PORTLAND — Hadlock Field has hosted its share of memorable moments.
Fans of a certain age remember the minutes-long ovation through the bottom of the ninth as the Portland Sea Dogs succumbed to Harrisburg in the final game of the 1996 Eastern League championship series.
The annual Field of Dreams entrance and accompanying “People Will Come” soliloquy never fail to raise a lump in one’s throat.
A midweek ballgame in this damp and chilly spring between a Sea Dogs team stuck in the league basement and a middle-of-the-pack Yard Goats squad from Hartford didn’t figure to nudge the goosebumps meter much. And yet
Early arriving fans were treated to a pregame video clip of the first Olympic women’s marathon in 1984. While it played and the music swelled, through a dark tunnel a young woman from Maine emerged into a roaring Los Angeles Coliseum.
Adjacent to the home dugout and tossing a ball into the well-worn glove on her left hand, Joan Benoit Samuelson watched her younger self run that final lap. Thirty-five years later, the fans at Hadlock stood in admiration as a smile spread across Samuelson’s face.
The Sea Dogs lost 2-1 to the Yard Goats on Wednesday night after Samuelson tossed out a ceremonial first pitch. Tanner Houck (3-3) recovered from early troubles to pitch into the seventh inning, but the Sea Dogs scratched out only one run, on a Bobby Dalbec single in the fourth, and left eight runners on base.
Shortstop C.J. Chatham went 2 for 4 to raise his team-leading batting average to .327. He was thrown out attempting to score the tying run on a medium fly to left to end the fourth.
For the Yard Goats, Vince Fernandez homered in the first, and Bret Boswell doubled and scored on a dribbler in the second.
The Sea Dogs (12-23) embark on a nine-game, eight-day road trip to Reading and Trenton.
Samuelson, who turns 62 today, signed autographs in the concourse, sat in for a bit on the radio broadcast and enjoyed the rest of the game with family and friends in a skybox.
Samuelson’s appearance kicked off the 18th season of bobblehead giveaways at Hadlock, where the first 1,000 fans through the gates Wednesday received a plastic statuette of the Cape Elizabeth native in midstride, a number 84 on her red singlet.
“My stride looks better than it really is,” Samuelson noted as she reflected on her bobblehead.
Samuelson marks only the fourth non-baseball bobblehead given away at Hadlock since the fad was ushered in with a Josh Beckett bobblehead in 2002.
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