May 2001

A Baseball Game with My Wife, Warm Sandwiches, and Two Electric Hot Dogs
Rambling On

This past Tuesday, I took my wife to a ball game at Camden Yards. Camden Yards is a great place to watch baseball. Sure the team is terrible, and the fans are lifeless (unless the jumbotron tells them to clap,) but the stadium leaves nothing to be desired. I love going to ballgames in Baltimore.

This game was not exciting. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are worse than the Orioles. The game was so slow that a wave circled the stadium nearly a dozen times in one half inning. 26,000 fans, not one of them watched a 1-2-3 inning. Terrible.

I love going to Camden Yards with a bag full of goodies purchased outside of the stadium. I buy peanuts, a big pretzel and a few sodas for less than ten bucks. That alone covers my hunger until I need a kosher hot dog.

The wife and I took a bag of goodies into the ball game, sat down, and watched the entire game. (While most of the Oriole fans leave after the 7th inning, non-Oriole fans like myself like to watch the whole game - win or lose.) I am happy to say that I enjoyed that ballgame experience.

In the past, I went to the park with friends or family as often as possible. That usually meant a few games a year. I always went with a buddy of mine, or a brother or my father. We would sit together, talk baseball, politics, life or whatever while eating peanuts. I looked forward to being with a person at the game more than the game itself.

I remember going to Yankee Stadium with my father and siblings as a child. The morning of the game, mom and dad would help us pack a few sandwiches, peanuts and cold drinks in a bag. I loved to bring frozen juice boxes. By the time we reached the stadium, the juice was about half melted, after finishing the juice you could make a slurpie with the remaining block of frozen fun.

The best treat in the bag was the sandwich. We always made special sandwiches for a field/road trip. I liked a turkey and cheddar cheese on wheat with lettuce, tomato and Italian dressing. After three or four hours in the car, the sandwich warmed, the cheddar sweated, and the dressing marinated everything in the bag. Mmmmmm.

We always arrived before the game started. The whole gang would sit together eating our treats, watching Mel Alan's This Week in Baseball on the jumbotron.

(A baseball stadium is also the only place in which I saw two naked men walk down a concrete ramp while peeing. I love New York.)

My special baseball sandwich came with me on school field trips, family vacations, and most summer camp outings. I say most because there was one exception to the rule. Each year at my summer day camp all the campers joined in a cookout. This cookout took place outside of a school in a city. Most kids had burgers. But the luckiest kids were given hot dogs.

While the burgers were cooked on a grill, the dogs were electrocuted. The counselors had two, eight dog capacity, electric hot dog machines. Each end of the dog was stuck on a prong. A flip was switched, and a current turned raw hotdogs into plump and juicy treats.

I never met another person with an electric hot dog machine. Most people like their dogs boiled or grilled. For some reason, the thought of electrocuting a hot dog is abhorrent to many.

Anyway, as my wife and I walked out of Camden Yards on Tuesday night, I remembered my childhood trips to the ballpark. I remembered the sandwich. For some strange reason, I began to remember the electric hotdog machine.