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Baseball team's eclipse watch during game draws fans from far away

 
Published Aug. 22, 2017

KEIZER, Ore. — They came from Hawaii, Rhode Island and Alaska, and as far as the Dominican Republic and Australia.

Some of the fans at the Monday morning game between the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and Hillsboro Hops, short-season Class A affiliates of the San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks, traveled across entire oceans and countries to Volcanoes Stadium, located in the path of totality, to watch the first eclipse delay in professional baseball history.

The big moment lasted less than two minutes.

At 10:17 a.m. and 21 seconds, just after Hillsboro's Daulton Varsho punctuated a four-run first inning with a two-run homer to left, the moon obscured the sun. The eclipse left visible only the sun's corona, which formed a thin ring of light around the black sphere of the moon.

Cheers and screams of excitement erupted from the sold-out crowd of 5,300 — at last count 34 states and three Canadian provinces were represented — as the last vestiges of the sun's glare disappeared. Looking at the sun through "eclipse glasses," the narrow sliver of light was replaced by blackness.

"It was just spectacular," said Michael Cottenden, a resident of Ontario near Niagara Falls. "It was brief, but worth the travel time. The only risk was the weather, which was perfect."

Cottenden said he would have had to travel all the way to Tennessee or South Carolina to see the eclipse, but had a work event in British Columbia that allowed him to come here with his wife. He said he found the game listed on NASA's website as a recommended event.

At first, the atmosphere at Volcanoes Stadium felt like that of an unusually crowded minor-league baseball game.

But signs of the rare event became quickly apparent on one trip around the ballpark. (Total eclipses of the sun occur about every 18 months from somewhere on Earth, but one location may go centuries between seeing an eclipse.)

Vendors sold eclipse-themed merchandise: lapel pins, T-shirts, even shotglasses. The walkways around the stadium became packed, similar to the bumper-to-bumper highway traffic encountered by some fans as they drove to Monday's game.

Fans set up blankets on the grassy hills along the leftfield line and beyond the low fence in left. Others sat in lawn chairs along the cement pathways above the grass.

The Volcanoes treated the game like a national holiday, wearing special jerseys for the eclipse — black with a circle in the middle surrounded by flames emanating from the sun — and arranging for enough food and drinks to accommodate the crowd.

"It's like preparing for a wedding," said Jerry Howard, the Volcanoes owner. "A ton of details have to come together at the last moment. Here, it's a wedding with 5,000 people."

One of those details included putting a projection of the sun's shadow onto the scoreboard as it became more and more obscured by the moon. Howard's brother, James, a physicist and self-described amateur astronomer, had pointed his telescope toward the sun, projecting the shadow gathered by the telescope onto a white board. The image was then transferred to the scoreboard for the crowd to track, as the sliver of sun grew smaller and smaller.

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By 12:30 p.m. the temperature in Keizer would reach 88 degrees. But at its lowest point the air in the stadium was 66 degrees, cooled by the eclipse.

By the end of the game, the crowd had thinned, with some sections half empty after being packed less than a couple hours before.

And by the way, the Hops beat the Volcanoes 9-5.