The Best Two and a Half Innings of Baseball Ever

[Dear Booze]

Without a doubt, drinking removes my inhibitions. And when I drink, I stop giving a fuck about almost everything. Sometimes this works in my favor, and sometimes it does not. The following is a true tale of a moment when Jameson, Pujols, Busch and I were in perfect alignment, right at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis, MO.

It’s been ten years, but I remember most of the details as if it were yesterday. On Saturday, September 18, 2004, I arrived in St. Louis. I had recently written a guide on municipal development of tourism programs as a tool for economic development and was invited to speak at a convention. My travel itinerary forced me to fly into town a day early, which was fine with me because it would allow me to explore a full day’s worth of bars.

I was staying downtown at the Union Station DoubleTree, a huge place that’s located in the historic train station, which is now a trendy mall with a ton of restaurants and bars. After checking in, I spent the better part of the afternoon in a sports bar watching the Saint Louis Cardinals beat the Arizona Diamondbacks on television. Jesus, that city loves their baseball team and I got caught up in the excitement. The more I drank, the bigger fan I became of the Cards.

In the process of watching the game, I managed to put away an impressive amount of Guinness and Rum. But the funny thing was that I didn’t realize how loaded I had become until I stood up and tried to walk around. “Fuck that”, I thought to myself, “as long as I can just sit here at the bar, there is no reason to get up and walk around.” It made perfect sense at the time.

Eventually I left with five strangers – who were, at that time my new best friends in the world. We were all pretty loaded. And I remember that we all thought it would be a great idea to take a cab a few miles away to an old steamboat that’s docked on the Mississippi and which serves as a casino. I remember gambling and drinking well into the evening. But I split up from the new friends at some point and made my way across the bridge into Illinois, where there was another steamship/casino.

There are a few vague memories which I can sum up fairly easily.

1. I danced with a very old lady.
2. I danced at a dueling piano bar.
3. I overpaid for a whole bunch of small glasses of beer.
4. I jumped on a trampoline.

Sadly, I don’t remember much more.

When I woke up the next morning, there were several phone messages waiting for me. Apparently, the people that I was drinking with the night before were also in town for the economic development conference. I wondered if I had known this as some point earlier. The messages were all from those people. They were genuinely concerned because I had disappeared when we were all at the first riverboat casino.

I returned their calls and agreed to meet up with them for lunch in an Irish pub located down the street from the hotel. I remember that the bar had several TVs and at some point there was an advertisement for game three of the three-game series between the Cardinals and the Diamondbacks. One of the guys, Robert, decided that, since we were in St. Louis, that it might be a good idea to go see the game. Live. At Busch Stadium.

Brilliant! I was totally on board, but the rest of our group remembered that the economic development convention’s opening night meet-and-greet was going to start at 6:00 PM, and they thought it was important to go. So we split up. I would join Robert for the game and the rest would go to the stupid meet-and-greet.

At that point, it was about 1:00 and the game wasn’t scheduled to start until 2:50 P.M. So what did we do?

We drank.

I started with a Guinness, but it didn’t go down well, so I switched to Jameson & Soda. I’ve never been a big whiskey guy, but God, those went down smooth.

So I had a bunch of them.

At about 2:00 we headed over to the stadium. Neither one of us had ever been there before, so we were unsure of where and how to buy tickets. But we quickly recognized that there were plenty of scalpers selling tickets for the game. We found one guy who had two tickets for sale for $16 each. We bought them.

Not being familiar with the park, we decided to follow a group of about 25 people, all with little kids, to a ticket counter. The clerk scanned our tickets and the group, including Robert and me, continued through a large waiting area. There, we were met by an official-looking young man carrying a walkie-talkie and wearing a Busch Stadium polo shirt. He greeted us with a simple “Hello, right this way.”

So we all followed him through another door and down a narrow hallway, and then through another door and down a concrete corridor to another door. He punched a code in on a keypad which was mounted on the wall and opened the door and led us all down another hallway and then up a ramp to yet another door.

Remember, Robert and I were both drunk. And at that point we knew that we were someplace that we didn’t belong or deserve. We looked at each other and started to giggle a little bit. But, as if we could read each other’s minds, we refused to look at one another again. We were too afraid of breaking out in full-on laughter.

And then, Walkie-Talkie guy opened the door at the top of the ramp. HOLY SHIT! We were outside, with only about 20 feet separating us from the backstop behind home plate.

