Unnecessary Drop

• Mets: 5
• Phillies: 6
• Sold: 216 beers, 6 sodas

In Philadelphia's ballpark I'm identifiable by a vendor number of "78" in bold red letters stitched to my yellow Russell jersey. Each of us has our own, as if we're members of our own team racing around in parallel competition amid the spectators, and it's supposed to help ID us in the event of a poorly handled transaction or customer complaint. One Mets-supporting numbnut told me bluntly, apropos of nothing, "I don't like that number." No reason, really, just didn't like it, liked other numbers, just not that one. And so you don't, my man.

I thought to ask him if he was one of those geeky sorts that had a peculiar affinity for prime numbers, but then I would have had to explain what a prime number is, and he wouldn't have gotten it anyway. Other New Yorkers objected the the $6.75 price point for beers -- the same people who pay two grand for a shoebox space in a tenement -- when it's $9.25 at New York's stadia.

They were really spoiling for confrontation, in the same way they seem to enjoy standing up and jeering the locals when a Met makes it to first base on a walk. A series of similar interactions with these loutish characters reminded me that I really love New Yorkers, but only when they stay in New York. It also added to my poor mood at the way the vend itself had gone.

First, I gotta explain that beyond the basics -- carry a bucket of beer, circulate among the people, advertise via bellowed call, collect money, dispense product -- there are in fact subtleties to beer vending. (Indulge my insistence on this.) A critical area could be called "stadium layout management," or more simply, "Where to Go and When." There's a particular amount of money out there in the seats, unknowable in exact amount, and a certain number of vendors to draw it out of their pockets. Not at vendors make the same amount, and those that pull in the highest commission go where they can get the biggest slice of the pie for themselves.

The simplest thing to do is to sell to the area closest to your home commissary, those load-up rooms dotted on the various sides and levels of the stadium. This obviously saves valuable time. A more advanced move is to weigh the benefits of travel, forgo the nearby customers, and head elsewhere. The Drop (from upper-deck commissary to lower-deck patrons) is a common move, one I'd made a habit of employing in Philadelphia each and every game. I'd started there by climbing up to the vertiginous heights of the sky-scraping 400-level seats, but denser crowds and better tips on the lower level have left me mostly taking the elevator to the right-field bleachers right below. It took more energy to transport, but it was worth it.

I may have limited myself unnecessarily in this approach, though. While I fell back on this trick game after game, I have today found that on sellout days like today, there are still sales to be made up top. I should have changed course about three innings earlier, when a poorly timed drop left me toting two cases of Coors around the long rows along the first base side with hardly any sales to show for it. Competitors hawking Coors were everywhere; each row seemed to have it's own salesman of the Silver Bullet Beer. I was no longer so alone in employing The Drop technique.

I should have identified this and changed course quickly, but a myopia born of habit had me stubbornly continuing to pace the low-altitude rows. Only eventually, when I met whole sections of under-watered buyers in the high-deck sections, did I realize this basic error. For the last inning and a half, I hucked that hoppy stuff in twos and fours at a pace that would have had me happy by the end of it all. But there I was stuck at the same sales total as the night before: 9 1/2 cases sold, and ruing all the more when I found that I'd been out-smarted and -sold by at least a couple of vendors I usually beat, on a kind of sellout day that only happens once in a while. And then the self-recrimination set in.