Let's play ball!

Let’s play ball!

The Greens. People just call them, “The Greens”. They are the coveted 15 rows of seats stretching from dugout to dugout, behind home plate, at St. Louis’ Busch Stadium. From any seat in The Greens, you have an incredible view of the batter, as he steps into the box and the pitcher as he sizes up the batter and shakes or nods his head in response to fleeting hand signals issued from between the legs of the catcher.

Each batter has his ritual. Like superstitious old women, they carefully repeat the same motions each time they approach the plate and prepare to receive the pitch. For some, it’s the way they step into the box: always the left foot first, carefully lined up on an imaginary trajectory from the plate, followed by the right foot, perhaps at a perfect two-foot distance from its mate. For others, it’s touching a talisman hung on a heavy chain about their neck, or swinging precisely three times as they enter the box, or spitting exactly two sunflower seed shells each time.

From The Greens, you can hear the umpire’s call. You can see the incredulous look on the batter’s face when he disagrees with the call. You see youthfulness, age, joy, anger, pain, and disappointment in players’ faces. You can even, from certain seats in The Greens, see into the dugout, where there is always a fascinating and sometimes childish passing of the time with drinking water, swapping stories, and telling jokes.

Actually, in The Greens there is always a fascinating and sometimes childish passing of the time too! Watching the Cardinals from The Greens is a social experience. People know each other and often shout greetings across several rows. I sometimes lose track of the game, as I strain to hear responses to enquiries about recent divorces, bowel surgery, deaths in the family, and other important details shared by friends in The Greens.

Listening in on these conversations distracts me, so I don’t always realize that I’m the roadblock in the ritualistic two-way stream of food and money that goes back-and-forth between servers and seated customers during the entire game. Well, not so much the money, for food and beer are FREE in The Greens. There is nothing like free food and beer to make people REALLY hungry and thirsty. It makes them so hungry and thirsty that they forget they paid four times the general ticket price for the free food and beer.

What’s really annoying is that they don’t get hungry and thirsty at the same time! I mean, I’m still a novice, so I try to place an order for the whole family at the same time, which earns me patronizing looks from my husband, who then feigns great interest in the game and pretends he’s not associated with us. He waits, like everyone else, for the server to return with nachos for the guy two seats down before he asks for another Bud. By the time she returns, he’s hungry and asks for a burger. Now the guy who got the nachos is thirsty, so he asks for a Bud for himself and a lemonade for his son, who will remember in a couple of minutes that he wants some popcorn.

Now I know why they sell out the Cardinal games ... I mean, the food is pretty good! The popcorn is like movie theatre popcorn; it is so salty, your body starts to wither as you eat it but so addictive that you can’t stop eating it until you’re just sucking on unpopped kernels. The burgers are delicious and the boxes are designed so that the lettuce, tomatoes and pickles are “on the side” and, therefore, are not wilted in the heat and grease of the meat. And the beer ... well, it’s about 110 degrees in the shade in St. Louis during the summer, so ice-cold beer makes a welcome treat on that kind of a day!

Oh and did I mention the winning team? Let’s play ball!