How not to experience a baseball game

1. Have seats on the first base line for an afternoon game, ensuring you’re in the worst possible spot for unrelenting sunshine and heat on an oppressively hot summer day.
2. Leave the ballpark in a fit of pique when your team is losing 9-4 in the ninth, and you KNOW there’s no way they can come back.
3. As you leave your seat heading to the exit and you hear that Jim Thome has hit a 2-run home run, thereby making the score 9-6 with one out in the ninth, briefly consider staying…but dismiss the thought. After all, as was previously addressed, there’s no way your team can come back.
4. Think you’re somehow smarter than everyone else in the stadium by leaving in the top of the ninth, so you’ll beat the crowd heading out of the parking lot…only to spend 45 minutes traveling a 100-yard stretch on Broad Street with 20,000 equally smart people.

My love for the Minnesota Twins cannot be questioned. (My beloved’s loyalty is to the Phillies.) But after a Saturday afternoon of anemic hitting, shamefully bad pitching, apathetic fielding, and falling into a 7-3 hole in the second inning, even I had had enough and bolted. Which is when the Twins decided to stage an epic comeback against the Phillies and win 13-10 in the 11th. This was all captured on the radio as we rolled away from the stadium. So I enjoyed almost none of the game...until we left. The Phillie Phan beside me enjoyed nearly all of the game...until we left. MORAL OF THIS SAD LITTLE STORY: no matter the odds, stay until the last out, folks.