Americas Pastime

Americas Pastime

One thing that I have always collected are the tickets to every baseball game I have ever been to. Most of them being Mets games, the few Orioles Games stand out like a sore thumb in my ticket stub box. But its not only the tickets themselves that make them stand out, it’s the memories I have tied to each of the tickets.
When I look at one ticket, it says New York Yankees, Monday April 6th, 2009 4:05 p.m. 6 game flex pack. As soon as I saw the words Yankees, I can hear my roommates screaming in my ear. All being obnoxious Yankee fans, the first thing I can remember are the three near miss fights we almost had with the other ignorant fans. I can smell the old sticky beer making my shoes stick to the floor when I walk to my upper deck seats. I can smell the peanuts I bought for two dollars before I enter the stadium. I can tell by the wrinkles on my ticket that we didn’t go back to campus after, and we had a long night in downtown Baltimore.
The other ticket that sticks out is the one that’s larger than life. My roommate Scott’s grandfather gave us his tickets to see the orioles. This ticket reads section 24, row NN seat 7 and the price 48$. We were about 10 rows behind the O’s dugout. I can remember the bird running up and down the aisles stopping at all of the little children staring up at him with awe. I can smell the pulled pork sandwich that Brian bought me and taste it as I drink a warm bud light to wash it down. A combination foreign to me Shea stadium adapted food vendor pallet, all that’s missing is the funnel cake.
No stadium will ever be like Shea, I mean my friends have gotten beer there since they were fourteen years old. The beautiful orange, blue, green and red seats will always remain how I first saw them in my mind; even through they were always empty. My father had tickets on the second level on the third base side. He had two tickets to every game and I was allowed to go to around twenty games a year with my dad and about ten more on five-dollar ticket day with my friends. Keith Hernandez always sat in the private booth right above us and would wave every game in the 3rd inning when the camera had a close-up on his booth and its image being displayed on the megatron.