6.29.02 ROCHESTER RED WINGS vs PAWTUCKET RED SOX
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Some time probably around the sixth inning tonight my wife and I moved from
where we’d been sitting and took two of the plentiful empty seats off
to the left side of home plate. As we made our way down to the first few rows,
I noticed a guy I’d seen here before. Not a terribly uncommon thing for
me at Red Wings games—there are lots of regulars, and after a while their
faces become familiar—but something about this one set me a little on
edge, and it wasn’t just the blustery and self-important way he went
on and on about the finer points of Syracuse politics to everyone within earshot.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out why. After half an inning,
an usher approached and asked if we had tickets for the seats we were occupying.
No, I said pointedly, we came down from our original seats because nobody
is sitting here. Of course, this was of little importance to our rules-is-rules-minded
interlocutor, who insisted that we return whence we came, and it was at this
moment that I realized why I recognized the fat blowhard who’d been eyeing
us on the way down: it was because he was the very same fat blowhard who had
narced me out to the usher last year
while I was sitting near the field taking pictures, half an hour before the
game had even started. I leveled a go-to-hell glare at him as we walked back
up, but he just stared back smugly from behind his gold-rimmed prick glasses,
his domain secure. Fuck you, asshole.
And hey, Red Wings management: Just so you know, it makes me really wanna
keep coming back here spending twenty bucks a night on food and admission
to see your shitty ballclub when your security people treat me like a petty
thief for sitting in unoccupied seats in a half-empty stadium.
Tonight’s other highlight was the scoreboard appearance following Luis Lopez’s inconsequential seventh-inning homer of an animated “rally panther.” Uh, sorry guys, but no. (Former Angels regular Gary DiSarcina apparently didn’t find it particularly funny either; he homered once, singled twice, and scored four times for the Paw Sox in response.)
FINAL SCORE: PAWSOX 8, RED WINGS 5
LIFE DURING WARTIME: To hell with war, bring on the strike!