The lights above were so bright, they'd blind me if I looked straight at them. Thousands of stadium seats sloped gently upward from the field. A roar went up from the crowd, and my image blinked on the scoreboard above the bleachers.
Then I turned around, and there were the Christmas trees and twinkling lights. The illusion dissipated.
For one winter afternoon in Cleveland, I indulged in a fantasy shared by many a fan of America's pastime: romping around a Major League Baseball diamond. Snow Days at Progressive (nee Jacobs) Field, home of the Indians, is now in its second year. From right after Thanksgiving to mid-January, the stadium dedicates itself to winter sports, with ice skating and tubing facilities installed in a place that typically sees a different sort of sliding.
My husband and I have been making annual summer pilgrimages to Cleveland for several years now to visit his family, and the trip always includes a baseball game. Thanks to his grandmother, we're treated to premium seats just a few rows back from the first-base line.
I'd always figured that it would be nearly impossible to get any closer to the actual field, but for less than the cost of one of those game-day tickets, an all-access Snow Days pass puts you smack in the middle of the turf, with unlimited tubing, skating and holiday cheer.
After oohing and aahing at the spectacle — and downright brilliance — of it all, I girded myself for a trip down the tubing hill. Waiting in line, you get a behind-the-scenes view of what is not, of course, the kind of hill you'd find at a ski resort but rather an incline constructed of what I assured myself was a very sturdy structure of metal rods.
The Batterhorn (get it?) consists of about a half-dozen lanes that run 200 feet down to the level of the field. I was a little nervous, because it was my first time tubing despite my numerous visits to ski resorts. This seemed as good a time as any to give it a go, in a fairly contained environment with a high employee-to-visitor ratio.
Before I had too long to contemplate the situation, the keepers of the hill released me and my fellow tubers, propelling us down toward another set of red-jacketed employees. I unintentionally did a 180 and rapidly decelerated to a stop at the bottom.
"It was way faster than I thought it was going to be," said University of Mount Union student Andrew Brown, whom I met on the Frozen Mile skating loop after happily abandoning the tubing hill. "It was scary, but it was fun," added his companion, Gina Serluco. I decided to follow their lead and stick to skating for a while.
The Frozen Mile is a bit of misnomer. To get a mile of skating in, you have to take five laps around the ring. (A separate full ice rink was added this year, which hosted a youth hockey game — the source of the cheering crowd — the day I was there.)
I slowed down to admire the icy prowess of Slider, the Indians' magenta Muppet-like mascot, who was skating against the flow of traffic while doling out high-fives.
I lost track of how many loops I made around the Frozen Mile, part of which travels under the tubing hill, providing a soundtrack roughly akin to passing under a highway overpass. Each time I completed the circle, I found something new to contemplate. Several dozen Christmas trees lined the ice, some decorated with Indians paraphernalia. There were wooden cutouts of frolicking children and snowmen. I enjoyed the novelty of being in the stadium, peeking into the bullpen as I glided past or watching myself on the scoreboard's big screen, a distraction that nearly caused me to topple over.
My feet and face sufficiently numbed by the 25-degree air, I returned the skates and settled in with a cup of free hot chocolate. The rising moon peeked through the gap between the upper and lower decks.
"This is really unique," Cleveland resident Rachelle Keng said. "You usually can't go tubing in a city." A recent transplant from Michigan, Keng was showing around Doris Leung and her friend Elaine Lin, both of Toronto. They were all used to the cold. I was not, I realized, glancing at my meshy running shoes. It was time to go.
The next morning my husband's grandmother and I visited the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Its glass-enclosed Madagascar desert habitat did a pretty good job of erasing the memory of the previous night's chill. It did such a good job, in fact, that I decided to continue my winter sports adventure by trying out the skating rink next door.
There was a twist, though. The Rink at Wade Oval, located in the city's culturally rich University Circle neighborhood, isn't made of ice. The surface is a synthetic material that I can best compare to a plastic milk crate.
University Circle "ambassador" Pleurat Dreshaj handed me a pair of ice skates, informing me that the fake stuff is about 70 percent similar to ice.
I found his estimate rather generous. It was difficult to glide, and the most effective way to move across the surface was to take quick baby steps while leaning dangerously forward. I had the rink to myself for a little while, but soon enough, several families joined me.
Currier & Ives it wasn't. Still, with snowflake ornaments hanging from the trees, holiday tunes playing and a somewhat functioning propane heater in the seating area, it was close enough to a Christmas greeting card scene.
Now if only Slider were in the picture.
Skating at Snow Days at Progressive Field in Cleveland consists of a loop around center field and a separate rink that hosts hockey games. (Washington Post photo by Becky Krystal.) 
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