It might not be obvious, based on my ongoing critique, but I'm actually kinda into American life.

Don’t
think me a player hater for revisiting this. Listen: baseball’s
awesome. I can remember chilling with Prince Fielder, Johnny Damon, and
rising Milwaukee Brewers star

Seth McClung
in South Beach on Super Bowl Weekend ’07 and thinking: These cats are
living the life. They’re among the world’s best at the game most men
would die to play for a living.

But would every kid want
to play it? Today’s kids? Ya gotta wonder if tomorrow’s youngsters will
be into baseball at a level that matches 20th century interest. Never
mind that baseball plays out as challengingly deliberate for anyone
under 20, the sport has become perversely expensive.

My last Dodger game
played out as the same amazing live event I’ve dug almost all of my
life. Cliff Lee was the same beastly hurler he’s been all season.
Closer Takashi Saito
displayed the unpredictability that’s given Joe Torre headaches all
season. It’s a nutty, up-and-down game, and the fans still feel it.

But
the expense of going to the ballpark has become damn-near prohibitive.
My crew’s four seats were worth $160. Parking another $15. Unremarkable
food ran $60 and my single large, domestic beer ran $11.50. A bottle of
water was $5.75. A week later, I saw Gilberto Gil and Devendra Banhart
at the Hollywood Bowl. It unnerved me that beer was relatively cheap at
$7.50 and water $3.

Now, MLB apologists will at this point say that  the Hollywood Bowl gets help in keeping its prices down. But owners get corporate welfare and that all-important anti-trust exemption
is nothing like a burden, either. Still, baseball’s overlords can’t
figure a way to get a family of four in and out of their entertainment
product for under two-and-a-half bills? Are you shitting me?

Pardon me if I think of baseball as an enterprise that targets elites. As Reagan McMahon
pointed out in her innovative book Revolution in the Bleachers, the
cost of all-important camps and club teams has risen so that the best
American can’t even consider the game a realistic option.

Anyone who watched the College Baseball World Series saw how the the diamond's throwback exclusive ways are playing out. Anyone who’s watched how the Dodgers’ “bargain” plan, its $35 all-you-can-eat
bleachers ticket, knows that it amounts to a bunch of poor Mexicans
penned up just beyond the outfield. On this fourth of July weekend,
while MLB prepares for Mark McGuire’s dodgy return
to the game, maybe you should consider just how far the national
pastime has gotten from its origins in the hardscrabble fields of an
America the game hardly seems to recognize anymore.