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

[olie]

I think that one of the main problems with America is the dearth of opportunities one has to use this sentence: "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."

Certainly this is an area where the Japanese are kicking our collective ass, and we need to put some good ol' American ingenuity into closing that gap!

(So to speak...)

[Fuzznsmoo]

I went to a Giants game when I was ten or so. I've never been tempted to go back. I've never been to any professional event that wasn't better watched on TV, even one near and dear to your heart, tennis.

[Dan]

Several sports writers have taken stopwatches to baseball games, timing the actual 'action': starting the timer for each pitch, stopping it in between, but letting it run for each play. The total time averaged less than 15 minutes - less than 10 minutes in 1956!.

Nowadays that works out to about $3.00/ minute. Phone sex is cheaper, more satisfying, and cleaner. Plus, you don't have to involve 40,000 other people.

Cite: http://ask.yahoo.com/20060810.html

[A Geek Talks About Money]

I just went to the Pirates-Phillies game yesterday, maybe the third baseball game I have been to in my life. I believe the main outcome of me spending my ten bucks was a slight increase in my chance of skin cancer from sitting out in the sun all day.

On the plus side, I had a fun time trying to explain to the concession lady that a soda "without ice" should not have ice in it. This took much longer than you would expect.

[Michael]

The bats were given out in hopes that the little kids would cause enough head injuries that the public would forget about our "ace" pitcher Barry Zito and the $126 million he's being paid to drag down our team.

I was at the game, too, but unfortunately there weren't any Little Leaguers with reach of my skull during the game.

[DrHyde]

This is a great post !... being from a non-baseball-playing nation, part of the stuff made faint sense .. but the rest of it was hilarious !

[Biff]

Great post. (Shout out to Dilbert fan and AC! Wooo!)

[the_muteKi]

I wonder if there were any stalls available for use at the stadium? Usually when a bathroom is super-crowded there will be several people using the stalls so that they don't have to wait. Obviously there's plenty of privacy and if several other people are doing it, nobody would give it a second thought. If nobody else is doing it, clearly they are either quite drunk or got hit on the head one too many times with that bat, as there's no real reason to not use those extra stalls in the bathroom.
Then again, I was having a discussion on how so many people here have trouble coming up with efficient ways to collect papers and such. Everyone was queued up to turn in evaluation forms, and one guy just runs along the line, picks up everyone's pages, and turns them in. Everyone else ends up thinking, "Why didn't we do that sooner?"

[Tim]

On Saturday, we went to the Tampa Bay/Red Sox game. It was Cowbell Night, also known as Migraine Night. Full details here: http://without-warning.blogspot.com/2008/04/cowbell-night.html

[Eric M]

Good, you are back to being funny rather than political.

Thanks.

And Go cubs Go.

[Bloodboiler]

I salute your courage to make an indirect pedophilia joke at the time when worst incest case since Egyptian pharaos is in the news. I am also shocked to hear that such shoulder to shoulder peeing facilities are still allowed in always chaste US. Could it be that those who guard children from all thing naughty have never visited men's rooms that have high capacity urinals?

[mr tom]

Saw a wonderful picture of two nasty little kids recently.

The caption went something like this:

"Smoking

When cancer can sometimes be the cure and not the problem."

Link here: http://www.ratemyeverything.net/post/7543/Smoking.aspx

I think this also applies to the kids with the baseball bats.

And it would help the environment.

[DF]

I went to a major league game once, it was a few years ago, and I really did enjoy paying $20 for a hot dog and pop. It was a good game, but I don't think that I would do it again, once is enough. I remember thinking that I could get just as much enjoyment sitting at home with my friends watching the game. On the day I went, they had a promotion that if the home team hit 7 runs, everyone with a ticket could redeem it for a free slice of pizza, so in the end, it was worthwile.

[Pradeep]

The device already exists. It is called a Television.

[May]

I LOVE your sense of humor. This post cracked me up, which I really appreciate since I'm all under the weather today.

[ND]

Why is it spelled "pastime" as opposed to "passtime"? I mean, the word is obviously a conctraction of "pass time" as in "Rather than earning my pay, I decided to pass time at the office by reading the Dilbert Blog". Would it kill us to write that one extra "s"? Or, alternatively, if we *must* drop the second "s", shouldn't we have to substitute an apostrophe for the missing letter, such as in the word "shouldn't" ("should not")? Then it would be "America's Favorite Pas'time". I'm just sayin'.

[John]

I remember going to bat night as an eight year old. The stadium had metal bleachers in the outfield. Put 10,000 bats into metal seats, and you get quite a loud noise. Combine the noise, free full size wooden bats, and adults that had one too many, and it was quite an entertaining night. Everyone went home with at least a headache.

[Kate A.]

Don't be givin' our elected officials any ideas. (I can just see it: Bat Day at poling places...)

[Joe McConnell]

The fast website should receive an award. It's the best website I've seen in quite a while.

[mason]

Scott,

Your punchline today was vaguely familiar: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/us-open-update.html

quote: Anyway, I wish someone would just invent some sort of device that would display sporting events while you sat on your own couch. I think it would catch on.

ciao!

[LA Clay]

I LOVE Baseball! Well as long as I am AT the game. Baseball on TV is boring. You don't get all of the in stand excitement, especially at Yankee games. They never seem to show fights in the stands on TV, unless you awatch a soccer (football) match.

[Nate]

Couldn't be worse than the $.25 beer day they had in Cleveland some years back. I'm pretty sure that game set the record on number of drunken fans running out on the field and if memory serves correctly, they had to call the game and the Indians had to forfeit.

[Leslie]

This is where spanking comes in handy.

[Godilla]

I think it's important to understand that I am unable to watch spectator's sports… I'll play ball a bit, though. :)

[Jim]

Haven't been in a while but I enjoyed the irony of going through the post 9/11 security, emptying handbags and packs, removing nail files and pocket knives to ensure the safety of the event only to be give a baseball bat....