You could see your breath Tuesday night at Delta Dental Park at Hadlock Field. You’re not supposed to see your breath at a baseball game. At a Nordic ski race, sure, or next door at Troubh Ice Arena.
But at 6:01 p.m., with snow flurries falling around him, Yordanny Monegro of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, threw the first pitch of the game to RJ Schreck of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. It was 35 degrees. The 12 mile per hour wind made it feel like 30.
When the game ended 2 hours and 36 minutes later, it was 31 degrees but felt like a crisp 25, and it was snowing again. But to the couple hundred fans who stayed until the end (the announced attendance was 5,026), a walk-off win warmed things up. Max Ferguson’s single past a drawn-in infield drove in Corey Rosier with the winning run in the 10th inning for a 2-1 victory.
“These guys knew leaving Florida, we’re the furthest north you can go (in the league), so be ready for it,” Portland manager Chad Epperson said.
If Monegro was cold in his snow debut, he didn’t show it in the first inning, working a quick inning to get the Fisher Cats in order, with a pair of strikeouts. It snowed harder in the 20 minutes before the first pitch, when Monegro was warming up. Big, wet, heavy flakes. The kind that make tracking a fly ball harder than nuclear physics. The term warming up is applied loosely here.
Pitcher Yordanny Monegro blows on his hand during the Sea Dogs’ home opener on Tuesday at Hadlock Field. Temperature at first pitch was 35 degrees. Daryn Slover/Portland Press Herald
“I said, ‘Well, it’s cold, it’s snowing. I can’t control that, but I can control my warmup.’ I just wanted to get my body ready to go so when I touched the mound, I can give the best of me,” Monegro said through interpreter Juan Rivera, his pitching coach.
Rivera said Monegro did complain about the cold a couple of times, but he ignored it.
“I told him, it’s cold in Boston, too. Pitching October baseball in Boston, that’s cold, and that’s what you want,” Rivera said.
On a pitch count, Monegro was done after getting the first out of the fourth inning. He allowed one run on two hits, kicking off a dominant night for Portland pitchers. Monegro, Jack Anderson, Zach Bryant and Wyatt Olds combined for 18 strikeouts.
That’s a fact of life in early season baseball games in the Northeast. The grass isn’t quite green yet, the precipitation is mixed, and the air is cold. Sea Dogs team president Geoff Iacuessa said he’s not sure if Tuesday’s game was the coldest in team history, but it was the coldest in a while.
“The only thing I was worried about at the beginning, when it was really coming down, was seeing the baseball. It wasn’t white-out conditions, but it was getting close,” Epperson said.
When a snow squall hit at 3:30 p.m., 2 1/2 hours before the scheduled first pitch, a few members of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats poked their heads out of their locker room in the Expo. They were having none of it.
“Nope. Game cancelled. Nope,” said one player.
Portland’s Max Ferguson runs to first base as snow fall at Hadlock Field in Portland. Daryn Slover/Portland Press Herald
The tarp remained on the infield until 4:40 p.m., and what snow did fall quickly melted. The comedian in charge of music at the ballpark played Christmas carols. Monegro tried to block out the cold and focus on his pitches.
“We talked about it pregame with my pitching coach. I just blew my hand, tried to put some moisture on my fingertips. I felt I thought I did a good job between pitches just making sure my hand was in a good position to have a good grip,” Monegro said.
Down in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Triple-A Red Sox postponed Tuesday’s game because of freezing temperatures and strong winds expected throughout the evening. In Binghamton, New York, the Rumble Ponies, Portland’s rival in the Eastern League’s Northeast Division, also postponed their game.
The Sea Dogs once postponed a game because of cold, too, an early Saturday afternoon in April 2013, when the field froze overnight and the wind chill was 26 at the scheduled game time.
In Maine, we fight through it. Because honestly, we don’t know if it’s going to improve. I mean, it always has before, but past results do not guarantee future performance.
Last season, a spring snowstorm caused postponements of the first two games of the season. The Sea Dogs finally played late Sunday afternoon after the grounds crew did amazing work getting the field cleared and playable.
“We were out here earlier, and there are probably a handful of guys who have never seen snow. This is their first time,” Epperson said. “These players, when they get out there and they’re moving around, they’re amped up.”
The Sea Dogs had heaters in the dugout, and Epperson just asked that the guys not playing make sure the players coming off the field each inning got plenty of access to the warmth. Monegro said any trepidation he had warming up went away when he entered the game.
“Once you touch that mound and you’re in competition, everything just zones out and you’re, ‘OK, I have to do my job’,” he said.
A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Ferguson said he played in snow once, in his freshman season at the University of Tennessee.
“At least it’s better than rain,” he said.
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