Let Them Buy Gear

If you ever need a vivid example of the disconnect between the people who run the games we watch and us, the people who spend the money that allows them to do it, just try paying nearly $200 bucks for a World Series game that's in a rain delay.

No reasonable human being within 20 miles of Busch Stadium could have possibly thought Game 4 was going to take place last evening. The rain was light all day, but unending, and a big huge green blob on the radar appeared ready to land on the stadium about, oh, 10 minutes after first pitch. The field was already soaked, the players weren't warming up, it was 39 degrees and wet and cold and miserable ... just no chance of the game being played. It was obvious to anyone who had so much as stepped outside.

Sadly, FOX executives — and you know FOX made the decision, because they run everything in the postseason, because in October, MLB is FOX's bitch and the whole world knows it — must have not left the suites. As the delay went on and on, we kept getting text message updates from friends. "FOX says it's clearing up and game should start at 8:30!" What? The right-field jumbotron showed the radar of the big green blob, which had a rather different opinion on the "clearing up" notion, and once fans started to receive word of what FOX was claiming, before you knew it, they'd taken the radar down.

And you have to realize that we were held captive. It seemed obvious the game wouldn't be played ... but obvious enough to potentially give up your $200 and once-in-a-lifetime tickets? You weren't allowed to leave the stadium and come back in before first pitch, so basically, our job was to stay trapped in the stadium and purchase merchandise. If we were lucky, we'd freeze just long enough to be cast as extras in FOX's late-night reality programming. We all just kind of huddled together under awnings, freezing, wet, miserable, begging the people in the heated booths above home plate to just put us out of our misery. Which, after two-plus entirely unnecessary hours, finally happened.

We will say this: We have finally come up with a reason someone would want to be a press box: They have heat up there.

(UPDATE: Apparently, the Busch Stadium press box doesn't. Well, jeez, what's the point of being a reporter, then?)