Bees Invade PETCO Park

For fielding such a boring team since PETCO Park opened in 2004, San Diego sure has its fair share of the exciting and strange.

We've seen an 82-80 team win a division.  We've seen Padres ace Jake Peavy crack a rib during a division-clinching celebration on the field, rendering him useless during the playoffs.  We've seen Barry Bonds crack homer #755 off fellow PED-user Clay Hensley.  Friday night marks the return of Manny Ramirez from his 50-game drug suspension.

And Thursday afternoon, it was a swarm of bees.

Rewind to the ninth inning of yet another Padres blowout loss.  Down 6-1, left fielder Kyle Blanks started yelling in to the infield, trying to get the umpires to call time.  Seems there was a small swarm of bees circling the left field corner.  Blanks, who is allergic to bee stings, wasn't about to fool around with that.

Well, small swarm turned into huge swarm because a queen bee was present.  And when she emerged, she landed in the ball girl's team jacket, which was hanging over the chair she sits in down the LF line.  Over the course of 30 minutes, with the game delayed, about two thousand bees parked themselves on and up inside that jacket.

Without a beekeeper on staff, team officials had to summon one from elsewhere, and he arrived about 45 minutes into the delay.  As he did, and donned his hood, he got the loudest ovation of the day.  5 minutes later, we were playing ball again.

What do you get when a swarm of bees invades PETCO Park and the Astros are in town? A slew of Killer B's jokes from the days of Bagwell-Biggio-Berkman.  And more excitement than typically seen at a Padres game.

Now if we could just get professional hitters to invade PETCO Park for the home team, we'd really be onto something.

(Photo: Getty Images)

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Chase Parker believes in the East Coast bias, stretching triples into doubles, and considers Tommy Boy to be the greatest athlete of our generation.

Unless otherwise stated, no particular sexual orientation of anyone depicted is implied or should be presumed.