A Vow, a Wave, and the Runner on Second

Before the first pitch, there were vows.

The Somerset Patriots opened Saturday night with a pregame vow-renewal ceremony, couples gathering on the field to say again what they had already said once before. It was sweet without asking the whole ballpark to become sentimental about it. Minor-league baseball is particularly good at this kind of thing: a public ceremony can happen on the grass, families can take pictures, everyone can applaud, and then the bases go back where they belong and the game gets on with being a game.

There was something fitting about starting a baseball night with the idea of returning to a promise. Ballparks are built around return. Another homestand. Another season. The same concourse. Familiar ushers. A seat you know well enough to find without looking at the section number. People come back, and the place becomes partly theirs because they do.

Saturday did not need a giveaway or a celebrity theme to justify the trip. This was a regular game, which made it a useful reminder that regular games are rarely as regular as the schedule makes them look.

The Yankees supplied the first bit of extra gravity. Right-hander Clarke Schmidt and third baseman Ryan McMahon were both in Somerset on Major League rehab assignments. That is always one of the pleasures of being the Yankees' Double-A affiliate: a player whose normal workplace is Yankee Stadium can suddenly be standing a few yards away at TD Bank Ballpark, working through the unglamorous but necessary steps of getting back.

Rehab appearances are interesting precisely because the box score is not really the point. Schmidt's outing lasted two-thirds of an inning. Jaison Chourio opened the game with a triple, and Aaron Walton followed two batters later with a two-run home run. Schmidt also struck out two. McMahon went hitless in three at-bats and struck out twice. None of that felt like a verdict. A rehab assignment is a process made temporarily public. The work is the attraction.

Akron, meanwhile, was perfectly willing to treat the game as something more final. Chourio returned in the second inning with a two-run double, and the RubberDucks had a 4-0 lead before Somerset had found much room to answer.

The answer came one run at a time and, for a while, one home run at a time.

Manuel Palencia hit his sixth home run of the season and then his seventh, homering in consecutive trips to the plate. Connor McGinnis added his tenth. Cole Gabrielson eventually hit his fifth. Four solo home runs pulled Somerset all the way back from 4-0 and tied the game at 4-4 by the seventh inning. It was a strange kind of comeback: no bases-clearing eruption, no crooked-number inning, just repeated proof that one swing could remove one piece of the deficit.

Palencia finished 3-for-4 with two home runs, two RBI and two runs scored. Jace Avina had three hits. Akron starter Caden Favors, pitching on his birthday, still turned in six innings with eight strikeouts despite allowing three of those solo shots. By the time the ninth ended, both teams had nine hits and the game was still even.

Elsewhere in the stands, a group of kids had undertaken a separate challenge: they wanted a wave.

This deserves a hat tip. A wave does not begin because somebody announces one. It begins because a small number of people decide, with almost no authority, that several thousand strangers should briefly cooperate with them. At a minor-league game, that can be a difficult coalition to assemble. The kids kept launching anyway. Arms went up. A section or two participated. Momentum threatened to exist. Then the structure collapsed and they tried again.

Success was almost beside the point. They had appointed themselves to the job and remained committed to it.

Baseball can spend nine innings improvising and then become startlingly procedural in the tenth.

That became the other memorable piece of the night. The modern extra-inning rule begins with an automatic runner at second base, which means the tenth inning does not feel like the first inning with more pressure. The board has already been arranged. A piece is already in scoring position. Every small decision immediately carries weight.

Watching that process from the stands is fascinating. What had been a game of swings and reactions suddenly starts to look like a sequence of assignments. A single. A perfectly executed bunt. An intentional walk. The defense responds to one problem and another one appears. The choices are recognizable before the result is.

Akron finally converted the geometry. With two outs in the tenth, Somerset intentionally walked Nolan Schubart to load the bases. Dean Curley then lined a two-run single into right field, scoring Tyresse Turner and Jaison Chourio and giving the RubberDucks a 6-4 lead. Nothing about the sequence required theatrical chaos. That was what made it so unforgiving. Akron kept moving the pieces until Somerset had almost nowhere comfortable to put them.

The Patriots still had their half of the inning. They brought one run home, trimming the deficit to 6-5, but Carter Rustad finished the job for Akron after working three innings in relief. Rustad earned the win; Matt Keating took the loss for Somerset. After two hours and fifty-one minutes, the comeback stopped one run short.

The official attendance was 6,756, enough people to make the kids' wave seem theoretically possible and still not enough to guarantee that several thousand adults would agree to raise their arms at the correct moment.

That may be what stayed with me about the night. The game began with couples publicly choosing to do something again. A pair of Yankees were doing the deliberate work required to return to the majors. Somerset spent innings refusing to let a four-run deficit settle the matter. A group of kids kept trying to convince a ballpark to move together. Then extra innings arrived and reduced all that loose human energy to a runner on second, a bunt, a walk and a line drive into right field.

The Patriots lost but it was still a great night at the ballpark. Baseball has room for both statements.