Ohhhhhh, who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
“SpongeBob SquarePants!”

No matter what successes the Curve achieve on the field, they will never draw the kind of raucous cheers that the SpongeBob song gets during a “School Kids Day” promotion
Kids absolutely love that song
LOVE it!
It’s like the anthem for childhood

How awesome is it that, a handful of times a year, a bunch of kids from across the region get to skip school and take in a Curve game at Blair County Ballpark?

What a great day that must be for the youngsters

The Curve held two “School Kids Day” promotions this past week, drawing about 3,500 students each day
Hopefully those kids know how lucky they are to be able to blow off math and science for a chance to watch baseball

When I was in elementary school, our big end-of-the-year field trip was walking about a mile down to the high school for an ice cream sandwich
And I thought THAT was awesome

“It’s way cool” Bethany Carroll, a seventh-grader from North Star Middle School in Kantner, said of the field trip

The Curve do a fantastic job entertaining the kids on the school-day specials
Wednesday’s game started 75 minutes late because of a threat of rain, but there was plenty of entertainment for the kids
It started with a Q&A session where the children asked Curve outfielder Brett Roneberg some questions
You know kids say the darndest things, and one of them caught Roneberg off guard by asking how many times he’s struck out in his career
“Thanks for bringing that up” Roneberg said with a laugh before answering, “about 1,000”

Nothing, however, seems to entertains kids more than loud music
Especially the SpongeBob song, which had all the kids standing and dancing

“It’s just that we love him so much” Savahannah Swiger, a fourth-grader, said of SpongeBob
Swiger attends Augusta Elementary School in Augusta, W.Va., and the entire fourth-grade class made the two-hour drive to Altoona for the game
“That’s a lot of kids” Swiger said

She and a friend, Samantha Orndorff, joined in with hundreds of other kids to do the Macarena dance
It’s amazing that kids know the steps to a short-lived fad dance that gained popularity in 1995, before many of them were born

“I learned it when I was little; my mom taught me” said Katie Buxton, a seventh-grader from North Star Middle School

The kids also had a blast dancing to the “Cha Cha Slide” by DJ Casper, as well as the ballpark favorite “YMCA” by The Village People

All the kids I talked to said their favorite part about the day would be watching the baseball game
Come on, now, I’m not buying that
Their favorite part was merely being out of school, and various glances around the ballpark throughout the day revealed very few kids actually watching the game

“They love it, they really love it” said Claudia Hopkins, a fifth-grade teacher at Moshannon Valley Elementary School
“They were very excited about coming”

One Mo Valley fifth-grader, Jacob Ludwig, managed to snare not one, but two T-shirts thrown into the stands by Curve staffers
“What are the odds of that with all these kids here?” Hopkins said

It’s easy to get caught up in how Curve players are doing, the team’s record and where they are in the standings
But that’s not what minor league baseball is about
Minor league baseball is about what we saw on Wednesday and Thursday at BCB
It’s about fun, and nobody knows how to have more fun than kids