America’s Favorite Pastime

Yesterday I went to a Giants baseball game. It was Little League Day, so there were about ten thousand young boys running wild in the stands. It was also free bat day, courtesy Bank of America.

I will pause while you digest this concept.

Do you know what happens when you hand an 8-year old boy a new bat, sit him behind the exposed heads of several adults, and ask him to sit patiently for four hours while nothing much happens on the big field in front of him? Do you think he fiddles with that bat?

Apparently Bank of America figured there was some theoretical amount of head injuries that would make the public forget that they lent a trillion of your dollars to hobos.

My memory of the afternoon goes something like this: “TREVOR, PUT DOWN THAT BAT! YOU ALREADY HIT THAT LADY ONCE! I SAID, PUT IT DOWN! I MEAN IT! I WILL NOT TELL YOU FOUR HUNDRED MORE TIMES!” This was followed by the sound of wood making solid contact with skull, cursing, repeat.

My wife took a solid blow to the shoulder. Later, one of the tykes kicked some guy’s beer out of the back seat holder, so we sat in a puddle of beer, while the sun cooked us. I was one pinch of salt from being a recipe.

I tried to use the restroom at the stadium. This is no place for the shy. Unlike most public men’s rooms, where there might be a small privacy shield between urinals, this place was designed to handle high volume, shoulder-to-shoulder peeing. I saw an opening where I could poke my penis between a bearded guy and a guy with a fanny pack, just over the left ear of a Little Leaguer, but before I could make my move, someone filled the slot. I decided I could wait another three or four hours.

Conditions were difficult, but at least the game was exciting well into the first half of the first inning when the Reds scored six runs and put it out of reach. Technically, there was still hope, since many of the Giants have batting averages that round to one hundred, and some are able to catch a fly ball nearly half the time. But yesterday was not their day. There were many boos from the stands. I felt bad for the players until I realized they couldn’t hear the boos over the screams of the bat victims.

I wish someone would invent a device that allowed you to watch sporting events from your home. I think that would be popular.

Comments

[Marklar]

Will Dilbert wake up from a dream in the next strip or are the aliens going to catch a cold?

[Kevin Kunreuther]

I hate going to stadium games nowadays because you're not allowed to bring your own food and drinks. Up until '87, I enjoyed the trouble of bringing an ice chest or a picnic basket of hero sandwiches to Texas Stadium to watch the Dallas Cowboys suck on the field. I'm not a cheapskate by any definition, but frankly, I'd rather be eating and drinking food I know I'm gonna' enjoy and eat instead of scarfing down some overpriced mystery meat miasma served with warm lifeless beer cups priced by the likes of OPEC or ExxonMObil.

Unless you write a blog looking for comedic inspiration in anarchy or conflict, check your baseball stadium's website for any "special" days or premiums being handed out (Best one ever - Texas Rangers handed out free unbelievably sturdy umbrellas, then a freak thunderstorm broke out during the fifth inning, delaying the game forty five minutes. Not one umbrella folded up or got tangled up by the gale force winds.).

[wrench]

It's been calculated and timed that the ball is in play 6% of the time during a baseball game. Why someone would pay to watch a bunch of steroid pumped overpaid white guys stand around for 94% of 3+ hours is way beyond my comprehension. I can't stand it while sitting on my couch.

[merle]

hey Nate from Cleveland. i'm pretty sure that is was nickle ($.05 beer) and the Indians did have to forfeit the game like in the seventh inning.

[Scott Nelson]

When is Free Lawn Dart Day?!? I want to book my ticket now!

(And that suit of armor at the costume shop...)

[Dave]

Dear God man. The game was played in 2 hours and 34 minutes according to the box score -- that is lightspeed for baseball. Suck it up.

[Kurt Christie]

Why don't they give out the bats upon leaving the stadium rather than upon entering?

