growing in the goo

Last night E and I saw the Cubs at the new Nationals Stadium.

I had been very, very against the building of the new stadium. I thought it was a waste of money, that it was a certain death knell against the $5 tickets that I had come to know and love, that it was a symbol of everything that's wrong with peoples' priorities...we did not need a new stadium. The old one functioned just fine. Couldn't that money be better spent elsewhere?

Well, I've been seduced the riches that awaited me at the new park. The scoreboard is so beautiful and shiny and glittery. The grass is so green. The seats, so new! And so many food options...there's the usual chicken and fries fare (and hot dogs, and pretzels, and beer), but now they have Ben's Chili Bowl! And Senator's Sausages! And "The Boardwalk!" Oh, and the food stations accept credit cards. Which is a very, very big deal.

AND—the greatest news of them all—they have $5 day-of tickets. We had been trying to get seats online, but we had been trying to get three in a row, and the cheapest available were around $80. Eh, not so much. I had pretty much given up hope, then C-note told me about the $5 tickets. The hitch is that every member of your "party" has to be in line to get one...you can't purchase any additional.

Of course, we saw people getting around this rule by recruiting random strangers to stand in for their friends and then bribing the stand-ins with beer. Hey, whatever works.

So E and I got there around 4:15, which put us about 20 people from the front. The line opened at 4:30, and we got our tickets shortly thereafter!

As much as I'm trying to like the Red Sox, for me the integral part of being a fan is actually being able to attend games. It's a struggle to get passionate about tracking the team's stats, to learn about the players, or to care how they do against other teams. But to see it in person is an entirely different story...I'm there with my $5 ticket doing the wave, drinking beer, and shouting "CHARGE!" with the best of them.

I've heard my aunts and uncles, brothers, and friends commiserate about how hard it is to get reasonable tickets to Sox games. It's great living in a city where the fanbase is dismal enough that it allows people like me to stroll up and get a piece of the experience without having to be a megafan or the girlfriend of a sugar daddy. It seems backwards to make the effort to become a fan, only to largely lose the one aspect of the sport that I naturally enjoy.