29,000, still larger than the average Phoenix crowd for the last few seasons. The pre-game routine is done, they’ve had a (bad) rendition of the national anthem, there’s been a ceremonial first pitch or two, and then … the players don’t take the field for the top of the 1^st inning.

It turns out that after batting practice finished, and as all the ceremonial things were happening, a few bees started to show up and circle around the top of the netting behind home plate that protects the spectators from foul balls. The team waited a bit to see if the bees would go away, but instead, the number of bees just kept increasing.

There are two perspectives on this story, the story as it unfolded for those of us in the stands, and the story as it unfolded behind the scenes. Both are interesting, but let me start with what those of us in the stadium saw.

Ten or 15 minutes after the real first pitch was scheduled to have been thrown, the scoreboard showed the bees swarming, and they announced that there was a colony of bees that had appeared, and that the game was going to be delayed until the bees could be dealt with. “So please bee patient.”

We waited, and waited, while they played “Let It Be” and various Beyoncé songs. Meanwhile, they evacuated a couple of thousand people whose seats were nearest the bees. Incidentally, I’d posted something on Facebook about the situation (what else was there to do?), and Monica Kress, a long-time friend, said that her entomologist husband had said that it must be a “swarm,” not a “colony,” because they were just house-shopping, and hadn’t really made it their home yet.  

The crowd cheered when, 30 or 45 minutes after the scheduled start, someone drove a scissor-lift over to the base of the netting. But then nothing happened for another 15 minutes.

Then a guy showed up with lots of gear (including a beekeeper’s suit, which he hadn’t yet put on), and the crowd cheered more. But he just walked to the scissor-lift, talked to some people there, then walked away. The crowd deflated the same way they do when the hometown pitcher gets two strikes on the batter in a crucial situation and then the next pitch is called a ball.

A few minutes later, our hero came back, got on the lift, hooked up a safety harness, which hadn’t been there before, put on the beekeeping suit, and the crowd really went nuts. The lift barely reached to the top of the netting, where the bees were swarming, and then the real action began, all shown on the giant scoreboard. “Bee Guy” sprayed something on the bees, then started vacuuming them up, not stopping until you couldn’t see any more in the camera shot, with the crowd cheering the whole time. Bee Guy acknowledged the cheers, which revved up the crowd even more, and then he came down on the lift. It was pest control as theater.

 

The team put a message on the scoreboard that said, “Thank You Bee Guy.” About a minute later, it was changed to “Thanks You Blue Sky Pest Control.” It did seem only fair that his business got a marketing bump.

By now, we’re nearly 90 minutes past the scheduled start time, but the players needed to warm up again, those thousands of spectators had to get back to their seats, and they wanted to make sure that the bees wouldn’t come back. So they announced a new start time, 1 hour and 55 minutes after the originally planned time. The normal pre-game ceremonial stuff had already been done, but a few minutes before the actual start, they announced that there would be another ceremonial first pitch, by the “Bee Guy.” He came out in the beekeeping suit, then dramatically pulled off the beekeeper's hat to throw the first pitch, and got one of the biggest ovations I've ever heard for a ceremonial first pitch.

And finally, the game started.

The first time the “Beat L A” chant started, the scoreboard said “Beet L A.” I was momentarily confused until I saw the bee emoji next to the second “e” in “Beet.”

A promotion was announced for the next set of games, on the weekend, offering a “Buy One, Get One Free-Bee” deal for game tickets.

The next day, Topps, the premier baseball trading card company, came out with a limited edition “Bee Guy” card, some of them signed by the Bee Guy himself. That in itself was a story that made the Washington Post.

I really appreciated the way Diamondbacks management played it. It was a situation that could have really stung them, a two-hour delay with the possibility of a cancellation, but they milked the situation (or maybe I should say “honeyed” it) for all it was worth, and the crowd bought into it.

Now to the other version of the story.

The Diamondbacks, the Dodgers and MLB offices in New York started discussing what to do as soon as someone realized that there were bees congregating. They talked about whether it would be safe to play, but with the number of bees growing, and with the bees at a spot where a well-placed foul ball might lead to an angry swarm of bees descending on players and/or spectators, that didn’t seem like a good option. They talked about postponing the game until another day, but decided to see if the Diamondbacks could get someone who could deal with it in a timely fashion. But what constitutes a timely fashion?

Doug Hilton is a branch manager for Blue Sky Pest Control in Phoenix. I’m guessing they’ve got a pest control contract with the team, because he was at his son’s tee-ball game in one of the outer suburbs of Phoenix when he got a call asking if he could come and take care of a developing bee problem. He was a 45-minute drive away from the stadium, but he had the equipment he needed in his truck, so he headed for downtown. Along the way, he told the team what he needed. That’s why the scissor-lift rolled out long before he got there, although he had not thought to say that a safety harness would be a good idea. Actually, it seems kinda obvious that you’d want one if you’re working 25 feet above the ground in the middle of a swarm of bees, but you have to be clear when you're giving specifications for equipment.

Incidentally, the team made it a point to say that he hadn’t killed the bees, just sprayed them with something to make them groggy, then vacuumed them up into a container to release somewhere else, far away from the stadium.

I doubt that he’d ever worked in front of a crowd of 29,000 people before, but I have to say, he did have a stage presence about him, which I think was one of the reasons that it became such a story. Besides the ceremonial first pitch and the trading card, he also did lots of interviews that evening and the next day. I’m sure that when he got up that morning, he didn’t think that he would beecome famous before the end of the day.

The game:

The long delay changed the way the game was played. The Diamondbacks' scheduled starting pitcher, Jordan Montgomery, was only making his second start of the season, because he had signed as a free agent the week the season started. So he had not gotten into his mid-season routine yet, and D’backs manager Torey Lovullo didn’t want to risk him getting hurt by getting heated up, then cooling off, then trying to heat up again a couple of hours later. So the D’backs made it a “bullpen game,” using a series of seven relief pitchers, most of whom only pitched one inning (the Dodgers stayed with their original starter). Montgomery then started the next afternoon’s game. The Diamondbacks’ best pitcher, Zac Gallen, had been scheduled to start the Wednesday game, but he’d missed his previous start with a tight hamstring, so Lovullo just skipped Gallen’s spot in the rotation again, to give him more time to heal (and Gallen’s next two or three starts were excellent, so it must have worked). In other words, the bees changed the progression of the season, if only in a small way.

The line of relief pitchers mostly pitched very well, although one of them threw a wild pitch that allowed one runner to score, and then committed a balk (I understand the rules about balks in principle, but I never notice it before it gets called) that allowed another run to score, so the Dodgers were ahead 2-1 going into the 8^th inning. We’d been at the stadium for more than 5 hours by now, and Kerry had had enough, so she walked back to the condo, a reasonable, but unfortunate, decision. In the bottom of the 8^th, Gabriel Moreno and Corbin Carroll, two young (24 and 23 years old, respectively) players who were outstanding in the playoffs last year but hadn’t been hitting this year, got back-to-back hits to tie the game.

The Dodgers’ “Manfred Man” (the runner who starts each extra inning at 2^nd base) scored in the top of the 10^th, but they couldn’t score any more. In the bottom of the 10^th, the first hitter, Christian Walker, hit a home run to win the game. Walker is 33 years old, and has hit over 100 home runs in his 10 years in the majors, but it was the first time in his career that he had a “walk-off” (game-ending) home run.

The crowd was buzzing as it left.