Mother's Day

• Yankees: 5
• Orioles: 3
• Sold: 164 pretzels

Visiting relatives this morning left me running a touch late out the door to Baltimore, and unexpected backups on 295** sealed my fate. I showed up late to the vendor callout and had to wait until the end of the list before I got to pick. No selection, actually: I was given an assignment to sell pretzels on the lower deck and had to make the most of it.

Pretzels are terrible, really, overall the worst thing to sell in the stadium. They connote no nostalgia, evoke no associations to the game, prompt no tips, and are cheap -- three bucks apiece -- so the commission payout is lower. A bad deal for vending all around. My standard call for them is, "Fresh Hot Pretzel!" but they're not really fresh. They're pulled out of a big cardboard box, spread them out on a baking sheet, spritzed with a butter spray and hailed with excessive amounts of large-granule salt (so that they appear excavated straight from a salt mine), and tossed in an oven for ten minutes or so. I tote around 30 at a time in a metal box reading SUPERPRETZEL on the front, heated by a little can of sterno.

The real magic is that out of this method, and of such poor materials, is crafted such a tasty item: ideally browned to a shiny light crust on the outside housing a doughy, chewy interior. Add mustard -- and de-salt to a more consumable sodium level -- and you've got a meal. Sort of.

"Buy your Mom a pretzel!" didn't really work as a call, so I had to call it a day after 167 sold.

I actually saw a few families out there, not unusual for any Sunday, and a few more mothers than normal. It reminded me of a Mother's Day a few years ago, when Howard Hart, a lifetime vendor with a voluble streak, took note of it in the loadup room:

"When you go back out there, you'll see out there in the seats a couple of little old ladies sitting there in the shade about a third of the way down the baseline -- just a couple of them together in nice flowered dresses and big hats -- and you know they never go to the baseball game normally, don't even know anything about baseball, never would even be out otherwise except that it's Mother's Day, and you know that this is a special day for these sweet older ladies and it's just...it's nice, y'know?"