You might not be surprised to hear that I have a half-baked plan, for some point down the road.

OK, I have a lot of half-baked plans. But one that I’ve been thinking about recently is to do a “ten-in-ten-days” trip to all of the ballparks in the Pioneer League. The big issue with that (among several), is that the teams in this league pretty much play six-game weekly series matchups, so I’m not sure if it’s even feasible. So for now, I’ll just tackle a few of them here and there.

I’ve been to an Oakland Ballers game already in their initial season, but I’m waiting to make a return trip before writing a blog entry. So Ogren Park, home of the MIssoula Paddleheads, is my first official story about a Pioneer team. It’s an MLB ‘Partner’ league, which means it’s connected to MLB without the teams actually being affiliated with specific Major League squads. It does feel as if the players get signed to MLB teams fairly regularly, at least thus far this season; I think the Ballers have already had three or four guys make that jump. There are a number of familiar major leaguers who played minor league ball in Missoula: Former Tigers’ closer Jose “Papa Grande” Valverde, Adam Eaton, Jake Lamb, Jazz Chisholm, Jr., Justin Martinez, Geraldo Perdomo, and Paul Goldschmidt, who hit 18 homers for the team in 2009 as a 21-year-old.

I first settled on a trip to Missoula, honestly, because I discovered that there were cheap flights from Oakland and I love cheap flights. Mostly I just thought that the idea of randomly going to Missoula was kind of weird and quirky. I do love the concept of Montana, which Leigh and I had visited once, maybe 20 years ago on a long western-state road trip. So it’s been a while, and I wasn’t sure if maybe I made it out to be more idyllic than it really is. But we had a great time there over the span of a long weekend, despite some pretty brutal heat and smokey air caused by wildfires. I’d really like to come back again when it’s a little cooler, as Missoula is the sort of place I could see as a retirement spot. We even checked out a couple of houses with our new best friend, a real-estate agent named Pat.

On the morning of our trip, we woke to alerts that a good number of the country’s flights were affected by a software update gone awry. There were cancellations and delays all over the place. As I’m writing this, I think there are STILL people who are stranded in various spots far from their homes. Since we were flying out on a relatively obscure Allegiant flight, I assumed until we actually got on the plane that our flight would be cancelled. Somehow, it wasn’t!

So it turned out that Leigh and I were able to spend our 24th wedding anniversary here in Montana; she somehow keeps agreeing to go to baseball games with me, amazingly. She’s amazing too. The ballgame was just one small part of the trip; we had a lovely weekend, exploring the town of Missoula and the surrounding landscape.

On Saturday night we stayed in a cool renovated-church-turned-into-an-airbnb in Charlo, about 45 minutes north of Missoula. Earlier that day we had a chance to hang out with friends on Swan Lake and jump into the water to cool off. We also ambled around in our rental car, an upgraded Dodge Charger, which is an excellent vehicle to drive in a state where speed limits are 80 mph, stopping to take photos of random cool barns and fill up on coffee at the local hipster joints. We had several excellent meals, one a phenomenal steak dinner at Kampground, and another at a brewpub called Cranky Sam’s right before we headed over to the game.

We also had a chance to check out the Missoula farmers’ market on Saturday morning; they take their farmers’ markets very seriously in Missoula, it turns out. So much so that there are THREE different locations around town. We didn’t even get to one of them. But we did see the artists’ market and the smaller food setup. We feasted on homemade baked goods, chicken and corn tamales and deliciously strong coffee. Missoula is a really cool spot, we were pleasantly surprised to discover.

If only it had been about 20 degrees cooler, it would have been pretty much perfect!

‘Cause man, this game was HOT. It didn’t quite work out timing-wise to go to the Saturday night game, so that meant that our only option was the Sunday afternoon matchup. And Sunday afternoon, it turned out, was about 101 degrees.

They’ve been playing minor league ball in Missoula for about a century now, but the Paddleheads name just came into existence about five years ago. Before we got to town, I was assuming for some reason that a Paddlehead was a variety of fish, maybe because Montana makes me think of “A River Runs Through It.” But it’s not a fish; a paddlehead is a name for a moose. I’m not clear whether or not Missoulians actually refer to moose as paddleheads in general; one innkeeper we stayed with told us that the area isn’t even really known for its moose population. it reminded me a little bit of our time in Amarillo, where the team is called the Sod Poodles which is a colloquial name for prairie dogs that no locals actually seem to use. Oh well. I still bought a hat in both places (although my dog Nova ate my Sod Poodles hat a while back, I just now remembered)

The ballpark employees did as much as they could to make it comfortable for the rather sparse crowd: they had little misting stations set up around the concourse. And we somehow got tickets for the ONE (literally: one) shaded row, directly in front of the press box. Everyone else was in the full-out sun and had the sweat-drenched clothes to prove it by the end of the game.

It was also helpful, heat-wise, that the game’s ‘beer batter,’ Jaylon ‘Bad News’ Lee, had three hits on the day, leading to an 8-5 win over the visiting Glacier Range Riders. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a beer batter, the idea is that they’ll pick a guy on the home team and give everyone half-priced beer for 10 minutes after he gets a hit, if he gets a hit. There’s a somewhat meaner variation where a random OPPOSING player is picked; if he strikes out, you get the same half-off brewski.

Bad News turned himself into a bit of a folk hero on this day, I can tell you that. He kept a lot of us well-hydrated.

In addition to the beer batter, the crew at Ogren Park had some of the better goofy minor league gimmicks I’ve seen. Some of them worked, others not-so-much. The best of these made us laugh quite a bit.

One involved a kid at the top of the concourse tossing rubber (or stuffed? Not sure) fish down onto the field, where another kid was waiting with a fishing net to catch them. He did not catch any of them. The other, more successful attempt had a young fan lead the bullpen pitchers through a dance lesson; she performed a move, and then they all copied her. It was pretty funny. Before the game they set a tee up at home plate and had a kid knock one up the middle; he then ran around the bases as the Paddlehead infielders ineptly attempted to tag him out. This one was pretty adorable as well. The fans near us, though there weren’t a ton of them, were clearly having a great time, even with the heat.

They had a few more between-inning promos as well, but at some point they were probably running out of kids to trot out to the field. You gotta love minor league baseball! I think I roll this phrase out in every minor league blog post I write. It’s still true though!

On our last day in Montana, we met a couple in a great little coffee shop called Trapper Peak, which is in Stevensville, about 30 minutes south of Missoula. Leigh noticed that the husband had a Michigan State Spartan logo on the back of his shirt, so of course we asked him about it. Turns out he played both basketball and football for the Spartans in the mid-60s, and was once the roommate of MSU legend Bubba Smith. Whoa! How cool is that? He and his wife split time between Montana and Florida, where they host the Michigan State golf team each year at a tournament at Quail Hollow. It’s always fun to make these sort of connections, and it turns out you can do that pretty much anywhere.

Even in Montana!