[Marionthel]

This isn't a comment about today's post. I would really love it if you would take up the ethical question: Since the living can now donate a kidney - why don't we all do that, and save many peoples' lives? (We each only need one kidney). I myself will not do it, and I feel guilty about it. Someone will die because I do not give. Would it really hurt me to undergo some discomfort to save a human life? How would *I* like it if someone wouldn't undergo the discomfort of giving a kidney, and I knew I would die as a result? And, if we *should* do that (ethically speaking), where does it end? Don't we have an obligation to save starving people? People who need medical care (like vaccinations?)

[Marionthel]

This isn't a comment about today's post. I would really love it if you would take up the ethical question: Since the living can now donate a kidney - why don't we all do that, and save many peoples' lives? (We each only need one kidney). I myself will not do it, and I feel guilty about it. Someone will die because I do not give. Would it really hurt me to undergo some discomfort to save a human life? How would *I* like it if someone wouldn't undergo the discomfort of giving a kidney, and I knew I would die as a result? And, if we *should* do that (ethically speaking), where does it end? Don't we have an obligation to save starving people? People who need medical care (like vaccinations?)

[tubaguy]

You neglected to mention the cacaphony of 10,000 kids pounding on the stadium. I LOVED bat night as a kid.

[Kitten]

To ND:

"Pass time" and "pastime" don't have exactly the same meaning. The first is a verb coupled with a noun, which you could use as an instruction or in your sentence "I decided to pass time at the office". The word "pastime", which is a noun, cannot be substituted in that sentence instead of "pass time", because then the clause would have no verb. You can't say "I decided to pastime". Well, you can, but it wouldn't make sense.

So although the phrase "pass time" has led to the use of "pastime" as a noun, one is not a contraction of the other. However, the human brain is an amazing place. We are all intelligent enough to cope with different spellings of similar sounding words or phrases.

Hope that's answered your question. :)

[burt]

you need to stick with posts like this, mr adams. you are not a philosopher

burt trub

[bridget in oregon]

Geesh... you think they'd hand out the bats to the kids as they LEFT the game. It's basic MOM-101. I mean, how hard is that to figure out after the first Bat Day gone wrong? Apparently very hard indeed.

[Diana W]

While I thoroughly enjoyed your incredibly bad choice of weekend entertainment, I'm shocked that you didn't write something about the lead story on the News of the Weird (http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html). It could put a whole new spin on the game Operation. You get a 3D model, tweezers and a flashlight...

[dipy911]

Bat night --- LOL :)

Etymology: LME passe tyme, transl. of Fr passe-temps

Blame the French. Not innocent contractions. Do schools not teach internet searching any more?

Yet more proof that Americans are all accepting of new words into the American English language.

PS. I find it isn't comfortable to watch sporting events from my "Coach". His shoulders are too bony and he's always yelling at someone. I prefer a love seat.

[KnightRider]

Scott,
You should patent that idea about the device that allows you to watch sporting events from home, I'm sure the idea would sell.
On another subject, I LOVE your new site. I work for a software company and I deal all day with people who are like, "I liked it the old way", or, "Why did you change that? Who needs efficiency and convenience!?" So, any whiners about your site are just afraid of change. Yeah, all the Flash on the site took me about 5 minutes to get used to, but once you figure out where things are, it's really cool.
Don't let the uber-techs get you down.

[Mark Thorson]

Hey, I thought today's blog
would be about the guy in
Austria who kept his daughter
in an underground bunker for
over 20 years, and had six
kids off her. (Seven, if you
count the one that died.)

The entrance to the bunker was
through a password-controlled
electronic lock for a steel
door in a concrete frame he
built himself. Wow! You'd
like one of those, huh? You
should include that in your
designs for your ideal house.

And -- get this -- he lived
upstairs with his wife and
three of his children/grand-
children. The wife says she
had no knowledge of what was
going on downstairs. Where
do you find a wife that dumb?

Three of the kids/grandkids
lived a more-or-less normal
life upstairs, while the other
three lived downstairs with
mom. His wife was given the
story that the daughter had
joined a religious cult, and
on three occasions had left a
child on their doorstep.

