HowieCast: From the Hart

• Red Sox: 4
• Orioles: 0
• Sold: 115 Corona Lights

Now that I've risen high up on the Camden Yards list (#37 of about 60), I have an outside chance of getting beer during the bigger games. Yesterday I should have taken Heineken, but I made a mistake and took peanuts instead. Which can be the most fun of vends, but it hurt my take-home total for sure. "Listen to me," Shakey energetically told me before tonight's game, starting to amp into his frenetic game-time persona. "The name of the game is beer. Maybe once in a while something else beats it, but nine times out of ten beer's gonna be the thing to take."

So tonight I picked the only downstairs Corona -- $5.75 for 12 ounces, instead of $6.75 for 16 ounces of Bud, Coors, or Miller. Neal snagged the only upstairs Corona ticket, and it wasn't long before he dropped down to my level and nabbed some of my sales.

But neither of us was in the big money: he sold three and a half, I was just short of 5. "Kinda tough on you when you don't find a rhythm," he said.

Yep, I said. Never found a choice spot in the crowd either. All I was doing was running around drilling for core samples -- home plate, outfield, baselines -- and never hit any ore.

After the game, I caught Howard Hart while he was checking out and recorded him discussing one of his favorite books, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker: