ESPN Buster Olney Blog

The little big man of the house is 5 years old now, and he loves baseball -- all parts of it. He loves the hitting and the pitching, naturally, but he also likes how the scoreboard changes, likes how the momentum of each at-bat changes from pitch to pitch, likes the diving and the jumping and the running and the throwing on defense.

But he'd never been to an actual game in person until Saturday, when he and I got tickets to see the Nashville Sounds play host to the perfectly named Albuquerque Isotopes, at Greer Stadium in the Music City, where the scoreboard is shaped like a guitar.

He loved the kid stuff at the park, although none of his five fastballs registered on the radar gun (thankfully, a 33 mph reading from the adolescent who threw before him remained on the board, anchoring Jake's hopes that he actually does throw a decent heater that might match that of his favorite pitcher, Tim Lincecum). He bounced on one of those bouncy things for a while, but I talked him out of the trampoline-bungee cord thing. ("We gotta get ready for the game," I said, as if we really had anything to do other than find our seats.)

And about 10 minutes before the game was scheduled to begin, some groundskeepers lined up next to a tarp, and with other members of the front-office staff (that's how they address these manpower issues in the minors), they covered the infield -- just before it started to pour, for over an hour.

"It's not raining that hard," Jake insisted, in the moments when the rain making circles on the tarp seemed to lighten. "They can still play."

He was ready to go. We had a scorecard and a pen, and we had talked about writing down the lineups, and to keep him hopeful and patient, I told him that the shortstop for the Nashville Sounds -- the Triple-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers -- was a really, really good young player named Alcides Escobar.

"How many home runs does he have?" Jake asked, cutting to the chase.

"Two or three," I said.

"That's not very good," he said.

"He's hitting over .300," I replied, "and he steals a lot of bases. And he's really, really good at catching the ball. That's what everyone says."

I kept pumping up Escobar over the course of an hour of rain. The groundskeepers began pulling the tarp into right field, and the crowd roared and Jake clapped, his cheeks flared out by a huge grin. The mascot, Ozzie the Lion, came out, and when he held up a sign that said, "SCREAM," Jake screamed. He watched the pitchers start to warm up in the bullpens and tracked the movements of the umpires as they came out of their room beyond the center-field fence.

No. 15 stood inside the home dugout. "That's Alcides Escobar," I said, and Jake locked in on him. "Dad, he steals a lot of bases," he said authoritatively.

Tony Abreu led off for the Isotopes, and after taking a couple of fastballs, he chopped a ground ball past the mound and toward center field -- a clear hit, it appeared. Until Escobar dove to his left, gloved the ball, popped to his feet and gunned down Abreu by a half-step. Jake looked at me and grinned. "Escobar," he said, again, sounding out each syllable carefully. That's all he had to say.

Chin-lung Hu followed Abreu in the lineup, and he topped a grounder past the mound -- with more speed and a higher bounce than Abreu -- and Escobar ranged to his left and reached down and lunged, while staying on his feet. And he got this grounder, too.

His angle to throw to first was awful, and so he pirouetted 270 degrees, the way Cal Ripken used to do, and rifled a throw to first. Hu barely beat the throw, according to the umpire, who drew some ire from the little big man. "He was out!" Jake snapped.

No, he was safe. But on successive plays Escobar had given a 5-year-old and many others a couple of plays to remember him by -- something that we could talk about on the drive back to the hotel, after the lightning and thunder and downpour stopped the game an hour later, and something we'll probably remember for years to come, when Escobar is making those kinds of plays in the majors. The baseball gods had bestowed good things on Jake in his first time to the ballpark.

• I e-mailed Joe Kehoskie, an agent who has worked with Cuban players and knows a lot about baseball there, and asked for his impressions of Aroldis Chapman. His response: "Chapman has more upside than any pitcher in Cuba and that 100-mph fastball is exciting. However, strictly from the standpoint of ML-readiness, I don't believe Chapman is Cuba's best pitcher right now, or even in the top five."

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