When the 2017 solar eclipse reached totality Monday morning, the sold-out crowd gathered at the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes stadium held its breath, then burst into loud cheers.
These weren't just 5,000 regular baseball fans. People from 34 different states and eight countries, including Great Britain, Japan and Colombia, decided that a minor-league baseball game was the place to experience one of the rarest of astronomical phenomena.
The game, played against the Hillsboro Hops, got started at about 9:45 a.m., just as the eclipse was approaching its peak. After a long top of the first inning (in which the Hops scored four runs), umpires suspended play due to a lack of light.
As the eclipse hit totality a little after 10:15, the temperature in the stadium dipped, and there were gasps: "Oh my God!"; "Incredible"; "Look at that!"
"I honestly got chills," said Amy Goebel of Portland, who was celebrating her birthday at the game with her husband and two sons. "Right before totality, when it was almost twilight, that was my favorite part because of the colors."
Seeing an eclipse on her birthday was different, and left her feeling a part of something bigger: "It's cool to have such a unifying event and to be in a crowd and feel everyone come together."
Sue Coffin, a Volcanoes season ticket holder from Sublimity, said the eclipse was spiritually moving.
"I'm a Christian, and this felt like a testament to God's power and creation," she said.
To experience the special eclipse game, Coffin was at the stadium when the parking lot opened at 5 a.m. She said there was a long line of cars waiting to get in. Volcanoes games sometimes draw small crowds, and she was thrilled to see the stands packed.
"There have been some fun events at the stadium, but this is the most-unusual," she said.
While Coffin was getting ready to enjoy the game from her regular first-base seats, the people she supervises had to go to work. Coffin is a manager for Salem's Cherriots bus system, where normal service was scheduled on Monday.
"My poor staff had to show up at 6 a.m.," Coffin said.
Monday's Volcanoes game made a little history, too: It was the first professional baseball game delayed by solar eclipse, and the ball that will be used for the ceremonial first pitch will be sent to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Volcanoes Stadium sits just west of Interstate 5, offering a perfect vantage point for in-bound Salem traffic, which varied throughout the morning from free-flowing to a slow crawl.
Lisa Walker, co-owner of the Volcanoes, said that tickets to the game were available up until the day before, but that they decided to cut off sales to keep the stadium from becoming too crowded.
Walker said that she was relieved that the massive traffic jams that transportation officials had worried about hadn't materialized: "I'm excited it's not a parking lot."
The game time is unprecedented, Walker said, because the Volcanoes have never had a morning game before.
"People are happy, which is nice considering the hour," she said. "I do see a few Grumpy Gusses, though."
The crowd was unprecedented as well: With a final count of 5,297, attendance was the largest for a non-July Fourth game in the team's history, team officials said.
After the game, which the Hops won 9-5, it was a different traffic story. Northbound traffic went from almost nothing to slammed in just a few minutes. When the game announcer told the crowd that the drive to Portland could take 2-1/2 hours or more, the crowd booed.
The prospect of gnarly traffic could not dim the spirits of Emily Garrison, who came to Oregon from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to see the eclipse. "I've never seen anything like that," she said.
-- Grant Butler