I sure do. I remember taking the 3 hour ride as a kid to the ballpark knowing I was in for a good 8 hours of major league baseball. It was a fun thing to think about and prepare for. I was told ahead of time by my parents or older siblings to ration out my thinking about what I wanted to eat and when I wanted it. So don’t blow the whole load at one time or I might be hungry by 6PM if I started too early. Sometimes they had a twi-night doubleheader and started at 4PM or 5PM with the first game which took you until midnight.
You get to the game and you know you will see about every player on the roster in a doubleheader. You buy two scorecards and a pencil which together cost about 60 cents at one time and found your seat. You scoured the rosters numbers as they didn’t print the starters name on the line-up card and you checked out all the starting pitchers for the other games. Yes, today’s schedule and starting pitchers were included in the card.
The scoreboard watching was more fun, at least I thought, because you saw them remove a zero and you knew they were about to inform everyone that a team had scored some runs. In those days marketing was not as prevalent and there was really not a “sea of red” across the stadium. People brought binoculars to look around and get a close look at the players.
The game starts and everyone across the stadium had at least one person in their group keeping score. People just did that and now it appears to be a lost art as all the information is on the jumbotrons. So you watch game one and get some peanuts and a hot dogs along with a drink. Now that it is over you have 30 minutes between games to get your line-up card ready and use the bathrooms. In those days you could send a kid out by himself and not worry as much as people do today.
Game 2 is ready to begin so back in your seat and you do it all over again except this game it might be some ice cream and another hot dog with a cold soda on the menu. Total of 8 hours later it is time to go home and it has been a good day for baseball and if your team won two games it was a great day of baseball. Tickets for field level were about $6.00 a piece.
Now we have some level of greed going on. Traditional doubleheaders are a thing of the past. They have to have day-night ones so they can charge you twice to come through the gates. I am not just going to blame it on the owners for this as it takes a whole group of people to have this happen. With today’s salaries they have to make money to pay them. If 40,000 pay twice instead of once that is a good chunk of change.
I miss the traditional doubleheaders.
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Today the Cardinals have a day/night doubleheader which I will enjoy through the wonders of television. Another nostalgic fact was that in olden days there was ONE game on during the week and that was Saturday afternoons.
Cardinals need to get both games today.
