Baseball… according to Wikipedia, if you trust such website, “is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal of baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond”.
Simple, isn’t it? Well, not at all.
In going to a baseball game, more important than the game is the set of complex rituals that takes those thousands of people to the stadium to watch a game that lasts usually no less than three hours.
Last month we received two tickets to watch a game between the Mets, a New Yorker team, against the Texas Rangers, as the name suggests, from Texas. As soon as we arrived at the Shea Stadium, in Queens, we could smell the king of all American sports, His Majesty the hot dog. With rare exceptions, including Lollo that chose a burger, everybody was enjoying a hot dogs with beers or for kids, some kind of colorful soda that we still can’t figure out. We bought our meals ($20 for a hot dog, a burger and a beer) and headed to our seats. Bibi got the tickets from the TV station where she’s interning in the summer.
As organized as Americans are, all tickets are numbered. By the way, Lollo said that in Europe seats are also numbered. Well I guess that only in Brazil we operate in a “first come, first served” fashion.
Anyway, it took us some time to figure out our seats which were really good, very close to the field and uncovered. Bibi, used to enjoy games at Maracana worried about what people from the upper seats would throw on her new hair do forgot that the my hot dog was overloaded with ketchup and mustard that started dripping onto her white short. But since nothing was coming from the sky after 15 minutes of game, we relaxed and tried to understand the game.
We tried really hard to read the wall of numbers on the score board and the elusive action triggered only occasionally by the bat hitting the ball. But right when we was getting into the game, there he came, Mr. Met.
Mr. Met is the mascot of the Mets, kids of all age love him. So the game paused for a minute and on a jumbo TV screen, the biggest ever seen, appears Mr. Met, a baseball-headed humanoid wearing a Mets cap and uniform. The music starts full blast and the crowd joins in to take part in his choreography.
Then he goes away for a while and the game restarts. At that moment we were no longer interested in what was going on with the game, but rather we followed the multimedia presentation of music and slides shown on the jumbo TV screen.
Couples kissing, thousands of commercials, pics of the players, more Mr. Met, and so on. But everything is done in such an interactive way that we started believing that the main objective of going to the stadium is to interact with the TV.
Think about it for a second. The TV in our homes doesn’t really go the whole way. Here we are talking of true vertical integration where the commercial triggers you appetite, then vendor walks by you selling the very same nachos that made your mouth watering a minute earlier at a premium price, it’s consumer’s paradise. The stadium is a TV who talks to you and most of all: it smells. What else can you ask for in life?
Finally after more or less three hours of this interactive dance, and variety show, the game had not yet finished, but we decided it was time to go home.
After all, the greatest thing about going to the game was to observe our American friends happily respond to the music and games that took place around the ball game as if for over 3 hours there shouldn’t be a single dull moment looking more like a circus than with a sport event.
Bibi & Lollo
Simple, isn’t it? Well, not at all.
In going to a baseball game, more important than the game is the set of complex rituals that takes those thousands of people to the stadium to watch a game that lasts usually no less than three hours.
Last month we received two tickets to watch a game between the Mets, a New Yorker team, against the Texas Rangers, as the name suggests, from Texas. As soon as we arrived at the Shea Stadium, in Queens, we could smell the king of all American sports, His Majesty the hot dog. With rare exceptions, including Lollo that chose a burger, everybody was enjoying a hot dogs with beers or for kids, some kind of colorful soda that we still can’t figure out. We bought our meals ($20 for a hot dog, a burger and a beer) and headed to our seats. Bibi got the tickets from the TV station where she’s interning in the summer.
As organized as Americans are, all tickets are numbered. By the way, Lollo said that in Europe seats are also numbered. Well I guess that only in Brazil we operate in a “first come, first served” fashion.
Anyway, it took us some time to figure out our seats which were really good, very close to the field and uncovered. Bibi, used to enjoy games at Maracana worried about what people from the upper seats would throw on her new hair do forgot that the my hot dog was overloaded with ketchup and mustard that started dripping onto her white short. But since nothing was coming from the sky after 15 minutes of game, we relaxed and tried to understand the game.
We tried really hard to read the wall of numbers on the score board and the elusive action triggered only occasionally by the bat hitting the ball. But right when we was getting into the game, there he came, Mr. Met.
Mr. Met is the mascot of the Mets, kids of all age love him. So the game paused for a minute and on a jumbo TV screen, the biggest ever seen, appears Mr. Met, a baseball-headed humanoid wearing a Mets cap and uniform. The music starts full blast and the crowd joins in to take part in his choreography.
Then he goes away for a while and the game restarts. At that moment we were no longer interested in what was going on with the game, but rather we followed the multimedia presentation of music and slides shown on the jumbo TV screen.
Couples kissing, thousands of commercials, pics of the players, more Mr. Met, and so on. But everything is done in such an interactive way that we started believing that the main objective of going to the stadium is to interact with the TV.
Think about it for a second. The TV in our homes doesn’t really go the whole way. Here we are talking of true vertical integration where the commercial triggers you appetite, then vendor walks by you selling the very same nachos that made your mouth watering a minute earlier at a premium price, it’s consumer’s paradise. The stadium is a TV who talks to you and most of all: it smells. What else can you ask for in life?
Finally after more or less three hours of this interactive dance, and variety show, the game had not yet finished, but we decided it was time to go home.
After all, the greatest thing about going to the game was to observe our American friends happily respond to the music and games that took place around the ball game as if for over 3 hours there shouldn’t be a single dull moment looking more like a circus than with a sport event.
Bibi & Lollo
1 comments:
That's a good one. I never thought about our whole ritual at a game.. Lol
Ross
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