Baseball is Bad For My Self Esteem

I think I've mentioned before that I'm still trying to find an attorney who will take my case against Michael Chabon on contingency: Chabon took the season I played baseball and used it verbatim as the springboard for his novel 'Summerland.' Right up to the cool, supernatural stuff. Oh, and my Dad was a high school teacher who drove an unattractive series of used cars, most of which lacked air conditioning as well as sex appeal. He didn't cruise around in his own blimp, nor did he have any more genuine enthusiasm for baseball than his gangly, uncoordinated, unpopular first son.

I had a zero batting average, and my so-called peers never let me forget it. A collective groan resulted from me being 'at bat.' The coach would tell the kids to 'cut that out,' but how much credibility did he have? He was the same schmuck who told me the ball couldn't hurt me. With a zero batting average, the only way I got on base was with a walk. In third grade, the pitcher is the kid who can throw the ball from the mound to the plate; accuracy is not a consideration. You might get to first on four wild pitches, but you're about as likely to get on with one wild pitch. Your shin, your ass, your shoulder blade, these were as likely as the catcher's mitt to receive the pitch. The ball might not kill you, but if you think it can't hurt you, stand sixty or seventy feet from me while I hurl baseballs at you. Yeah, I'm 36, but my arm strength is comparable to a top third grade pitching arm, and it'll still fucking hurt you.

I digress. Shit, I led off with a digression. I took Em, who's about to start fourth grade blissfully ignorant of what it's like to stand in the batter's box while a third grade Mad Hungarian wannabe uses you for target practice, to a baseball game. This is more or less an annual event.

My employer is a generous one. Not perfect, but generous, and since Chiefs tickets are wildly expensive and practically impossible to get for 130 employees, baseball offers the company a chance to give us a perk better than average while being realistic. These aren't shitty seats, they're club-level most years, and have been plaza level one year. It's a season ticket package with four seats and a parking pass. You sign up for the dates you prefer, the person with the seniority gets the parking pass and it's minimum two tickets per employee.

But baseball isn't that popular, and more often than not, I not only get free parking via seniority, but I get four tickets. Sometimes for more than one game. People are too busy, or out of town, or whatever the day the tickets they signed up for, and they look at the chart and give their pair to whoever has the other two.

One year, Frau Lobster extracted a promise that I not accept any more free tickets because it was breaking us. Financially, even with free admission and parking, the fuel to navigate my truck to the stadium, and buy minimal concessions was too much. The 'free' tickets ended up costing us, on average, $25 a game.

Maybe that's why some of my coworkers beg off on theirs...

Anyway, I'd just read 'Moneyball' by my tied-for-favorite (tied with James Gleick) non-fiction writer Michael Lewis, who profiled Billy Bean. Using unorthodox approaches to evaluating talent to win his division with the second lowest salary in the league. That speaks to all my soft spots: heterodoxy, the underdog winning, proving that deep pockets don't necessarily mean you get the 'best,' a failed player who can write his own ticket as a manager, this is great stuff. In the end of the book, Bean is turning down big money to go coach the Boston Red Sox. Maybe, in retrospect, not the best career move ever, but it made me like him even more.

The A's were also my hometown team, or they were around the time I was born near here. They moved, along with the Dodgers and Giants, to California, gold-rush style. And there was a drug lord, err, pharmaceutical robber-baron, willing to do the philanthropy thing. From what I recall hearing, he put out feelers to figure whether Kansas City preferred a burn hospital for kids or a baseball team.

We got a baseball team. I don't know if that falls under the 'baseball is bad for my self esteme' heading, or just 'God, this town sucks sometimes.'

And while Kaufman was alive, he bought talent as necessary. he retired numbers on the wall at this stadium are no small beer. It's been 20 years since the Royals won a World Series, but I can't tell you how many times I've heard names of players on winning teams, including last year's Boston Red Sox, who came up through the Royals' farm team. These guys get louder cheers in KC as the visiting team player than our current crop, normally.

