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   Michelle and I did a Midwest swing to start the 2007 season--the fourth year in a row I'd done some Spring Break minor-league travel...and the first year that I've done said travel in northern, rather than Southern, climes.  Just my luck:  my year would coincide with a massive Arctic batch of air covering the entire Midwest.  It cancelled one game on the trip--the game in Appleton, Wisconsin.  But they got opening night in in Clinton, and my wife and I bundled up to see.

    Were it not for minor league baseball, I would not have ever heard of Clinton, a county-seat sized town on the Mississippi.  Alliant Energy Field does reasonably well in the is-there-any-question-where-you-are test, since it's close enough to the river that I could see a steamboat past the outfield fence.  It also features a decent view of the county courthouse (which sits kitty-corner from the ballpark, across home plate) and some factory belching out a massive amount of smoke.

    I want to cut the good people of Clinton a little bit of slack, since it was such a cold night.  But it was opening night, and I therefore was quite disappointed in the turnout...almost nobody made the trip out.  When one considers that the opposing team was the Swing of the Quad Cities, just about a half hour down the road, there should have been considerably more people.

    Of course, the folks at Alliant Energy Field weren't doing too much to draw the people in.  Outside of the mascot, Louie the LumberKing running about, there was very little excitement in the ballpark--and on a night like this with baseball as poor as we were watching (nine errors...these were not only less-talented ballplayers, they were rusty less-talented ballplayers), a little something more to get us cooking would have been nice, even if it were merely some ushers talking to us a little bit. 

    Alliant Energy Field has an interesting history--it's just that spectators have to look for it.  A plaque informs us that the then-Riverview Stadium was opened in 1937 as a WPA project.  So why does it feel so antiseptic and charmless now?  Is it the bizarrely-scary note that Community Service Workers (are these charming volunteers or those serving work-release sentences) appear to check in at an office inside the ballpark?  (Do they sell concessions?)  Is it that I'm bothered that a ballpark originally constructed in part to give work to desperate Depression-era workers, is now being pimped out to a sponsor (it appears that metal "Alliant Energy Field" plates have been affixed over places where the old "Riverview Stadium" names had been etched in stone)?  Is it the antiseptic metal bleachers that have been added in the intervening years throughout the ballpark?  I don't know, but I wasn't thrilled with it.

    The line of the wife goes, as usual, to my wife.  She wasn't a fan of Louie the Lumberking, Clinton's mascot.  Instead of a Lumberjack, she felt Louie looked like "the Burger King king's porn star brother."  Good assessment?  I leave that up to the reader.

    Looking back, this might be the second-coldest night on which I've ever seen a game. (I recall my game in Wichita being a lot worse.)  But my wife and I got through it all right, simply because we were prepared.  I might have been the only person in America who bought long underwear in preparation for my Spring Break.  The only problem I have with the cold night is how to score.  Michelle (who started her own scorebook on this trip...cool!) wore driving gloves.  I didn't want to spend money on driving gloves...I wasn't confident they'd keep me warm, and I was scared that my handwriting wouldn't be up to snuff.  I brought ski gloves, and spent the game looking like a snow bunny version of one-gloved-wonder Michael Jackson.

    So, on the whole, I can't tell if it was actually the ballpark or a convergence of events that came together (subpar baseball on a really cold night), but I can't say I was terribly impressed with Alliant Energy Field.  I do hope to head back to Iowa, however...as the Swing of the Quad Cities' ballpark in Davenport looked absolutely gorgeous as we drove by.

BALLPARK SCORE:

BASEBALL STUFF I'VE SEEN HERE:

    Mauro Gomez's first-inning three-run home run gives the LumberKings a lead they never give up.

    Grant Gerrard gathers three hits.

    John Whittleman walks four times...but I'll always remember him for dropping a pop to third that--and I don't say this lightly or often--I likely would have been able to catch.  (Of course, I never would have made the team, but that's another issue.)  It's one of two errors for Whittleman, four for Clinton, and nine...nine...in the game.

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Written April 2007.