Over the past few days, Marilyn has been participating in a photo challenge on her Serendipity blog… “Five Photos, Five Stories,” which she was asked to participate in by the first name in photo prompts, Cee’s Photography Blog. I decided to give it a shot this week as an excuse to show off a few of my non-squirrel photos that might otherwise not end up on my blog. The rules are simple…
1) Post a photo (or more!) each day for five consecutive days.
2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or nothing more than a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to you.
3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is supposed to be fun. It is not a command performance!
Don’t worry…. I’m not going to put the guilt trip on anyone by nominating them… you are perfectly free to latch on to this idea or not.
Here is my photo for Day 3, which I took at the first of two games I attended at Target Field in Minneapolis back in September 2011…
The Second Amendment guarantees the right to arm bears.
That madman wielding the weapon of mass destruction in front of 15,000 innocent fans is T.C., the ursine mascot for the Minnesota Twins. This is what passes for entertainment at the old ballpark between innings these days… launching crappy souvenir T-shirts at light speed out of a cannon for fans to rip each others’ limbs apart trying to obtain. As luck would have it, I just happened to catch him in this photo right as he was launching one of these cloth bombs… and he looks truly psychopathic as he pumps round after round of cotton shrapnel into folks who just came to watch some damn baseball…
If you’ve been to a baseball game over the past 15 years or so, you know the stadium atmosphere has become more like some carnival sideshow instead of…. you know, focusing on the competition taking place on the field. Could you imagine T-shirt shooting mascots running amok at Ebbets Field? Or interns dressed up like sausages running around the warning track like fools at The Polo Grounds? Can’t you just picture this on the Jumbotron at the Baker Bowl:
The ultimate ballpark evil…
The Commissioner of Baseball (Which will continue to be Bud Selig’s frozen head for all perpetuity… regardless of the puppet actually holding the job) likes to brag about how the game of baseball is more popular now than it ever was in the past. Bullshit! Teams do everything within their power to bribe families into parting with their hard earned money to come out to the ballpark and experience a lot of events that have dip diddly squat to do with the national pastime of baseball. While the home team is trying to get out of a fourth inning jam, Dad’s got the boys feeding five dollar bills into the batting cage machine behind the left field stands while Mom’s letting her hysterically crying baby get a photo op with the scary looking mascot at the food court. The announced crowd of 35,000 looks more like about 10,000 in the seats because NOBODY CAME TO WATCH THE FUCKING GAME!!!!
I think I’ll change my Facebook status to “Bashed in the head by foul ball.”
Don’t be like bowling, baseball. Get your act together and encourage the next generation to fall in love with your sport by actually getting them interested in the game itself! Not some crappy gimmick promotion that would make even Bill Veeck roll over in his grave…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
So true – AMEN! Mom loves baseball. She used to go to all of the Braves games here in Atlanta. But then prices go so sky rocketed it wasn’t even funny. Nowadays, it’s easier to watch the games on the boob tube – and a lot cheaper for excellent seats to boot. XOXO – Bacon
That’s true… and when they move into that even newer ballpark in a few years, I’ll bet it’ll take a second mortgage to see a game! And nobody crawls over you to get a beer when you’re at home!
Exactly! XOXO – Bacon
I hate to see it starting to creep into baseball, the rising prices. I just stick with nosebleed seats for the Orioles. Even with the drive, it isn’t too bad.
I sit in the bleachers here, which are usually cheap… though they have that tiered pricing now where games against certain opponents cost more. When the Yankees came here last year (Memorial Day week), a bleacher seat that usually went for about $20 was running over $100…. through the box office!!! I also won’t be seeing any Cubs games anytime soon, that’s for sure….
We haven’t been to a live game in about 8 years and that was the Nationals in DC before they got their own stadium. Previous to that, there were a lot of games at Fenway where fans take their baseball very seriously. But that’s Fenway. Probably Wrigley is the same. I hope (I believe) that some markets are worse than others in this respect. I want to be right about this. When they start having animal clad people blowing tee-shirts into the new seats atop the Green Monster, I give up.
You’ll be hard pressed to find more knowledgeable and passionate baseball fans than in St. Louis…. yet the circus sideshow is in full force here too. Fredbird and his personal cheerleaders pepper the seats with tees several times a game (only they use a slingshot rather than an AK-47 like the Twins bear does), and the stupid human tricks on the video board between innings are a comically bad form of entertainment that should be reserved for children’s birthday parties and not baseball games.
The sad thing is…. you aren’t just paying for the overbloated player salaries, you’re also paying for all this extraneous “entertainment” that I can frankly do without…
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I found this to be perfectly normal in your scheme of things, E.S. Hope you had a ball!
LOL! It was cold as heck, as you would expect for Minnesota in September, but I like my baseball with a chill in the air…
Amen! The last Mariner’s game I went to was ridiculous and left me with no desire to return. I like the low-key simplicity of the minor league games better, except it seems like no one even cares how the team is doing, including the team.
Exactly! That’s where all these sideshow ideas came from… the minors! And given the high turnover, with the best players always getting promoted to the big leagues, it has to be hard to be a fan of the team itself…. so why not throw some extra fun in to make the ballpark experience interesting. Major League teams don’t have the same excuse and should just worry about their product on the field!
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I don’t know much about the game but I liked your post and a message at the end.
Thanks! 🙂
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