Scenes from a Pirates Game

My friends and I attended a Pittsburgh Pirates game last night. What follows are snippets of some of the most enjoyable moments.

The Pirates actually won. Not only that, but they got the lead in the first and never lost it. What an unexpected surprise

It was "Free Extreme Hat Night". My hat was indeed free, but I think the extremeness (as signified by the silver flames on the brim) has caused some of the threads to come loose.

A beer vendor climbed all the way to where we were sitting, about four rows down from the last row in the stadium, calling, "Beer here! Cold beer here! Get it now because it's too hot for me to walk back up again!"

My one friend decided that the beer vendor had a point and so purchased a beer from him so the vendor's efforts in the 80+ degree heat weren't in vain.

I had my first Primanti's Bros. Sandwich ever. I went with roast beef and cheese, which I guess is a relatively new flavor. I must say, the sandwich was tasty and delightful. At first I thought the $6 was a little pricey, but was so exepensive because it was staudim food. Then I paid the same amount later at Kings for a burger and fries. So I guess the Primanti's was actually affordable.

As each Pirates player went to bat, the Jumbotron showed scenes of that player posing with a painting about themselves. I thought it was sweet that they would let second grade classes paint these and show them at the games. Then I realized that they were painted by the players themselves. I guess when you make millions of dollars a year, you have no reason to paint inside the lines.

It doesn't matter how bad you are at batting, the Jumbotron operators always find a way to cherry pick your stats so you're batting over .300. Things like "Batting .383 in his last 16 starts against Right-Handed Pitchers at PNC Park" (ignoring that his overall average is around .250).

The nightly pierogie race was going well after the pierogies beamed down from what appeared to be the Starship Enterprise, but when they were coming down the final leg of the race, Oliver Onion said mean things about Chester Cheese's sister, causing Chester to headbutt Oliver in the chest and take him out. This infraction allowed Saul Saurkraut to sprint to victory. Nothing like topical humor acted out by anthropomorphic pierogies.

So there was this guy, possibly drunk, weilding a plastic pirate sword who came to our section and, by requesting that we provide him with certain letters, coaxed the crowd to spell out P-I-R-A-T-E-S. After Mr. Sword left, another man jumped up and shouted "Give me a C!" which the crowd quickly provided. They also acquiesced to his requests for an H, two Es, an S, and yet another E. When the man asked, "What does that spell?" the crowd ponded for a moment before enthusiastically cheering "CHEESE!" The second man shouted thank you and sat back down. Our group had a debate over whether we could incite the crown to cheer P-A-N-O-P-T-I-C-O-N, but we decided they probably wouldn't know how to pronouce it.

The guy sitting two rows in front of me had his wedding ring tattooed on. That's pretty hardcore.

During a brief debate about how to make baseball more interesting, we decided either on placing random land mines in the outfield, or replacing all the players with Oompa Loompas.

Ah, no wonder baseball is America's favorite passtime.