On Friday, I took part in baseball history, or so I hear. Someone said that the regular season had never extended into October before. Yet there I was, in the cold rain, at a Cubs game.

The President of my company has four season tickets, and she was nice enough to give them to my department as a little motivator. But the original date for the game, September 14th, wasn't a very pick-me-up sorta day. The Cubs' battle against the Pirates was postponed until last Friday.

Now, I'm about as much of a fan of professional sports as I am of professional quilting. In other words, I'll watch it, but any more than one game a year is way too much for me to handle. So I try to make it to a baseball game once a year just for the thrill of the crowd, the hot dogs and beer, and the sense of personal victory when people who don't know you succeed at what they do. Other sports such as football and basketball (and the worst, golf) are excrutiating for me to watch- I'd rather be hanging by my eyelids. Some sports I really enjoy watching are curling, bullfighting (always rooting for the bull, of course), and sumo wrestling (goooooo Akebono!).

I'm sure my dad, a die-hard fan of sports of all sorts, was disappointed when his eldest son was only interested in taekwondo and rock-climbing and not any of the more competitive sports. I remember him making us watch "Eight Men Out" with the kids whining about how bored and tired we were while he said, "No, wait- watch this- it's where the conspiracy really gets convoluted!" And he made sure to drag us to all of the best ballparks, such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, when on family vacations when I was little. So, I'd been to a Cubs game once before- 12 years ago- and since then one other baseball game- the Reds at Cinergy Parking Garage in Cincinnati two years ago, which inspired me to attempt to attend a game a year.

We left work at noon, and stopped by the Scoundrel's Lounge to drink a few cheap beers. At that point Brooklyn Mick's "I won't drink today" mantra changed to "I won't drink inside the park". We threw back a few- well, not all of us. The four seats went to myself, Brooklyn Mick, Mayo Mick, and the Hooterhumper. Hooterhumper was in training for the Chicago Marathon so he didn't drink beer. But between us three we made up for him, thankfully.

A short train ride later, we strolled into Wrigley like Balki and Cousin Larry from 'Perfect Strangers'. Brooklyn immediately bought us a round, breaking his backup mantra. Oh well, if you ain't going to the ballpark to get drunk, why are you there? :)

Found our seats within the Friendly Confines- front row of the balcony, halfway between home and first base. Wrigley is such an intimate park that it was hard to believe the millions that those players were making. If you've never been there, the first row is separated from the field by a three-foot brick wall, the scoreboard is manual, and the houses across the street all have bleachers on the roof because you can see right into the park. This was Mayo Mick's first baseball game, so I'm glad it was there. Some other city's concrete behemoth wouldn't have left as favorable an impression. We had to explain the rules, so we told her it was just like rounders, except the players don't usually wail on each other with the bats.

So we're watching these grown men play games, and all I can think is "25 million a year... 25 million a year..." It all looked so much more impressive in Cinergy Eastern European Housing Block, when the players were a mile or so away. On one hand, they're playing games for money, and they make more than a hundred schoolteachers. On the other hand, people are willing to pay to go to the game (it's a luxury, not a neccessity), so that money is there anyway, and the owners make SO much more. Plus, you have to play the game in front of millions of people, so you're under incredible scrutiny. So I decided I don't really care what they make. Sports attendance is dying anyway, so maybe more guys are out there spending time with their wives and kids and stuff rather than cussing at the television all day.

I hooted an hollered for the Cubs to win, because hey, this town may be my adopted hometown but ya gotta love a team that hasn't won the world series in pert near a century. Carl Sagan has this theory about how sports appeal to our primal need for tribal identity, and in his book "Billions and Billions" he lists sports mascots along side of Somalian native totems- lions, eagles, rams, etc etc. They're all the same, except the Somalian tribesfolk also have a spirit for diarrhea, and if there's a baseball team with diarrhea as a mascot, then surely it is a Japanese team.

Got to see Sammy Sosa smack a home run off to Irving Park. You can't miss the guy- he's built like a turkey leg, and he just steps up to the plate, does all those hoodoo moves like tapping his feet, lets the first two pitches go by, and then WHACKs that poor ball out of the atmosphere. Then he lumbers around the bases, much to the delight of the fans.

But after he did that, they started walking him! I can't believe it. I guess the players are concerned with who wins- I just wanna see Sammy swat a few dingers into Wisconsin. I wish there was a baseball equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters.

The drunken fellow in front of us was talking about how glad he was that Barry Bonds has tied the home run record, despite the fact that everybody seems to hate Barry Bonds. This guy was just glad that the dumbshmuck who paid $3 million for the record-breaking ball that Mark McGuire hit was now stuck with the ball that set the second-highest record. LOL!

At one point a Pirate hit a home run, and the fan who caught it threw the ball back onto the field. I love that.

The best part of the day was when a fly ball came up our way and out of the scramble came a little five-year-old kid, his face painted with "CUBS" and an American flag, with the ball. If anybody deserves a ball, it's a little kid, idolizing the players in the few short years before he learns of the corruption, drug use, prostitution, spousal abuse, and murder that our "heroes" partake in. It was definitely a 'moment'.

Well, da Cubbies lost, I'm guessing, I was drunker'n Dubya so who knows? The Micks went off to drink some more, and I went home to pass out in preparation for the arrival of Guadalupe for an action-packed weekend of partying hearty. It took me until Monday to post this if that's any indication. I'm glad I got to take part in this fine American tradition and see Sammy Sosa doing something besides challenging me to step up to the plate to take the Pepsi challenge. And, even though Harry Carey wasn't there, our drunken state meant that his legacy was not forgotten. I recommend that you all drink at a beersball game.