Section 214

Thirty-one seasons. Section 214, upper deck, third base side. I make eleven dollars an hour and I'd do it for less, which I have never told the front office. People think an usher watches the game. An usher watches the section. I'm looking at you. I'm looking at the guy who's had four beers by the fourth and whether he's the fun kind or the other kind. I'm looking at the family with the little kid who's about to lose interest and the mom who's about to lose patience. I'm looking at the couple on a first date who don't know the rules and are pretending they do. I've seen maybe forty innings of actual baseball in thirty-one years. Never seen a home run land. I hear it and I turn around and it's already over. What I have seen. A proposal in 214 that went bad. She said no. Not loud, just no, and they sat there for the rest of the game because he'd paid for the seats and neither of them knew how to leave. I brought them each a lemonade in the seventh. On the house. I didn't ask the office. A guy who came every Tuesday home game for nine years, same seat, row F, kept score in a spiral notebook with a mechanical pencil. Never spoke to anybody. Then one Tuesday he wasn't there, and the next, and I went to the office and they said there was no forwarding anything, the tickets just weren't renewed. I still look at row F on Tuesdays. Somebody else sits there. Nice lady. She doesn't keep score. Rain delays. I love a rain delay. Everybody under the overhang, strangers talking, kids running the concourse, the grounds crew doing the tarp like a dance they've practiced, which they have. Baseball is the only sport where the stopping is part of it. A foul ball, one time, came all the way up. That doesn't happen in 214. It's too high, too far. But this one did, in a game against somebody in July, and it came down in row C, and a woman about seventy caught it barehanded. Clean. Just reached up and took it out of the air. The whole section stood up. She looked at it like she'd been handed a bill, and then gave it to the nearest kid, and sat back down and went back to her scorecard.

I asked her later. She said she'd played softball for forty years and the ball wasn't going to do anything she hadn't seen. The team's changed names twice. The park's had three sponsors. They put in a big screen and the sound went from something you could think over to something you can't. I'm sixty-eight now and my knees know every one of the four hundred and twelve steps up to 214. But the front office has a young guy now who's talking about "guest experience associates" and iPads, and last month he asked me what I do exactly, in a way that meant something. I told him I watch the section. He wrote it down.