A funny thing happened while I was out in New York once. My friend and I went out to the small town of Auburn, to try and catch the last of the minor league games we had planned to see, but several hours prior to the game, it began raining, and raining steadily. At this point, it really began to look like the game was in jeopardy, but since we had come such a long way, we wanted to wait as long as possible, or for the team to officially cancel it before we made our next move.
There was a little bit of frustration as the rain continued to come, and make it look obvious, but not being from the area, we still weren’t completely sure on whether or not to get the hell out of dodge yet, or wait on. But at this point, we needed a place to kill some time and not putter around out in the rain and waste gas. So we went to a nearby bar.
Auburn, New York is a pretty small town whose notoriety most comes from its proximity to the Finger Lakes, which I had never heard of until this trip, but it looked like the neighboring town of Skaneateles was the more popular regardless. Anyway, walking into the bar was definitely one of those movie moments where everyone there, naturally a regular, stopped what they were doing and stared at the Asian guy with his white friend walking into their bar in central New York. The bartender almost didn’t accept my Georgia license.
Naturally, I don’t like awkward situations like that, so I attempted to engage the bartender in some small talk. “Talk to everyone. You never know what others might say.” RPG logic – the shit that wouldn’t really work in real life, because who the hell wants to speak with complete strangers? Or so I thought.
I mentioned that were passing through, with hopes of catching the Doubledays (the name of the team) game, but it didn’t look very promising. Immediately she exclaims that she didn’t know that there was a game scheduled, but she could text her friend to find out of it was canceled or not. Her friend? Apparently the bartender’s friend was someone who worked for the Doubledays. Apparently one of the regulars at the bar at that very moment worked for the Doubledays’ treasury department. Like I said, small town.
The bottom line was that a few innocuous words of small talk ended up turning into very useful information for my friend and I. After three Yuenglings, the bartender relayed to us that the game was going to be cancelled. Neither the Twitter accounts of the Doubledays or the local beat reported had mentioned such at that time, but we were so enamored over the RPG logic that was taking place in front of us, that it was good enough.
Three minutes later as we were already on the road out of Auburn and back towards the highway, the Twitter feeds of both the team and the local reporter reported that the game was cancelled. Fascinating. Three minutes might not have seen like a big deal, but that was still a nice jump start to have, and contributed somewhat to our ability to reconvene our plans and make it down to Allentown, Pennsylvania to catch an alternate game instead. All thanks to “talking to everyone.”
