take me out to the ball game

I don’t really like baseball, but I do love AT&T Park, formerly known as SBC Park, formerly known as Pac Bell Park. It’s one of those new stadiums that never had a non-corporate name. Somehow the pre-corporate stadiums always manage to maintain their pre-sponsored name. “The Stick” will always be “the Stick”, no matter how many never-before heard of corporations buy the name.

So once or twice a year, I like to go to the park and sit up high and look at the bay and do nothing for three hours. Some people bring their laptops and “work from home”. I just like to sit there.

Last night I found myself at the ballpark at the Home Run Derby, part of All-Star Week. It was mostly through my own naiveté. I thought I was buying tickets for the All-Star Game for my girlfriend’s son.

He is the ultimate athlete. Through a friend, he met Jerry Rice, who said to him, “You look like a ball player.” His feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. So it just didn’t seem right that the All-Star game would be in San Francisco for the first time in 23 years and he wouldn’t be there.

So I went on Craigslist and bought two tickets to the game, or what I thought was the game. Turns out they were for the Home Run Derby the night before. No wonder I thought I was getting such a good deal. You can imagine everyone’s disappointment when I realized that he didn’t have tickets to the Big Game. So after I calculated how much money I have saved by reaching 53 years of age and never having had children, I decided rather than selling the Derby tickets, I would go myself and get him another set of tickets to the All Star game, where he is right now.

So I invited my friend and colleague Craig, and off we went. If I had only followed my intuition and brought my overcoat(summer in San Francisco-you know how it is), the evening would have been perfect. At one point, I said that baseball would really be boring now, after seeing only home runs for three hours. Like having only dessert for dinner or eating an artichoke heart without having to eat all the leaves first. Home runs are exciting.

It’s been a mighty expensive week.