That's A Crying Shame

I think I found something I hate more than black jelly beans or the initial 17-second brain freeze you get from your first gulp of a Slurpee.

Baseball.

For full effect, download “Never Again” by Nickelback, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

I know I have written rants before on my passion against America’s pastime. I know I hate it more than Canada hates Justin Beiber, but for some reason I gave it one last chance, I went outside my element and drove 110 miles south to Las Vegas, paid $43.50 just so I could watch an actual baseball contest live, in person, at an official spring training game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets.

Richard Briggs: “Of course you’re going to hate it bro, it’s a spring training game between the Cubs and the Mets. Who wouldn’t hate that?”

Valid point my friend, this isn’t really a battle between two powerhouse clubs with multi-million dollar superstars batting runs in left and right with the audience applauding their athletic achievements, it’s a game between two of baseball’s worst cellar-dwellers filled with a roster of scrubs who don’t even deserve having their last names sewn into their jerseys. But I’m not going because of the athletes, I’m going for the experience. And as anyone wearing a Red Sox cap has said to me, “I can’t knock baseball until I see a Major League game in person.”

Logan Bentley: “When you go to a game, you always gotta get a good ol’ hot dog at the concessions. Baseball ain’t the same unless you got a nice Brät with ya.”

Good point buddy, I most certainly agree. Yes, I’ll have a regular-sized, plain hot dog with no toppings, hold the relish. I’m sorry, what? Say that again? $9? Are you curse-wording serious? No, I don’t want it to be a combo, I haven’t received my tax return yet, how the crap am I supposed to pay for anything at this place?

Random drunk guy behind me: "One of the best parts about this games is the seventh ribbing stretch…hiccup… Where we all get up, stretch upup our legs and elbows, and I...sing together one of Murica’s greatestestest songs, "Take me out to the ball".

Oh, you mean the part where your drunk sextet spills beer down the back of my shirt and makes more dirty jokes about the lyrics than Dane Cook can say in his entire standup act? You mean a song that an off-key lunatic who for some reason is wearing an oversized leprechaun hat is butchering into a broken sound system? That song? That will help me enjoy this game even more? That will help me fully appreciate this experience to its highest degree?

You want to talk about experience? You want to talk about memorable? You want to talk about a sunburnt moment of my life that gets put in the same category as my first physical? I paid $40 to plant myself on bleachers more uncomfortable than a Helen Keller joke and listen to a drunk audience say commentary that would make Peter Griffin blush, meanwhile I’m forced to take out a second mortgage just so I can add some relish to a regurgitated piece of pork, and you want to tell me it’s all about the experience?

I kind of feel let down, deflated, betrayed. I went into this daytime shindig with higher expectations than I had for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I was looking forward to being proved wrong and be forced to write a 700-word retraction, taking back all of the unkind words I have ever written about America’s pastime. I wanted an experience unlike any other, something that would in fact be worthy of a journal entry. I wanted to weep for joy at discovering my newest addiction. You hear that? I wanted to bawl my eyes out in happiness, knowing that baseball truly was a gift from the heavens! 

But, as Tom Hanks so eloquently said in A League Of Their Own, “There’s no crying in baseball.”