My layover in Dallas was 3 hours. I’m not sure why. Typically our corporate travel office booked my flights so that my layovers were less than an hour. But, for some reason this trip I had a long layover.
Good layovers can be either short or long, long enough to visit the city, or short enough to just barely get from one plane to the next.
Three hours is neither long nor short.
I made my way around DFW, taking the train to the terminal where my plane was leaving from. I found a restaurant and settled in for a nice lunch. . .and a baseball game on the TV.
It was the first game of the second half of the season. We just had the All Star break. All 30 teams of MLB shut down for nearly a week. The best and the brightest players head off to the All Star game. It was held in Cleveland this year.
Every team is represented in the All Star game. The fans vote for their favorite player at each position. Those become the starters. And then the managers for each team pick the rest of the players, making sure they pick at least one player from each team.
The managers are chosen the previous year. The managers for the All Star Game are the managers from the previous year’s World Series. It’s actually viewed as one of the less desirable aspects of getting to the World Series. The managers have to try to manage the All Star game while making sure eah player gets a chance to play.
In baseball, once a player leaves the game they are not allowed to return. It becomes especially challenging when dealing with the pitchers. The danger is that the game will be tied and go into extra innings and require a pitcher to pitch too long, affecting his ability to play in upcoming games.
The All Star Game was last week. Today was the first day of that regular play resumed. The game playing on the TV at the airport was the first game of the day, Cubs at Pirates.
A baseball game takes about three hours. It can finish in as little as a couple of hours. There is no limit on how long the game go. Baseball games don’t have a time limit.
But, they typically take about three hours. . .and conveniently I had about three hours to kill.
It was a great game. Through four innings, both pitchers had a no hitter going. Eventually the Cubs offense pushed across a run, but the game was still close. I was watching the clock as I watched the game. It looked like I’d be able to watch through the end of the game.
And then they changed the channel. . .TO GOLF!
I watched the rest of the game on my phone at the gate.
But, then, some people just don’t like baseball.
(Cubs won it 4-3.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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