I went to my first professional baseball game this week. I’m 49. A few more years and I might have lived my entire life without seeing a single inning. Oh well.
It’s not that I’ve been too poor to finance a hot dog ($12), a pretzel ($8), and a soda ($6) at the stadium until now; it’s just that I hate baseball. My entire family knows this but somehow convinced themselves I’d enjoy the game more if I spent three (THREE!) hours watching it in a cushionless folding chair that smelled like deep-fried garlic.
They were wrong.
Watching the game in person turned out to be just as boring as watching it from anywhere else on the planet. After three (THREE!) hours, the teams had accumulated a combined total of seven points. That works out to be about two notable events per hour, which means watching baseball is mathematically less interesting than the movie Titanic. Mindboggling, I know.
The best part of the game was when I found a mass grave of dead bugs below my seat. I assumed they’d scuttled in with the rest of us hoping to see Macklemore in concert again but then died from disappointment sometime around the bottom of the second inning. When I showed them to my daughter, however, she told me they were toasted grasshoppers and that the ballpark is famously known for serving them as snacks. To people. Who pay for them.
This didn’t seem right, so I took out my phone and looked it up. I then looked up “grasshopper recipes” which somehow led me to “locust swarms” which led to “apocalyptic plagues” and “biblical end of times” which at least gave me something to look forward to during the game.
So that was nice.
Eating My Way to the Top 