Wave Those Homer Hankies!

While we live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, my husband and I have quite the eclectic set of season tickets. My husband has season tickets for the St Louis Rams and a partial plan for the Milwaukee Brewers, while I have season tickets for the NU Wildcats.

Granted, mine are really the only ones that make sense given our address. My husband has had the Rams tickets since 2000 though (and yes, he went to the Super Bowl when they lost in 2002), and we still go to games on occasion when we visit his family in St Louis. He generally sells the rest of the tickets, and ditto with the majority of the Brewers games. He always buys the Twins/Brewers interleague games with the thought that I’ll want to go to them. Unfortunately, that’s somewhat hard to do with a 2 and 4 year old.

However, we did go to last night’s game, and I forgot how fun they are. If it weren’t Father’s Day weekend, we probably would have gone to at least one other one. Oh, and speaking of Father’s Day – Manic Mommy is giving away a set of really cool books to any dads to be or those who know a dad to be who’d enjoy them. Check it out!

And now back to our game.

Last year, my husband got a bit distracted on the way to the game. We left later than we thought we should and got stuck in a huge traffic jam because he wouldn’t listen to me when I suggested we exit and take a back way. By the time we got to Miller Park, there was no parking left in the stadium lots and we had to find quasi-legal parking VERY far away. For someone who never gets to a game late or leaves before the very end, this was quite frustrating.

This year, no such issues. We exited where I’d suggested last year and would our way to Miller Park while there was still plenty of parking. As we were walking into the stadium at about 6:40, he suggested stopping in the Metavante Club for dinner.

To be honest, I don’t know much about the Metavante Club other than apparently we have a few passes for having the season tickets. It has a buffet, but there were no openings for the buffet until 7:30 (a problem for those of us who go to a game to actually, I don’t know, watch the game!) and a sit down restaurant of some sort. Whee, only “special” people are a obscene amount of money to eat a mediocre meal at the ballpark. I vetoed that one given the time. Good call, too, as we sat down with our dogs just before the national anthem.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the game. The Twins kicked some major rear end last night. Seriously – they bunted twice in a row and were safe on both. Tell me the last time you saw that happen – and I don’t mean in a little league game! The final score was 10-2, but the game wasn’t even that close.

Brewers fans in the past have always been pretty good baseball people, but they were quite abusive towards many Twins fans (granted, by the end of the game, some of the Twins fans deserved it). Worse, apparently they’re starting to turn into Cubs fans, as they started leaving the game during the fifth inning. By the end of the 7th, the stadium was more than half empty. Win or lose, you’ve gotta stick around for the whole game!

During the game, I also explained my internal scoring system to my husband who thought it was quite apt. Rather than the winning team be the one that scores the most runs, the winning team is the one that earns the most points. Runs count for two points, hits earn one, and errors are negative three points. Needless to say, for awhile it was 17 to -4, and my husband felt this much more accurately reflected the feel of the game than the traditional score. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll talk MLB into adopting it though (and yes, I adjust the scoring based on the level of baseball – high school only loses one point for errors since the error is that much more likely to translate into a run and thus would otherwise be penalized too heavily).

I’ve never claimed to be great at understanding certain things either. When crowds chant, it generally takes awhile to understand what they’re saying. We had a guy in our section chanting “What’s number 16?” and the crowd would reply “Beelzelbub” which made no sense to me. Unfortunately, having kids means that I don’t follow the Twins as closely anymore, so I can only assume that the Twins’ right fielder had some sort of odd devil tie.

It wasn’t until much later in the game that I discovered the crowd was actually replying, “He’s a bum!” Huh. That makes muuuuuch more sense, doesn’t it? Needless to say, my husband got a pretty big kick out of that.

Our plan had been to wait out the crowds after the game was over in the Fridays at the park. I hate rushing to the car and then sitting in the parking lot for an hour waiting to get out. I’d much rather have a treat in the park and wait there.

Funny, it’s only been since January 1, but already it seems so weird to walk in somewhere and see and smell people smoking. I totally forgot not everywhere is smoke-free. Bummer, really. But I’ll say that the Brownie Obsession my husband and I split almost made the smoke worthwhile. Pretty good stuff, especially since the brownie was only mostly cooked vs totally done. Yum! Of course, given that the majority of the crowd had left long before the game was over, I suppose we didn’t really have to stop at the Fridays, but once my husband gets an idea in his head….

It really is a shame that this is Fathers Day weekend though, as it would have been fun to head up to another game. I’d forgotten how fun they are. And really, my team kicking major rear had nothing to do with that assessment. Ok, maybe just a little.