Commentary by Wayne Lee
Baseball season is coming and I’m ready for 162 games of relaxing at the ballpark with a transistor radio tuned into the game in one hand, a scorebook in the other and a cold glass of beer under my chair for between innings. My very first major league game was when I was barely old enough to go to school.
We went on a weeknight to Dodger Stadium where the Dodgers were hosting the Philadelphia Phillies, and ticket prices were marked down. That was back in the days when Dick Allen played first base for the Phillies and was booed wherever he played. I was too young to understand Allen would use his cleats to carve words in the infield dirt just to get a reaction, and MLB eventually told him to knock it off.
The highlight of my night was walking down to the outfield fence to get a closer look at the players until an usher chased me back to my seat. I just waited for him to leave and was right back again. It was during one of these trips that I noticed a long fly ball coming in my direction as it went right over my head for a home run. Of course, I and every other kid within a half mile went racing downstairs to find the treasured baseball, but it had rolled under a vendor’s table, and he chased us all away.
And thus began my Close Encounters of the Baseball Kind. Nearly every professional game I attended I had a baseball land in the stands near me but was never the first one to the ball. I’ve been shoved, knocked down, elbowed and just plain run over by crazed fans and came up empty every single time. I do have some balls collected from batting practice if you get there early enough, and I have about a half dozen balls from minor league parks around the country.
There was a group of us who couldn’t wait for the season schedules for the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants to be released. MLB doesn’t like teams in a shared market playing at home on the same day, so they try to schedule the Mets out of town when the Yankees are on the road, and the same is true for the Cubs/White Sox and Dodgers/Angels.
However, every now and then you can find overlapping games when one team is playing the first game of a homestand while the other was heading out the next day. The bonus was finding a day game at Candlestick and a night at the Oakland Colosseum. Night games at The Stick were bone-chilling cold and made for a much longer ride home. We called this our two-league, two-city, four-team double header.
The other key series was when the Cubs came in on Father’s Day weekend with a double header on dad’s special day. I’d pack up the family and go to the game, usually coming home with a free souvenir tee shirt. Alas, double headers are pretty much a thing of the past unless it makes up a rainout, and they usually clear the stadium and make you purchase a ticket to the second game later that evening.
But I’ve been a baseball junkie all my life. When I lived in West Sacramento, I got a job as a Guest Services Supervisor at what was then Raley Field, of the Sacramento River Cats, the AAA minor league franchise for the Oakland A’s. As the A’s prepared to move to Las Vegas, the Giants moved their AAA team to Raley Field. Once their lease expired, the A’s signed a contract to play their home games in West Sacramento while the River Cats were on the road. I was actually being paid to attend baseball games. Of course there was work to be done. I supervised the main gate, the right field gate, the kids play area, the party zone for group events and patrolled the bull pen fence to keep kids from pestering players for autographs while checking in every so often to make sure the luxury suites were well-stocked, and all the ushers were getting their breaks
I had reached the baseball version of Nirvana. And it was a good thing too because even though the A’s were playing in a minor league stadium, they were charging major league prices. The cheapest ticket was $100 just to get in the gate and that didn’t guarantee anything more than a spot on the grass behind right field.
So now if it isn’t on television, it’s Medford for live minor league ball games. And I can afford those tickets (and yes, I did ask if they had any job openings).
