BRIDGEPORT, CT- The scene in the press box at Harbor Yard Monday night was filled with anguish and frustration. “You gotta be kidding me,” said Newsday staff correspondent Chris Silva.

“This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of,” Connecticut Post writer Chris Elberry sighed in disbelief.

“I am gonna be here all night now,” said Jerry Beach from Long Island Press.

What did I do at 10:08 pm Monday night, when the Long Island Ducks and Bridgeport Bluefish’s title game was delayed at 3-3 in the 10^th inning, with no ease in the torrential rain in sight? I smiled. After all, this was my first time being in a press box at a baseball game, and unlike my companions I was not on any deadline pressure.

When I arrived at the game I have to admit I felt a little out of place. The Ballpark at Harbor Yard is just a hair bigger than my old high school football field, and yet I still could not find the press box. After embarrassingly having to be escorted there by a stadium staffer, I took my seat in the back row of the two-row box.
           

Once the big game started I loosened up, though. I just feel right when I am at a baseball game, so it put me at ease. I filled out the game in my scorecard, and helped all the pro beat-writers when they missed a play, whether it was a sac bunt, a strikeout, or even Jose Amado’s mammoth three-run bomb off Bill Pulsipher in the first inning that gave Bridgeport a 3-0 lead.

The Ducks came back in the third inning with two runs in the third, starting with Doug Jennings lashing an RBI single into right field. That helped me break the ice with Jerry Beach, who was sitting to my right furiously typing away at his expensive laptop while I threw chicken scratch down on my Pathmark loose-leaf paper. “That Jennings sure can play, huh?” As soon as I said it I felt like a loser and buried my head back in my paper. But to my surprise Jerry replied and we ended up getting into a two-inning conversation about everything from the game at hand to Johnny Damon’s hair.

He told me all about how he has a new gig working with the Red Sox this year, and how he landed it. I knew this guy was experienced and wise, so I told him all about my ambitions to be in sports media. He responded with a very bleak and sarcastic, “Good luck, kid.”

That was right about the time Long Island’s Cole Liniak took a fastball from eighth inning reliever Kevin Henthorne and ripped it over the left-field wall into the screen. The game was tied, and all of a sudden there was no end in sight. I was loving it. I had nothing to do Tuesday morning, and could have waited there all night. But as the rain got harder and harder, and puddles started forming all over the infield, the beat writers around me knew their plight. “If Bridgeport doesn’t win this thing in the ninth, they’re going to put the tarp on and call this thing,” Chris Elberry told me.

I guess when you cover these games year after year you learn a thing or two, because he was right. At 3-3 in extra innings, 25 men and women rushed to pull the tarp over the already soaked infield.

The game was over for the night. One hour and 36 minutes later Atlantic League executive director Joe Klein called it and rescheduled the game to be played in its entirety on August 9. As for Monday night’s game, it was deemed a tie. So at 11:44 pm the sports writers hit panic mode. They all had to hand something in to their editors on the spot about the game that decided who made the playoffs. However, nothing was decided. The Ducks and Bluefish were in the same position they were in when the game started, and the writers had nothing decisive to say. They all cursed and stomped away to make pleading phone calls to their editors. I clutched my press pass, and since the players on the field could not decide anything, I made the first definite decision of the night- no matter how much pain and frustration I am going to go through, I have to be involved in sports media for the rest of my life.