Now, more or less, when the other kids...I mean owners, find out the Royals have a decent player, they buy him off.

So aside from liking Michael Lewis' portrayal of Billy Bean, what was my 'rooting interest?' Not much. The Royals have (last I checked) the second worst record in baseball, as they did last year. This is worse, in my mind, than being absolute last. At least there's a distinction in being the shittiest. Second shittiest? So I can root against the hometeam in a vague way, hoping Tampa Bay (last I checked they had the absolute worst record) might pick up a few games and save the Royls from being completely undistinguished.

I know, with fans like me, who needs enemies.

Also, I don't believe millionaires employed by millionaires to play a game should be subsidized by taxpayers (who are mostly not millionaires, and never will be no matter what the lottery commercials say). While I find it implausible that a sport of waning popularity could support four or five teams in the New York metro area (Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Mets, am I missing a team or two?), I fail to see what the Bay Area gained by whoring their tax base to get both one of New York's 'extra' teams and Kansas City's only team. And the A's haven't gotten much more notice from Californians than, say, the Kansas City Royals. I don't think most Oakies even noticed the arrival of the team until Al Davis whored the Raiders down to L.A. Now that he's conned the Oakland taxpayers into rebuying their own team, I bet a rambling sampling on the streets of Oakland would turn up more vials of crack, prostitots and actual Hell's Angels members, than A's fans. Or even people who know Oakland has a Major League franchise.

But the bad actors who are responsible for most of this financial mayhem (on the baseball front) are helping FDR with the wheel-chair access ramps to various circles of Hell. Al Davis is regrettably still alive, but that's a different sport. So who to root for?

Since the Royals haven't seemed to embrace that 'money isn't the answer' philosophy that has (sometimes) served Oakland well, I rooted for the A's. It felt less perverse than just rooting for the Royals to have the worst record in the game.

The Royals are presently owned not by a philanthropist who thinks a burn hospital is equivalent to a baseball team. Instead, the team is owned by a guy who (as far as I know) has gotten rich off $10 Bangladeshi jeans sold by Wal-Mart. In my book, that means he's an asshole who's worse than the Kaufmans, who only sold drugs.

I don't know who owns the Oakland A's, and don't tell me because then I'll regret attending the game entirely.

Thanks to baseball's new high standards, the players are without a constant supply of amphetamines and anambolic steroids. Consequently, it was five innings before anyone hit a ball. Still, it was a close game, with a pitcher from each side getting 'lit up' by the batters eventually. Em liked the idea that the pitcher was getting 'lit up,' having the ultimate bad day at the office when four or five guys would hit his pitches. We also speculated about whether a home run it into your own team's bullpen is maybe a little worse than having the ball wacked into General Admission or the fountains.

If you're pitching, and the home run lands in your team's bullpen, you gotta figure the other pitchers notice. They're on the same team, but are really your rivals in every way. They have a harder time focusing on the game, now that the Family Size jar of greenies isn't being passed around, that's gotta snap you out of your daydreaming, or your nostalgic conversation with a fellow reliever about how great Dianabol had been.

Em and I both agreed the fireworks they did after were better than the game.

So how was this bad for my self esteem? Aside from watching several hit-less innings where I might as well have been the guy in the batter's box, I gave two tickets away. Again.

I mentioned having four tickets, right? This is because a coworker who had the other two was going to be out of town. Em unable to find anyone available and willing to submit to the game. I also failed to attract guests, despite my parking pass (a $9 'value' itself) and club-level tickets with a face price of $22 each.

So I did what I always do in this situation. The opposite of scalping. I approach some pair I see waiting to spend money on admission and give them my extras. These are adjacent seats, so I pay a little attention: no one who looks like they got out of jail this morning.

Four or five times, I've done this. Given away $44 worth of tickets to people waiting to buy seats, and I've never seen the people I give the tickets to on the inside of the park.

