339.0: Orwellian.

Dear Linc,

YOU OWE ME FORTY DOLLARS, sir!

I finally decided which ballgame I want to go to next and I was completely run over by the price tag from StubHub on a nosebleed seat at a friggen day game! I thought that I could score $10-15 or, hell, even $20 seats but DOUBLE THAT?! I’ve never paid double that for a day game!

I guess times are different. I remember going to a game against the Nats pre-Strasburg-and-Harper-and I suppose-Suzuki and paying so much less. I am in no position to attend a 40-dollar ballgame, but you know what? I haven’t gone to a game in almost a month and a half. It’s like starving.

Momentarily I considered the notion of a cheaper hobby. Perhaps I ought to start supporting the minor league. But the cost of commuting to San Jose would probably balance/cancel out a cheaper ticket. So, maybe I could start going to A’s games. They have those cheap weekday games — what are they called, $2 Wednesdays? But even though I like baseball, I’ve no passion for the A’s. And their ballpark is so dreary.

Over and over and over again, I keep giving to this stupid sport and this stupid team. Why do I keep doing this? You know that I don’t really think it’s stupid, right? Which is why the words are crossed out. But perhaps you think that I am stupid for having such a fixed income — that’s putting it mildly — and blowing forty bucks on a ballgame. Hah hah hah, I can just imagine you thinking. What a chump.

There is no reason, there is no logic. And there can only be two outcomes: I will die a pauper, happily whittling away my golden years with no savings and no property except for The Ballpark seat that I have rented for three hours (or however long it takes the team to win a game when I’m in my sixties); or something astonishingly fabulous will arise from all of this, which turns out to be setup for god-knows-what-good ends up following, and I will write a book about this insane singular devotion that will be marketed like a Gladwell or one of the many books that attempts to explain why Apple is the way it is. The bad news is that I have yet to come up with any strategy to turn my newborn — hey, it’s only been three years — baseball fandom into anything besides unsent letters to an imaginary boyfriend. I guess I can console myself over how worse things have happened: the writing career of Jonah Lehrer, for example.

Wow, it’s been three years…

Thanks to Facebook, I still keep in touch with folks from high school, and sometimes they are surprised at how much I love baseball. Back then, I was as unathletic and indifferent to sports as they come: overweight, nerdy and rebelling against my dad.

Poor Pop. I wonder if every teenage son goes through that, even you. It has taken adulthood for me to see in retrospect that Pop was just doing his best and that above all else he meant well. It has taken adulthood for me to see what an ass I was.

The connections I’ve made in adulthood who are unaware about this baseball fandom are always pleasantly surprised when they find out. And when they find out that it all started only in 2009, their eyes widen at the timing because unlike so many lifelong fans I only had to wait another year to experience my first World Series victory.

And now here I am, paying forty bucks for a nosebleed.

There was some article posted online not too long ago about stuff that poor people and/or middle class people — I don’t remember which, exactly, and damnit that I never think to bookmark these things — spend their money on. I guess it was written to counter arguments being made by certain extremities of society that insist we are the way we are because we deserve to be. Among the expenses were shelter, food and medicine — everything you’d expected us to spend money on.

So no, we aren’t blowing our minimum wages on alcohol and sex and other depravities that Orwell speculated the overlords would use to control the masses — yet he would probably also question this devotion I have to baseball, and would force me to consider redirecting the energy and expense toward something more revolutionary. He would have a point. I am a fool.

Joe

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