Dan Pieringer helps out the Round Rock Express and lives a lifelong dream:
...In fact, I can die a happy man. At 22 years old, I realized my lifelong dream of running out onto a baseball field and shooting T-shirts out of an oversized slingshot with a man in a giant dog costume as thousands of screaming fans cheered us on. It's all downhill from here.
I accomplished this last Monday as I filled in as a member of the Party Patrol, the in-game entertainment crew at Round Rock's Dell Diamond.
The Party Patrol is composed of 13 people, and three to six of them will participate in the promotions for any given game. As soon as I donned my loaner "Party Patrol" shirt, I was ready to see baseball from a new perspective.
While I was comfortable with passing out coupons and talking to kids and smiling to fellow baseball fans, there were moments in the evening when I did feel distinctly out of place.
The first occurred in the middle of the fourth inning. In all of my daydreams of dancing on top of dugouts, I was always doing so to celebrate my game-winning hit in the World Series. Never once had I imagined my dugout-top dance to be part of a promotion. But as soon as the side was retired, Seamus told me to get up on the home team's dugout for "the chicken dance."
The prospect of dancing in front of thousands of people was scary enough, but the fact that I'd never done "the chicken dance" before tightened the knot in my stomach. There's nothing like learning new steps in front of 7,844 paying customers. But my shirt read "Party Patrol," so I knew I had to do get up there. I really lucked out, though, because it turns out the chicken dance is actually quite simple. It's four basic steps, the most complicated of which is flapping your arms as if you were a chicken. So I held my own, I suppose. Or did I?
Oh, and there is a part II:
It was a view unlike any other I've ever had at a baseball game.
Tracking the Party Patrol for a night is not without its perks. But it turned out we were there on business, because it's from that gate the Party Patrol emerges with Round Rock's mascot, Spike (a rail yard dog), to shoot shirts into the crowd.
My heart sped up as I saw the green grass from behind the center-field fence. And the thrill I got from running into the outfield did not disappoint. Spike's right-hand woman, Britney Paxman, managed the slingshot with Seamus and me, while Spike and fellow Party Patrol member Joe Diaz cruised the sidelines in a four-wheeler with a cannon.
That time between the fifth and sixth innings was one of the highlights of my night with the Party Patrol.
But this event also dealt me an extra dose of adrenalin. One of the shirts we fired off looked dangerously close to falling short of the fans and onto the warning track, which would have been further evidence that I wasn't cut out for Patrolling. I was already the guy who couldn't dance. No, I was not ready to take strike two.
My heart was in my throat as that shirt made its way toward the crowd, and I breathed a sigh of relief as it barely cleared the outfield fence.
When I explained that fear to Seamus as we retreated out of sight, he told me that it happens to everyone. Apparently, Seamus misfired a shirt on June 16, the night Roger Clemens pitched in front of a franchise-record crowd of 13,475 at Dell Diamond. Seamus earned a hearty round of boos for his efforts, something he took completely in stride.
Yeah, but can he shoot it into a fishing net out of the radio booth? I didn't think so.
On any other night of the week, the Party Patrol would have started to wind down after the stretch. But it was Monday, and Monday is the one night that features a second dugout dance. I was being punished for something.
In the middle of the eighth inning on Mondays, Party Patrollers do the twist. Compared to the chicken dance, which has some breaks for flapping, the twist is a strenuous dance, involving constant motion and, it turns out, a degree of flexibility that far exceeds the the arm flap for the chicken dance.
Certain Party Patrol members confess to having a hard time with the twist.
"I can handle the chicken dance but the twist? I just get uncomfortable up there," said Chris O'Brien, another easily embarrassed and perhaps rhythmically challenged Patrol Patroller.
Again, I was reluctant, but I got up on the dugout with Seamus and the two of us twisted for the length of the inning break, which seemed like a long time. I don't know if the leadoff man was particularly impressed with our moves, or particularly amused by them, but I believe he could have gotten into the batter's box a lot sooner.
I finally dismounted the dugout, suddenly overwhelmed with an unreal craving for Oreos, when an usher to reveal what thousands of others in the stands were probably thinking: there aren't a lot of fans who want to see two men twist together flamboyantly on top of the dugout.
But the young fans loved it. And if there's one thing I kept rediscovering in my night at Dell Diamond, it's that the Party Patrol exists for the young fans. For every 30-year-old guy drinking a beer and staring at you from the front row with a look that seems to ask, "What are you doing to yourself, man?" there's a 4-year-old girl who just likes to see people having fun, flamboyant or not. And, if the crowd participation on Monday night is any barometer, watching goofy grownups do the twist is the definition of fun for a lot of kids.
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