Walkie-Talkie guy led the group down a few steps and threw open a gate on the backstop and all of the parents, with all of the kids ran out onto the field and high-fived Albert Pujols.

“What the fuck is going on?” I whispered to Robert.

“I don’t know, but let’s go over here,” he pointed to the right and made his way all the way down the front row of seats and sat down.

We were sitting directly behind the home team’s on-deck circle. And when we turned our heads to the right, we were looking directly down into the Cardinal’s dugout.

Robert and I quickly learned that the kids on the field must have won some sort of prize or something and got the once-in-a-lifetime honor of running the bases with the Cardinals Goliath First Baseman, Albert Pujols.

I simply sat there for a few minutes and tried to decide if this whole thing was real or if I was even more drunk than my original estimation.

And then the team started showing up in the dugout. Robert looked to the right and then back at me and said “Dude, I just made eye contact with Tony La Russa!”

I remember thinking “I wish I had a camera because nobody is going to believe this.” Remember, this was 2004 and phones weren’t equipped with cameras yet. So I started calling everyone I could think of. I didn’t reach anyone but left a whole bunch of messages that said “HEY, TURN ON THE TV AND FIND THE CARDINALS GAME…I’M RIGHT THERE, NEXT TO THE DUGOUT!”

About that time, it occurred to both Robert and I that we were in an exclusive closed-off section. The seats were bigger than most stadium seat, they were upholstered in a beautiful green leather-like material and all had armrests which were also upholstered. Each of the armrest had a drink holder mounted on the end and each drink holder had a small 4 inch by 10 inch menu which was neatly tucked inside. We looked at the menus. There was real food available, not the standard baseball stadium stuff. But there were no prices. Robert and I decided that these seats may be like a country club; the waiter or waitress would just write down what you consume and bill it to your account.

Well, we weren’t members of this country club and we weren’t about to order anything to eat OR drink. Besides that, we couldn’t figure out how to get to a restroom and this game hadn’t even started.

Soon, the stadium started filling up, the players took the field, the national anthem was sung and the game started.

A few minutes later, an older gentleman came and sat down two seats down from me to my left. He was nice, said hello and asked where we were from. He continued to make periodic small-talk as Robert and I continued to enjoy the best baseball game we had ever seen.

By the top of the second inning, more and more people started coming up and talking to the old man. Perhaps they were friends of his? This kept on going throughout the entire second inning and I started to listen to what these other people were saying. It was stuff like “Great season,” “Congratulations on a great year,” and “Let’s win the pennant, huh?”

Several of those well-wishers started to sit in the seats around us and the section was getting pretty full. Then, during the top of the third, the old man leaned over to us and said “Boys, I think we’re going to need these seats today.” It was a nice way to say “get the fuck out of here!”

As we were making our way down the row, I heard another well-wisher slap the old man on the back and say “Nice season, Auggie. Who we gonna play in the series?

Did that guy just call the old man Auggie? “Fuck,” I whispered to Robert, “that’s Auggie Busch. Those are HIS seats. Shit, this is HIS stadium.”

We tried to sit in other empty seat in the same section but were quickly spotted and escorted out of the area by security.

In the end, we found our real section way up in the upper deck of left field. We could see that the seats were hard plastic and most of them were broken. There was dried vomit on almost every surface, the people were ugly, and the foul post obstructed our view of the infield. The funniest part about it was that when we found our seats, there were a couple of other guys sitting there. Robert simply said to them, “Boys, I think we’re going to need these seats today.” It was a nice way to say “get the fuck out of here!”

[booznik]

An August tale, and a highly entertaining drinking story indeed. No beating around the Busch here. Cheers.

[Dear Booze]

An August tale, and a highly entertaining drinking story indeed. No beating around the Busch here. Cheers.

Thanks. I was hoping for a home run. Don't know about the bases, but I was loaded. Had a pitcher after the game. The whole thing was out of left field.

BTW, this was Number 66 in the original 100 Things I've Done While Drunk thread.

[Patchez]

I feel Auggie Busch was a twat. Anyone with enough drunken luck to stumble their way to that sacred ground should have been allowed to stay.

[Dear Booze]

I feel Auggie Busch was a twat. Anyone with enough drunken luck to stumble their way to that sacred ground should have been allowed to stay.

Fuck yea! I agree. Auggie Busch IS a twat. I think I'm going to make some tee shirts that say that.

[Dear Booze]

The fact that Auggie Busch is a twat is yet another reason to NEVER drink Budweiser products.

[Palinka (RIP)]

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