Beer And Baseball Stadiums

Image: Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

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Here I am at Shea Stadium on the first round of a beer-tasting tour of selected ballparks. It's the fourth inning, the sun is shining bright, and the grandstands in right are packed with fans slugging back the golden brew.

So I'm wondering about the guy next to me. He's already stacked up six jumbo cups and is flagging down a vendor for No. 7.

"Sure, I'm a little buzzed," he says, "but nothing to write home about." Yeah, I guess you could get a little buzz from 96 fluid ounces.
   
He says he's celebrating his 47th birthday. He looks as if he has decided to drink a pint for each year. He's wearing satin gym shorts, a big gold pinkie ring, and some morning-after stubble on his chin. No shirt.
   
"Guys come to the ballpark to watch baseball, look at girls, get a tan," he says. "Nobody's here to get drunk."
   
I ask him what brand he's drinking.
   
"It's beer," he says, troweling some Mexitan Dark Tanning Oil onto his chest. "What's the difference?"
   
How's it taste?
   
"Taste! Nobody tastes stadium beer. It tastes like nothing. It doesn't have a taste. Taste! I don't want taste. I want beer."
   
He's got a point. You don't often get much choice at ballparks. You want Pilsner Urquell, you have to send out for it. (Although Shea does stock Grolsch and Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen draft). Ballpark beer seems designed just to flow through you. It may, in fact, have important medicinal qualities in that it so successfully flushes out ballpark hotdogs. Ballpark beer is … well, it's wet.
   
At Wrigley Field in Chicago, they've got some real beer drinkers. My cousin Rick is one. He suggests we go slumming in the bleachers.

Cousin Rick tells me that to appreciate bleacher beer I've got to look like a bleacher bum. He outfits me in a Hawaiian shirt with a hideous life of its own, and jams that would have made Oedipus grateful to be blind. No one else in the bleachers looks remotely as stylish.

The Cubs are playing the Dodgers. "L.A. used to have a perfect pitcher to drink beer to," says the bum behind us. "Know who I mean?" He means Tim Belcher.

It's hot. It's humid. It's time for an Old Style. Cousin Rick takes a sip. "It reminds me of British lager," he says.

How's that?

"It's lukewarm."

We order a couple of Budweisers, which are only slightly colder than our hotdogs. At six bucks, they're also exactly half the price of the large cup of Miller Lite I had at Dodger Stadium in April.

This Bud tastes flat, like it's been sitting in Al Capone's vault since Prohibition. (Maybe they should have left it in Spuds MacKenzie). I don't get it. Why can't a Bud in the bleachers taste like a Bud at the bar?

My Bud seems to get sweeter by the inning. I gaze into the cup and discover that the seven-year-old on my right has been decorating it with caramel corn. I'm reminded of the national brew of Zambia. In the capital of Lusaka, before opening a bottle you're supposed to turn it upside down to check for "floaters." That's a Zambian euphemism for beer bugs.

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