The quote:
The greatest sport ever. PERIOD. Misunderstood by jackasses who have never seen or been to a game.
The truth: I've seen it, iI've been there:
Memorial Day, 25th of May 2009, A beautiful warm evening and you are in NY. So what is your plan tonight? Right, you ignore whatever a reasonable person would suggest (like your girlfriend) and you take a 30min train ride out to the Citi Field in Queens ($2). In the packed train you promise that you'll immediately go back to Manhatten if no tickets below $20 are available.You'll end up in a long queue in front of a ticket office roughly 2hours before the game starts and you promise again to the reasonable person next to you in the queue that $20 is the max you'll spend for a ticket - you end up paying $69 for one ticket. As a result the reasonable person does not speak to you for the next 3 hours (she pays you a beer though ($7.50)).
The first two hours she can't speak to you as you keep on talking to her: "Serioulsy, that sport is great! What you've seen on TV is not what you will experience now! Baseball is completely different live! Much more exciting than on TV! A happening! You'll have fun! And you might even become a sports-fan! And if not for the sport than for the athmosphere! And for the food! You'll see there's a huge variety of food available! And I read in the program that the Broadway-Cast of West Side Story will sing the anthem before the game!" - It's true, that's what I read - even 5mins before the anthem it said it on the big scoreboard (unf. I was too late to take the pic of it...)
However, the guy who wrote the program as well as the guy responsible for the scoreboard both forgot (like me) that on Memorial Day only one thing counts: the soldiers and the respect for the veterans.As a result a soldier sang the anthem and the line up was broadcasted live from soldiers in iraq (their relatives got the chance to greet them live out of the stadium - all shown on the huge screen). A few airforce-planes flew over the Citi Field before the game and during the game you saw in every break during the 9 innings members of the army on the screens.
The seventh inning however apparently needed to be streched and Seargeant Elizabeth Quinones sang us the "Amazing Graze" (at least that's the song I recall).
What else can I remember? 3 more beers (3*$7.5 - needed to show the ID twice to proof my age (yeeha)), 1 hotdog ($4.50). Hotdogs & Burgers were the only food available if you wanted to queue for less than 30mins (didn't make the reasonable person joining me on that game happier). The game? Ended up 5-2 for the Mets which means you saw seven times within those 3.5 hours (most probably it took longer) a guy running around the bases. The rest of the time one team stood still on the field while two guys were throwing the ball to eachother and a guy stood between them swinging a stick but only hitting air or if hitting the ball the ball did not go into the field (and very rarely got into the field but landed directly in the glove of a guy standing there - which somehow was bad for the stick swinging guy). The stadium was full though (more than 40'000 people) and the crowd was screaming, waving, clapping and leaving 20mins before the game ended.... (A probably more accurate summary can be found here).
The atmosphere however was not even close to a 2nd league soccer game in St.Gallen...
At the end I fully understood why the reasonable person was pissed off of that evening before it even started... she (once more) was 100% right!