Do they hawk the good seats for cash and buy G.A.? Are stadium officials wating for me to turn my back so they can club these people into submission for not spending money at the gate?

No, it's me. I'm certain of it. It's not my long hair, the same thing happened when I shaved my head in the summer. And long hair, short or none, I'm with an adorable child. A child who's adorable enough to charm even people who think they don't like kids.

The seats are good. Very good. Less than 100 feet on one side is the press box, about the same distance the other way is the 'club,' where people spend big bucks on dinner while ignoring the game from behind glass. The 'luxury suites' are up behind where we sit, and from what I hear that's the most ridiculously expensive way to see the game of all. Why any actual fan would prefer those booths to a seat down where you can hurl insults at the guy in the on-deck circle is beyond me. But people waiting in line for tickets aren't buying a fucking luxury suite, and I'll bet they aren't buying the seats down there where you can smell the catcher's farts.

One time, I could see it, but every time I give these tickets away, I sit with Em next to a pair of empty seats. And this was a fairly full stadium. I don't know what the body count was, but the stadium was as full as I've seen it since the Orioles were in town with Cal Ripken Jr. on his last season.

Last game before school starts for a lot of people. Plus, it was dollar night for hot dogs, small sodas, peanuts; they had so many concessions discounted that I spent less than $20 despite having two beers (I almost never buy beer at a baseball game because of the combination of crappy product, stingy servings, and high prices). Instead of having to tel Em about making choices, I was able to provide her with more concessions than she could consume. It was also Friday, which means a kick-ass post-game fireworks display, one that clogs the air with smoke so bad you worry about people with asthma who might have strayed into the stadium.
And there were nostalgia fans, old-timers who remember the Kansas City A's, they came out in force. Neither of these teams has any playoff hopes (that I know of), but baseball fans (odd even by Lobster standards) love that shit. The inter-league games when St. Louis comes to town, they actually sell the park out with people wanting to see a supposed rematch of the 1985 World Series (though all the players and coaches from back then are dead or at least retired).

And the seats I gave away were empty. Again. I know there's better seats, but not much. I have photographic evidence. Is it my pits? Do I smell? Can people just sense that I'm the kind of creep who brings a book to the game in case I get bored?

The field from my seat
Speaking of which, they could dispense with the Minnesota Multi-phase Personality Inventory for ADD cases: if you can sit through a baseball game without additional entertainment, you have a suprlus of attention, give the players your amphetamines.

Anyway, when you give away tickets more expensive than you'd buy to someone waiting in line for tickets, then never see that person even though the seats you gave away are adjacent to your own... How many times does this have to happen before you start to wonder if the same people who groaned when you were up to bat are frightened by your very presense as a spectator? Yeah, I know I'm a troll. But I try to conjure up the kind of troll who could give me a free upgrade like that, a troll I wouldn't want to sit by for fear of cooties or conversation.

I can't seem to imagine this troll without including escapees from Wards Island (and you wouldn't expect too many of them to swim the Harlem River, and immediately head for a baseball game in Kansas City). True, that would be a crazy thing to do, especially since they could just walk over the pedestrian bridge. But the people in Ward's Island are a different kind of crazy. From what I've heard 'criminally insane.' And I can't see a criminally insane guy giving away free club-level tickets while escorting his nine-year-old daughter to the turnstiles.

The press box from my seat
Oh, the A's won 5 to 4. It came down to the last at-bat for the Royals, but as meaningless as the victory might have been, Oakland took it. Without having to expose Em to the 'extra innings' I'd explained were theoretically possible down to that last out. She seemed truly fascinated that grown men could play a game at the professional level without having any idea when it might end. And that, even though they get paid a king's ransom for playing, they wimp out if it rains.

Still, she's a bright girl, and I think she understands that a tie is the negation of competition. I think she was also glad (despite rooting for the home team) that the game didn't go into 'extra innings.' Nine is enough to wait through for a fireworks display.

Still, except my daughter, no one will sit with me...