Tocqueville in Birmingham

Baseball in America is alive and well in Alabama. Or maybe America in baseball is alive and well in Alabama, where outside of Birmingham, our national pastime still thrills, if only as sideshow to a more salient national pastime, the American family.

The family unit lives in sweltering late Dixie July, for six thousand and change pay the price of admission for Saturday evening baseball. What is not lost on the team, anchored in fourth place and near-threadbare in hope for a late season surge to the league championship, is the meaning of why locals still draw out to Hoover, Alabama for Double-A ball. There are franks and night lights and cones overserved with Blue Bell Ice Cream at Regions Park. There is a lawn for families to multitask between watching a game and having a picnic and children can leave the sides of their parents to chase foul balls.

The long-awaited parting of the sky, a flyover of F-15 fighter jets for Military Appreciation Night, pauses the night and the awed jaws of boys drop into their baseball gloves; you'd never have to see it in person to know what it looks like, but like a walk home, it's always new if you suspend enough disbelief.

And on a night like this, possibility is unassailable. On a night like this, a Southpaw named Wes Whisler, a pitcher with three times as many losses as wins will throw seven and one-third innings of shutout baseball like he's cutting the night heat with splitters and sliders back home in rural Indiana. On a night like this, the defending champion Montgomery Biscuits, likely on their way back to another coronation, have no chance of winning this game on the road.

Paul goes on the radio to tell the listeners that this is the first game of the season in which a Barons has hit two triples; at the seventh inning stretch, everyone stands and all heads are emptied of caps to sing God Bless America (with feeling). After the game, we'll watch the crew roll a tarp over the infield for fear of rain and two kids will wait for the hulking Wes Whisler to finish his interview for local radio to get his autograph.

Of course, he'll oblige, signing pennants and baseballs from his icepacked shoulder and smiling for a picture that comes out as blurred as the American tapestry itself. I couldn't have picked a better night for a game, unless as I'm told, it had been one of the nights at Regions Park when they have post game fireworks and everyone stays.