Talkin' baseball!

Sometimes I listen to the Rockies on the radio. It's kind of cool because I can see the lights of Coors Field from my home office window.

There you go. Rockies just scored five in the eighth to take the lead from the Giants, 5-3.

They're playing only their second home night game of the season. The crowd must be cold. It's 49 degrees, not horrible but chilly for sitting still for three hours except for 14 trips through the beer line and standing up occasionally to yell, I'm fuckin' your wife, Ump!

Rocks win 5-3. Six and eight--.500 shall be soon be ours!

I was at an early season night game during the (triple-A) Denver Zephyrs era once where it snowed the whole game. Nothing stuck, but it was really wet, and there were several game delays. Maybe 38 degrees, something like that.

The Zephyrs, as you surely remember, played in the old 72,000-seat Mile High Stadium, which they never, ever, ever came close to even half filling during the regular season, he exaggerated slightly.

Maybe a hundred people had shown up for this game, but after five hours that had dwindled to about 25 hardy souls, all of whom, unfortunately, were Blackout™ drunk (including, of course, me).

But I was a survivalist drunk and they weren't. Book, radio, my own private booze supply--and I'd dressed warmly.

Finally the 7th inning came and went, and with it, beer sales, which by law are halted after that "frame" (inside baseball talk). Ominously, the eighth featured another long snow delay, and the crowd started getting restive. Picture it: an empty field, the snow spitting down in the lights, the humongous non-echoing stadium--and this little knot of drunks huddled under an overhang and cut off from alcohol.

It was pretty bad. There were arguments, and a fight broke out, maybe two. Some idiot tried to run down the stadium steps as fast as he could and slid on his face about four steps. A skinny 50ish woman danced up and down the aisles in a t-shirt soaked by freezing snow.

It was like Field of Dreams in hell.

Update: Bill Stern: Be sure to tune in next week for another Drunkablog! Baseball! Memory!

Update II: Be patient with the Bill Stern the Colgate Shave Cream Man link. You have to get through a couple of minutes of poorly recorded Radio Nostalgia Network garbage, but Bill Stern is easily bizarre enough to justify the annoyance. Americans! Notice how Paul Harvey stole his whole schtick from Stern.

Update III: It's frightening to learn that Paul Harvey began his broadcasting career in 1933--the same year Hitler rose to power!