This follows closely on
another case of long-term
imprisonment in Austria, that
one being a girl who was
kidnapped at the age of 11 and
kept in an underground bunker
for more than 10 years before
she got her chance to escape.

[D. Mented]

RTFL...Not normally a sports fan, myself, nor that much into unprovoked violence, but still, I think I might have liked watching that one.I guess the reason they don't show the action in the stands on television is so you'll go to the game to see it.
Now, somebody is going to find out the name and address of the genius who decided to give out the bats as fans *enter* the stadium (rather than as they leave) and post it on the internet, so anybody who really liked the action can go give HIM a free bat...
D. Mented

[Skeptical Fanboy]

Scott,

You clearly made a number of mistakes. Every team publishes its list of promotional themes well in advance of game day. If your goal was to avoid being clobbered by 8-year-olds wielding clubs, you could just as easily have picked a day when such a confluence was unlikely to occur. Perhaps Gout Sufferers Day meets First-Ten-Thousand-Fans-Get-Oven-Mitts or something along those lines.

Second, you went to an afternoon game on a warm day. Given your self-described near-albinoness, that seems a poor choice.

If you really wanted to avoid the crush of humanity in the restrooms, you probably could have chosen a Tuesday night game, or better yet, gotten someone with whom you have even a remote business connection to put you and your family up in one of the many luxury suites at the stadium.

I buy cheap tickets in the upper deck to about a game a month during the season in my home market, and I enjoy those games immensely. But I also have connections that get me (and 11 of my friends and family) tickets to a suite in the stadium for a few games every year.

When I want to go to the game with my buddy, drink beers, eat hot dogs, be flatulent, and talk guy stuff, I go to the upper deck seats. When I want to enjoy the outing with my wife and kids (and our parents and siblings), we go to the suite. There's no comparison.

One final note: In baseball, the worst teams lose about 100 out of 162 games, which means they still win almost 40% of their games. The best teams win about 100 out of 162 games, which means they still lose nearly 40% of their games. The point I'm making is that even when the best team in the major leagues plays the worst team in the major leagues, the worst team will still win about 3 or 4 out of 10 of those games. This means that one should never get too wrapped up in the outcome of any one regular-season game. Just go to the game with the expectation that you're going to kill 3-4 hours and you just might see something truly memorable, such as a no-hitter, an inside-the-park home run, a bases-clearing triple, a left fielder on the mound, or a triple play.

The odds are against you seeing anything quite so memorable in any one game. But if you go to a couple of dozen games over the course of a few years, you're virtually guaranteed that something truly memorable will happen in at least a few of them.

By the way, never leave a blowout early. I did that once and heard on the radio as I was driving away that the home team's center fielder was pitching. I still kick myself to this day.

[Ben Adler]

And if they *did* invent a device for viewing games from home, do you think they'd mail us the bats?

[RPK]

Teams usually publicize these promotional events in advance. You could have figured that a bunch of kids with bats would not make for the most enjoyable day at the ballpark.

They play 81 home games per year, choose your games wisely.

[Ari]

re Slap's: "Baseball is a sport in which people sit in boredom for hours at a time in the hopes that they will see 6 seconds of exciting action."

I call this sport "Dating".

Hours of boredom and my team rarely gets to 2nd base.

[Simon]

It wouldn't work, and somebody's already doing it.

[T]

You ever hear of "Nickel Beer Night" or "Disco Demolition Night" or "Ball Day at Dodger Stadium"? (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2004-11-20-sports-incidents_x.htm and http://www.laalmanac.com/sports/sp09.htm) These are classic fan days. :) Makes you want to take a day off of work and head out to the ol' ballpark with a group of your buddies to soak in the sun and down a few beers.

[Al]

Dad: (setting the tone) Look, Johnny. It's a brand new toy. Now, there are two things we can use this brand new toy for. It can be a brand new bat for Johnny, or it can be a brand new paddle for Daddy if Johnny doesn't behave.

Johnny: (cowering in corner) Daddy, can you just hold the bat for me so I don't get in trouble?

Problem solved.