April 9: Camden Yards

• Detroit ----- 2
• Baltimore -- 6

My life as a beer vendor isn't limited to the confines of Washington's RFK Stadium; when the Nationals are away I supplement my vending with ocassional field trips up the BW Parkway to Baltimore's Camden Yards. These are irregular jaunts, usually limited to Orioles' near-packed-house series with the Red Sox and Yankees, an empty weekend or two, and a big one-shot event like Opening Day.

In Baltimore, where the team has had 60 years to establish its relationship with the city, Opening Day sends a ripple through downtown. The Eutaw Street corridor was draped in banners and orange and black balloons, and clusters of people were collecting here and there, chatting excitedly about the game. Maybe it's because RFK is separated from the business core of DC, but that sort of energy doesn't swirl around the Nats quite yet.

After showing up early to fill out some paperwork and receive a vending uniform from Camden's HR department, I had some hours to kill and so spent it on a cold stroll through town. One shopkeeper, taking note of my employee-issue Orioles baseball cap, said: "In town for the game?"

Yes, that's what I'm here for.

"Ready to be disappointed, then," he said.

I've found this sort of fatalism to be common in Baltimore, a city that has reason to resort to the refuge of the disgruntled sports fan: blaming the owner. Peter Angelos -- a money-mad Greek who in an earlier age would have done well to become a despotic shipping tycoon instead of an opportunistic asbestos litigator -- has managed to turn the team into an utter dysfunction zone by consistently spinning sows' ears from silk purses, and creating so controlling an environment that vendors are forbidden from wearing shorts early in the season, no matter the weather. Long black pants only.

When are we allowed to go to shorts? I asked one of the vending managers.

"Whenever Angelos says we can let you," she said glumly from behind the counter, dirisively emphasizing his name. The serfs are unhappy in the Angelos Kingdom.

The energy of Camden's home Opener, though, still percolated. The vendors began to aggregate in the basement room of the old warehouse building that forms the backdrop for right field, and the volume rose with them. Many of these vendors have grown old with the team, having sold beer in Baltimore for 15 years or more, and a grizzled few have histories that extend back to Memorial Stadium. This is another thing that is largely missing from Washington and its third-year baseball club: institutional memory.

I know plenty of these vendors, who come down the pike to double up on vending work at RFK, but as a big-game-only mercenary I'm still somewhat on the outside here: number 56 on a seniority list of 60, which keeps the Beerman out of beer for the foreseeable future. Today I was to be Pretzel Boy, vendor of cooked and buttered dough pebbled with gravel-sized rocks of salt. And only $2.75 per! Crappy for commissions, but priced to appeal to the penny-pinching upperdeck market for whom a $4.50 hot dog is too great an expense.

I grabbed the big metal bucket and started by bound up and down row after row of the upper deck, bellowing, "Superpretzel!" and "It's Pretzel time!" and looking closely for finger-raised signs of sale. Grab the warm pretzel with tongs, shove product into paper sleeve, toss them the mustard squirter if they want something on it.

"No, mustard," they said. "Why is this is in the red ketchup bottle?" Because they were out of yellow bottles and that's what they gave me. Working at RFK has gotten me used to vending supply rooms that were out of the supplies they were built to provide.

I try and continue to appear cheerful when they hold out their hand to recieve the quarter change. People will tip a beerman all day and into the night for lugging the foamy stuff into the bleachers, but they same relationship doesn't typically carry over to the food and soda vendors no matter what kind of sweat you're obviously working up. I looked over at the beer vendors in the next row and felt a sort of longing, like a nine-year-old who knows he could hack sixth grade but is still stuck in third. The beermen were readily establishing relationships with their happy customers, because the beerman is an iconic stadium character, while a grown man selling pretzels is sort of a dunce.

The other problem with a cooked product like pretzels is that you only reload as fast as the kid in the kitchen bothers to heat them up. Every round I take out I'm doing what I can to shave seconds off my sell time, while I come home to an empty oven. Honey, I want to yell, what have you been doing while I was at the office?

By the time the ninth inning is starting and I've peddled my sixth load, it doesn't matter anymore that the supply room is out of pretzels altogether. I split the seventh with the other Pretzel vendor on the upperdeck and sell a few more (bringing the tally to 187 units sold) before the game is over in a win for the home team and 44,000 happy Baltimoreans spill out of the stadium to continue drinking at a row of bars across the street. There I spent a few minutes conferring with a few of the other vendors there, amid piles of beer bottles and the din of hair-band rock blaring out of overcranked speakers, before heading back to the land inside the Beltway. Another honest day of work completed.