So what if the stock market is colder than Ted Williams’ body. Who cares if baseball’s All-Star Game ended with the same score as the 1980 Kansas-Oregon football game? Worry not that major league baseball players are waiting on the curb for the “Don’t Walk” sign to change.

Like summer itself, minor-league baseball comes on forever.

It’s true even in places like Fishkill, N.Y., where you can’t buy dead fish at the concession stands, but you can watch the short-season Class A farm team of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays try to perform at a higher level than the parent club, which isn’t all that difficult considering the D-Rays’ current dogged pursuit of contraction.

On this evening, the Hudson Valley Renegades were tangling with the Jamestown Jammers, chattels of the Florida Marlins, another fish worth dispatching, if not in Fishkill.

Incidentally, if you’re into local trivia, Jamestown, N.Y., is where Darryl Monroe, a former Lawrence High and Kansas University standout, began his abbreviated pro baseball career about a decade ago when the Jammers were affiliated with the Detroit Tigers.

One thing you have to remember if you’re planning to attend a minor league baseball game in New York or New Jersey: Be sure you have explicit directions to the stadium because the ballyard may not be where you think it is. For instance, Dutchess Stadium, home of the Renegades, has a listed address in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., even though the park is at least 10 miles south of that Hudson Valley town.

If you’re coming from the south, you have three choices. You can take either U.S. Highway 9, U.S 9W or U.S. 9D. Do not take U.S. 9G because you might wind up in the Catskills or in Massachusetts. For all I know, there is a U.S. 9 followed by every letter of the alphabet except K because of potential metric confusion.

If you phone the stadium, they will tell you it is located just past the 7-Eleven store on U.S. 9D. Why would they mention the 7-Eleven store? Probably for the same reason most of the Renegades’ games start at 7:11 p.m. Corporate sponsorship is the lifeblood that and concessions of minor league baseball.

Two things you have to like about minor league baseball. One, admission is cheap $4.75 per adult in this case and, two, you can take a couple of children under the age of 3 and know they’ll have room to roam. Dutchess Stadium, in fact, was crawling with toddlers, most of them in the spacious play area down the left-field line.

If you’re wondering why anyone would take two children under the age of 3 to a professional baseball game, you must understand that grandfatherly instincts overrule common sense, that grandfathers would rather have a monthly colonoscopy than deny the grandkids their baseball birthright.

Not only that, how can you beat holding a grandchild in your arms as he/she meets the team mascot face-to-face? At Dutchess Stadium, this is no problem because the Renegades have three mascots. That’s right. Three. All are raccoon caricatures. Their names are Rascal, Rookie and Rene. That day’s gate giveaway was an authentic Renegades autograph book. We missed Rascal and Rene, but Rookie put his John Henry in our book.

Guess who sang the National Anthem before the game? No, it wasn’t Rookie. It was the Renegades’ beat writer from the nearby Poughkeepsie Journal. This well-piped penman had auditioned in tryouts a month earlier and won. He wasn’t bad, but I would advise him to keep his night job.

In the end, our beloved Renegades were hammered by the Jammers, who jumped to a 10-2 lead, then cruised to a 10-7 victory. We were long gone by the end, however, because of the bed-time factor.

Maybe Katie and Blake will be able to stay an inning or two later at next summer’s game. I don’t know where it will be, but it will be somewhere because we must be there.