beetiger

If you were to ask anyone who knows me at all to put together a list of phrases to describe me, “sports fan” would certainly not appear on it. I have no favorite team or player in any sport. I don't watch games on TV. I don't play any sports at all, choosing to get what little exercise I do by walking or dancing. Sports, frankly, bore me, and watching sports really bores me. But I do love public performances, and I am definitely looking for any reasonable excuse to get out of my office, so when one of my vendors offered me tickets to the Yankee game yesterday, I gladly accepted.

The seats were very good, just a few rows back at the third base line, where you could actually see the players' faces, and where you got to order your food from perky blonde women and have it brought to you. The weather was perfect, warm and sunny and in the eighties. I seem to have gotten a bit too much sun, as I'm rather pink now, but the experience seems to have done wonders for my mood. I am rather heliotropic, really.

I'd forgotten how wonderfully, creepily, ritualistic an activity going to a ballgame is. Forty thousand people, cheering “Hip Hip Jorge!” for a good play by the relevant player, as the words flash on a large screen in the middle of the stadium. The same screen telling people to “get loud”, or to clap, though the picture of the clapping hands never matched the rhythm of the accompanying music at all, always moving at just a bit more than half-speed. I found the moment of silence for the heroes of 9-11 after the seventh inning striking, if only because I'd not noticed how very much background noise there was in the stadium, before that. And in the ballpark, it seems, disco never dies.

The concession service at Yankee Stadium is called something like “Volume Services Corporation”, which made me laugh for its honesty. (“Our mission: to serve a helluva lot of food, every day.”) I'd already started the sugar fiesta early in the morning, by buying a meringue the size of a small loaf of bread at one of the overpriced little groceries at Grand Central Market, to eat while I waited for Marianne, who actually is a Yankees fan, to pick me up. However, I still indulged myself in frozen lemonade, and a box of Cracker Jack the size of a small Polynesian island, seven servings worth. I had a foot-long hot dog, too, though I'm rarely eating random meat these days. They're serving Krispy Kreme donuts there now too, with blue and white sprinkles, but since donuts have nothing to do with ballgames I was able to resist without any trouble.
I'm all about the context, you know.

A random comment, heard from the young man next to me, perhaps seven years old, after a judgement call against the Yankees: “I hate this empire.” (His father told him the word was “umpire”, but I liked it the first way.)

The Yankees finally lost, after eleven innings. It was probably good that a lot of people had already given up and left before then, as neither MariAnne nor I remembered where in the parking lot we'd left her car , and the relative sparseness of the cars left made it easier to scan for her not-too-distinctive beige Camry.

I don't think I'd enjoy this more than once a year or so, and I still don't really give a hoot about sports, but I had a surprisingly, amazingly, good time.