Swing and a Miss

We went to Fenway Park last night to see the Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles. There wasn't too much traffic on the way up, and after going the wrong way off the exit, we managed to negotiate out of Copley Square, to Prudential Square and find the parking garage and restaurant. We had a nice dinner, then walked one hundred miles to the stadium.

Okay, maybe it was only one mile. I got my bottle of water in - it was in my hoodie pocket, which was draped over my arm. I put my arms in the air, signifying to the security guard that he could check me, but he waved me on.

Our seats were great, right in the middle of the third base line. We could see into Sox's dugout from our perch, about the second level up, just under the balcony. The game had already started. Lester was pitching, and Huff was up at bat. The weather was perfect. What a night for a ball game.

In baseball, there is a lot of down time. Time for an amateur anthropologist to start making observations. Here are some:

This seems to be a great venue for family/friend time. Making some intuitive assumptions, directly in front of me was a man and his teenage son. They were having a good time, but I felt sort of bad for the son when his father left to answer two cell phone calls, and get beer a couple times. So the boy was sitting 'alone', next to the group of corporate big shots that were getting pretty fiesty to the left of us. These were big guys, and close quarters. Very intimate. The poor boy's shoulders were scrunched in his attempt not to be cozy with his large neighbors. To the right of them was a couple, a yuppie couple. She kept turning her well coiffed head to give the fiesty corporate guys a distinct look of disgust. It was pretty funny.

To the right of Paul was a grandmother and college age granddaughter. I was so impressed and envious of them. How cool to be sitting at a ball game on such a nice evening with your grandmother. Maybe I will be able to do that with my granddaughter one day. They were having a good time.

In front of the man and his son was a young father with his small child on his lap, and in front of him was apparently his wife, also with a young child on her lap. Starting a family tradition? To their right was a father and his ten or twelve year old daughter. She was having a blast, singing all the words to the songs and saying all the right things. This looked like an activity they frequently shared. She was wearing an Ellsbury shirt. Nice. And in front of them was a couple of young guys. The two young girls in front of them were turning around and flirting - you know, doing the eyes thing, and smiling a lot. Then they'd turn around and watch the game and jump and wiggle, knowing the guys were watching. Then they would flirt with each other in front of the guys. As the night wore on and several beers later, this got pretty sleazy. But they were having fun.

The crowd was made up of basically one demographic - yuppies. White yuppies. Some old ones, a lot of middle aged ones, and yuppy families with kids in training, and college yuppies, going into their family's yuppy businesses. This was an incredible textbook example of republican america. One could reasonably argue that we were in Boston, after all. But I would say to them, doesn't Boston have African American's who would like to go to a Red Sox game? Isn't Massachusettes a democratic majority? And it was the same when I went to New Orleans to see the Pats play the Saints, and Minnesota to see a couple games there. Paul says its because the tickets are so expensive. From which statement I can only surmise that he is really saying that the majority of African Americans don't make enough money to go to a ball game on a beautiful June evening. Is this true? If so, that is shameful. Or is it that they don't like to? All of them? Truly, I think I saw maybe five African Americans, out of the thousands that I saw there at the game, and two were working. There were probably more IN the game than watching from the stands.

So my two most basic observations were that the female half of our human family, of all ages, were well represented. The white middle class ones, anyway. And African Americans of any gender or age were not represented by any amount worth counting.

So the game was terrific, the Sox won, with Lowell hitting a grand slam, the Orioles couldn't get within three runs of the Sox. It wasn't quite dark when the game ended. We took one wrong turn, but with little difficulty quickly got on the right track to the highway. Smooth sailing all the way home and I was tucked into my bed by 11:30.

Play Ball

Peace