I had a ticket to the All-Star Game in St. Louis last night, having won two in a sweepstakes before Christmas and before moving here, and indeed, I used the privileges that such tickets provided. I hawked one on E-Bay just as the demand was the highest, and used the other one for myself. The reason I didn’t say that I had these tickets until now, even going as far with the subterfuge as the pre-schedule two posts on this blog at times when the game was going on last night, is that there are a few people in this world who can link my identity and this medium. I would have gotten phone calls from relatives that I never even knew I had.
If you thought you heard a lot of boos during President Obama’s ceremonial first pitch, you weren’t imagining things. From people that I’ve talked to that watched it on TV, they figure that between a quarter and a third of the crowd were booing, based on their seeing and hearing it on TV. But it was even more than that — A cheer is louder than a boo; it would take a lot more boos than cheers from the sound from both to be equal. It seemed to me that half the people there were booing, including myself. And no, I don’t buy the bullshit that it was because he was wearing a Chicago White Sox jacket. The Cardinals and White Sox have never met each other in a World Series (though it almost happened in 2005; I was hoping for that mainly to put Cubs fans in the world’s biggest Catch-22), and probably haven’t had more than three interleague series since interleague play begain. It couldn’t have been anything other than political. Rush Limbaugh’s theory is that the Obamaites had him go out in a Sox jacket to rationalize what they knew would be boo birds. I think it’s right, but that effect would have been better served with a Cubs jacket. But nobody wouldn’t have taken the President, a self-admitted Sox fan, seriously in a Cubs jacket.
Why didn’t John Ulett, Busch’s regular PA announcer, do the All-Star Game? Also, I would have loved to have seen what is done during opening day at Busch done for the All-Stars, and that is have them all bought in through the wagon gate in Clydesdale-drawn wagons with “Here Comes to King” playing on the stadium organ.
