Tonight I Went To A Baseball Game And Left Questioning Pretty Much Everything

Every so often I find myself thinking about what life was like 100 years ago for people in my current age group. This would have been the 1920s, and those folks would have been born in the late 1850s/early 1860s. I try to put myself into their shoes. I try to imagine what they thought of the world surrounding them.

Most were probably considered old, because a century ago, you couldn’t really expect to live much past age 70, even in wealthier countries. Medicine wasn’t as advanced. Certain diseases we no longer worry much about could shorten lives back then, like polio and tuberculosis, because vaccines either hadn’t been developed or hadn’t been administered at a mass scale.

The United States currently has a certifiable idiot/conspiracy doofus named Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., running the Department of Health and Human Services, and he seems to have made it a priority to undermine vaccines that have saved many millions of lives for decades, so who knows, maybe we’ll all die of the same shit people died of a century ago, unless the certifiable idiot president who appointed him figures out a way to kill us all some other way first, but I digress….

So: the 1920s.

I wonder what people in their 60s thought of the world back then. They had seen amazing changes in their lives. They grew up in a time when you got around on a horse or mule (if you were lucky). The industrial revolution was still in its infancy. Railroads were fairly new. The world was a huge place, and it could take weeks to get from one state to another here in the USA. For entertainment, you listened to your daughter play the piano, or waited for the traveling carnival show to pull into town.

Now, cut to the 1920s. Gasoline-powered automobiles had become the preferred mode of transportation. Planes were beginning to fill the skies. You could go to the movies for entertainment, or listen to the radio, or play records. Did older people embrace these things?

I bet some did. But I bet many didn’t. I bet many felt like they were aliens in a strange land, forced to adapt to forces they could never have imagined as younger lads and lasses.

I bet some missed getting around on a horse, and being entertained by traveling carnival shows, and living out on the farm instead of in some crowded city with strange-looking people who spoke in weird accents.

The world was much changed in 1925 from what it was in 1895. I’m guessing a lot of those older folks missed the way the world used to be. They were living in the 20^th century, but their hearts were in the 19^th.

I don’t want to be like those people. I do not want to spend my time looking in the rear-view mirror. I want to stay in the here and now, live in the moment and make the most of it.

Whenever I think about how alien the modern world has become to those of us who came of age in the late 20th century, I make an effort to snap myself out of it. I remind myself that the past is dead and buried – and if you spend too much time wallowing in it, you’ll soon be dead and buried, too.

I succeed most of the time. Most of the time.

*****

Tonight I went to a New Jersey Jackals baseball game in Paterson, New Jersey, a gritty, grubby little city about 20 miles from our home. The Jackals are a minor league baseball team, one that exists at the lowest rungs of minor league baseball.

Now, I love minor league baseball. I prefer it over major league baseball these days. It’s cheaper, and less crowded, and a lot more fun. I went to several Jackals games last year, and enjoyed the hell out of it. The crowds were small. There was plenty of room to spread out, and no lines at the concessions or bathrooms. The games were played at unassuming little Hinchcliff Stadium, up on a hill, with a great view of the city below. On a clear night you could see clear to Big Old Manhattan in New York City.

Loved it, loved it.

And tonight, in the space of less than an hour, I learned to hate it.

During the offseason, the Jackals apparently decided to make some changes. They decided to turn their nice little minor league baseball games into Disney Worldish spectacles of between-innings funfests and loud music filling every second that no action was taking place on the field. They came up with various game-day “themes” designed to draw fans who don’t give a shit about baseball. A lot more fans showed up tonight than a year ago — and you had to wait in line for 30 minutes to buy food or drink.

Worst of all, they decided to stop selling beer. This offended me on so many levels I can’t even tell you.

I don’t care what you think about the relative merits of alcohol – seriously, I really Do Not Care – but I can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt that beer has been sold at baseball games for 140 years or so. It’s part of the experience. It’s part of the joy. It’s right up there with hot dogs and double plays and the 7^th inning stretch.

Except not at New Jersey Jackals games anymore. Not in 2025 — or at least that’s what a couple of the stadium staff told me.

I decided, in a matter of minutes, that beerless and entertainment-drenched baseball is part of a larger trend designed to make people like me long for what used to be. I don’t want to do that. I will resist it. But man oh man oh man….

*****

I was going to write another political blog this week. I was going to write about the ongoing shitshow consuming our country these days, thanks to the petty, infantile and thin-skinned douchebag who occupies the White House, and all his pea-brained underlings, and their war against science and reason and education, and their contempt for anything and anyone who doesn’t look or think like them, and their mistrust of the rest of the world, and the military units they send out to quell peaceful protests, and all their angry and ill-informed zealot supporters who can’t get through the day without blaming someone else for their problems, real or not.

But then I went to the Jackals game. And came to a sudden realization:

This is the world we live in now. It’s not the world I grew up in, and never will be again. There’s not much I can do to change that. It is what it is what it is what it is what it is and what it is some more.

There was a time when I never could have imagined a minor baseball game with no beer. I could not have imagined a game that assaulted you with nonstop music and entertainment out of fear that baseball wasn’t its own reward. I used to go to minor league games all the time back in my hometown of Charlotte, at beautiful, rickety old Clark Griffith Stadium (RIP). They had 25-cent beer nights, and the only sound you’d hear between innings (maybe) was an organ.

I grew up in a world that valued science and education. That appreciated the importance of international goodwill (for selfish reasons, yes, but still….). That didn’t let unqualified idiots run every branch of government. That wasn’t above electing a corrupt and/or unqualified president, but never one as singularly corrupt or unqualified as the one we have now. I never could have imagined how the country and the world could veer so far off the track that I once thought was a pretty good track to be on.

Yet here we are, here we are.

Is this what all those 60-somethings thought a hundred years ago, back in 1925? Did they just sigh and think to themselves, “Here we are, here we are?”

Oh, probably.

The world’s gonna do what the world’s gonna do. We’re mostly powerless to stop it. But, not totally powerless. Therein lies the hope.

So I’ll do what I can. I’ll offer my token resistance to the ill winds that blow.

Oh, and I’ll find another minor baseball team to follow. One that sells beer.  

Note: The photo was taken by me last year at Hinchcliff Stadium. Damn…..