I had plans for Friday evening that fell through at the last minute, leaving me with Plan B: Head to Hartford where the Savannah Bananas were playing at Dunkin’ Park (DP).

Actually, it wasn’t the Bananas, but two of their ‘affiliates’, the Indianpolis Clowns and Party Animals. While the Bananas played in Hartford in 2023, they have gotten too big for a stadium like DP, instead playing primarily MLB stadiums.

I would not be able to get into the Party Animals-Clowns game — it had been sold out for weeks — and that was fine. ‘Banana Ball’, as it is known, is essentially ‘baseball meets a loud circus’. It’s not my thing, but a lot of people love it, and that’s great. I could chase foul balls outside the stadium, hopefully. The Bananas and affiliates use their own baseballs. This was a ball I got 3 years ago when the Bananas played in Hartford.

The game started at 7pm. I purposefully got to the stadium about 7:15, wanting to miss the traffic for the sold out exhibition.

My plan was to stand outside the stadium on the 3B line, where I knew foul balls have come out of the stadium in the past. It’s admittedly boring sitting outside a stadium like that, and risky because nothing might come out on a given night. But if/when a foul ball does exit the stadium, it’s a neat rush.

What was helpful in terms of entertainment and knowing when to be ready for a possibiity of a ball leaving the stadium was that I could watch the scoreboard, which was showing the game feed.

I was interested in lefties, who primarily hit foul balls down the 3B line.

This is the corner of Main Street and Pleasant Street in Hartford. Main Street runs along the 1B line (green arrow), and Pleasant Street (red arrow) along the 3B line.

I watched the game on the scoreboard. Even outside the stadium, it was incredibly loud. They play an ongoing mix of high-energy song clips while the game is being played. Between that and the car traffic, I had to pay attention to the possibility of a ball bouncing outside the stadium without being able to hear it.

The first 50 minutes or so, I was the only one on Pleasant Street save for the occassional passing car, but there was no action. Of the 18 batters, I think only 7 were lefties, which did not help my cause.

On a couple of occasions with righties at bat, I walked up to the corner of Main and Pleasant in case a ball might come out of the Main Street side of the stadium. But that street is far busier than Pleasant, so even if a ball came out on Main Street, there was traffic and a few people on the sidewalk, so there’d be no guarantee I’d get it, which is why I mostly stuck to Pleasant.

The 3rd time I walked up to Main Street and just started back down Pleasant, I heard and saw what I was hoping for: A ball flew out of DP, hit the street and ended up on a grassy area on the other side of Pleasant Street.

Awesome!

Here is the ball.

The ball is different than the previous one I snagged the same way: The font size on front is larger, and you can’t see in this pic, but instead of the Banana logo on top of the old ball are the letters “BBCL”, which stands for “Banana Ball Championship League”. I like the old ball better, but was still very happy to get the new one, too.

It was about 8:10pm at this point. I knew the game would end about 9pm, and some people would probably start leaving early, so I had set 8:30pm as the cut-off as to when I would take off to avoid traffic. I stuck around the next 20 minutes, but nothing else came out of the stadium on Pleasant Street, so I called it a night.

No lineup cards on this night — the Bananas and their affiliates use lineup cards, but I thin they sell them at this point — but that was quite alright.

The Futures Collegiate Baseball League (FCBL) held its annual Home Run Derby and All-Star Game on Tuesday, July 26 at Holman Stadium in Nashua, NH.

Or at least they were supposed to.

I headed up to the Nashua area knowing there was rain forecast that could potentially change the FCBL’s plans. Given the 2:15 drive each way, it was a gamble.

But the opportunity to chase special baseballs has dwindled to precious few, and this was one of those opportunities.

I made it to Holman Stadium around 2:30pm, 2 hours before the HRD was scheduled to start, with the ASG to follow at 6pm.

But the forecast hadn’t gotten any better, with rain scheduled to start sometime around 4:30pm, and it looked like once it started, it would stick around, and be heavy at times.

Batting practice was going on when I got there, and I hung out beyond the outfield fence for a while, along with a couple others. Five or six balls made it over, but none were ASG balls.

This was the view from down the left field line shortly before the HRD was scheduled to start, with the rain holding off for the moment.

I didn’t take any more pictures because things went down quickly.

There were a bunch of kids in the outfield shagging non-HRs, and about 3 dozen kids and adults hanging out beyond the outfield wall hoping to shag HRs.

The HRD was largely a dud…very few HRs were hit, I believe 19 in total. I have never been to a HRD with so few homers hit.

For the right-handed hitters (6 of 7 were righties), I decided to play an area stretching from left-center to center field. There was a large back wall beyond the HR fence, and the area was fenced off, a very narrow area stretching the whole length of left-center to center field, but only about 6 or 7 yards in depth.

The pic above gives somewhat of a representation of the situation. The vast majority of ballhawks were playing down the LF line, with a few playing behind the fenced in area I was in.

My thinking was that any HR ball that hit the back wall would drop straight down into the fenced in area I had to myself. I almost certainly wouldn’t catch any balls on the fly, which is the fun of HRDs, but my primary goal was to get at least 1 ASG ball, and I saw this as the best opportunity to do that. Surely, one of the righties would hit a ball or 2 or 3 over the left-center wall and hit the back wall.

Except none did through the first round, which I initially thought was the whole derby. Meanwhile, it was also starting to rain.

Thankfully, there was another round of the top 3, and one of them hit the back wall. As I anticipated, it dropped straight down. There were a few kids salivating on the outside of the 10-foot-high fence with the ball lying just feet from them, but no way for them to get to it. All I had to do was walk over and pick it up.

Here it is.

Cool ball for sure, with both the location and year on it, and an outline of the state of New Hampshire between “ALL” and “STAR”. And it would be the only one I would get, so I certainly got lucky.

The HRD ended with a now-steady rain, which would ultimately postpone the ASG to the next night.

More on what I ended up doing on Wednesday to come shortly, but happy to say that the long drive to-from Nashua worked out with an ASG ball in hand!