Beginnings

My friend Kate works for a dude who has season tickets to the New York Yankees, and he let her have them for the Sunday game against the California Angels. (I am writing this a month and a half later, and by now have learned that they are called the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, but back then, as far as I was concerned, they were California.)

I don't know hardly anything about baseball, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that the Yankees are a loathsome lot, and all decent people must yearn for their defeat. That said, it would be poor form, unfun, and pretty poseurish to show up and root for the visiting team knowing jack-shit about either team or the game as a whole. So it's not like I was wearing a jersey or doing this,
,
but I was rooting for the proverbial home team, nullus.

So it was me and Kate and our friends Peter and Chris, and it was so awesome. We were like five or six rows back behind the visiting dugout, so close it was literally frightening, like you expect Security to come by and be like "you can't be on the field!" and throw you out.

Peter and I had biked up and were starving, so we immediately ordered like $200 worth of hot dogs and beer. And the game was actually really fun and exciting...the wretched Yankees lost their early lead when they relieved their starting pitcher, then almost came back in the ninth, but ended up losing 4-3.

And then we biked home and went to a party and told everyone how awesome baseball was.

Introduction

I never really cared about baseball.

I didn't play Little League, and I spent my time on the middle school team in the dugout, eating sunflower seeds, or else way out in whichever side of the outfield is where they generally put players who are liabilities (common sense suggests this is right field, but the idiom identifies wacky ideas as coming "way out of left field," so I'm not sure...it wasn't center, I can say that for sure).

Going to games as a kid, I enjoyed consuming hot dogs and reveling in the broken-down aesthetic of single-A ballparks, but never payed much attention to the "action" or cared about outcomes. I think the Mariners almost won the pennant one time when I was in high school, and there were TVs set up so people could watch games between classes. I enjoyed the general feeling of excitement, but didn't watch any of the actual baseball.

So this summer I'm turning that around. Who knows how long it will last.