Red Sox III

• Red Sox: 3
• Nationals: 9
• Sold: 15 cases of beer, 17 nut/Crackerjack, 28 water

Finally, the breakthrough game. Not for the Nationals, who won big, but for my sales. Got there early, rolled through four pre-game cases, and kept moving it through a fairly long seven innings. Predictions by one vendor that the visiting Bostonians might have tapped their travel budgets, resulting in down sales, proved untrue. It was Thursday, the weather continued to hold nicely, and a third straight stadium attendance record was set. I've never sold so much beer at a baseball game: 15 cases, providing almost all of my $445 in commissions, and with the tips I was up close to $700 territory. Quite nice for three-and-a-half hours of work; the best hourly rate you can get short of degreed professional work, or swindling. And as much fun as you can have standing up.

"Is it always like this?" asked one Bostonian as I furiously popped the tops off a series of bottles.

Not at all, I said. You should be here for the Cincinnati games, when it takes me all night to sell what I just unloaded in the past 20 minutes. And those twenty minutes went on over and over again, dropping two cases of Bud Light on one row, heading back to the support room for another 48, handing those out (and moving so aggressively my fingers were scraped and bloodied on the bottles sharp crimping) , collecting bonus money for it, and doing it over and over again, apron pockets fattening as the night moves on.

This is what I'd been hoping for during those dull slow vends of April and May, when I felt like more an intrusion on the sightlines than someone doing anyone any good. The constant motion and compressed sense of time is the fun part. "Here, take this, you're working hard!" is something I'll hear once in a while when getting a hefty tip. But it's the easiest back-breaking labor I've ever done, when time is a factor and fingers are raised to order the next row up, and the next row after that, until I can't even get to them at all before running dry. How can it be work when it's this much fun? Sometimes I can hardly believe I get paid to work at the ballpark.

Beerman Neal was so excited he called me up after midnight to compare notes. "Tonight felt like RFK!"

And it did feel like those three years when the team was new in old RFK stadium, especially the first year, when those home games would draw audiences that were thrumming with excitement about being there, at seeing something new! The team brought in long-suffering baseball afficianados who'd tired of the drive to Baltimore, and the novelty lured curiosity hounds intrigued by the hype of the new team. The numbers were bigger -- I remember hitting 13 cases of beer on only the third time I'd ever vended, and an average Tuesday night was 8 cases -- but it was also the newness of it all. And the newness of suddenly finding a bucket of brew in my hands, and feeling as if was attending the biggest party in town, seven nights a week when the team was there. And coming home so wired I couldn't get to sleep for hours and staying awake into the balmy nights.

The past three games were like that, and they're what I'd hoped the new stadium would be. I'd heard the Baltimore vendors talk about five straight years of Camden Yard sellouts: every night was another dozen cases and a wad of cash in hand, and that endless happy sweaty labor. But that began to draw down a dozen years ago, when Camden's novelty started to fade and the team started a streak of 12 straight seasons of losing that has yet to end.

But Nationals Park's sellout streak lasted exactly one game -- the game after last season's opener was cold and half-full -- and it became clear very quickly that this was no Camden. Nationals Park has seemed on almost every game night like a reception occupying twice too large a banquet hall, and suffered for the empty remaining space, with conversation made difficult from all the echoing. Parties gain energy from bumping elbows, when we're crammed in all at one point. Baseball games too.

And the sad part is, even as I was in the middle of it tonight, I could see it ending. We won't have a Nationals game like that again this year. They'll be back on Friday, July 3rd against Atlanta, an Independence day weekend which will be pretty good (but which I'll miss altogether for vending, to be at a family event), but after that it will be back to sparse crowds and three loads of beer during the weeknights. Down from the cloud.
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