When Greg Phelps was down for a visit last year, we went to a couple of UT baseball games together. Traditionally, I’d been a hot-dog-and-Coke guy at the games, but he got a bag of peanuts. Peanuts and baseball. As cliched as it gets…but they do go together! I, in turn, got Bill hooked.

At Disch-Falk, it’s $2-3 for a pretty good-sized bag of peanuts — plenty for two adults to split over the course of the game and be glad that they run out so that they don’t get themselves over-salted.

At Cunningham Stadium in San Diego, the peanuts were $2.75 for a bag about half the size. That would be one thing, but that injustice was piled on top of the fact that, for all of the other Torrero baseball games, admission is free. For UT, we got to pay $7/game. They made somre pretty nice bling out of their opponent…without even counting the concessions.

After Friday’s game, Bill and I stopped in at a grocery store and spent about $3.50 for a 2 lb. bag of peanuts. We split them into four half-pound bags, and we each snuck a bag in to each game. We just rolled them up in our sweatshirts and walked in. On Saturday, we didn’t even get a look from the ticket-lady. On Sunday, she asked me to unroll my sweatshirt. I started to ‘fess up, in my babbling/bumbling sort of way, which, apparently, the ticket lady took as me saying, “Well, okay, but there’s nothing in here.” I had it 3/4 of the way unrolled, and she waved me on along. Bill only got his halfway unrolled. Score!

Today, I was relaying this episode to Benton. Probably not the smartest thing to talk to a six-year-old about breaking a rule (“no food or drink can be brought into the stadium” signs in several places). But, once I’d headed down that path, I decided I might as well turn it into a micro-economics lesson.

So, we started by talking about the consequences if Bill and I had been caught. Benton asked if we would go to jail. I told him that, not only would we not go to jail, we would not even be kicked out of the game. They would just take the peanuts away from us. We then worked through the math to show that, even if we only got one of the four half-pound bags into the stadium over two days, it was still a worthwhile investment. I also pointed out that, if we had not been able to get the peanuts in, we would not have spent the $20 required to buy an equivalent number of small bags of peanuts in the stadium. So, we weren’t really depriving USD of *that* much revenue.

At this point, I also told him about the fact that we were being charged to see the game, when the rest of the USD games this year would be free admission. Admittedly, this was just rationalization on my part. And, forgetting the revenue, USD probably needed to charge admission just to adjust demand. As it was, two out of three of the days (Friday and Saturday), there were 200-300 people who were not able to get into the stadium and had to watch from outside.

I’m digressing. Back to the micro economics lesson…

After the “calculate the risk/cost against the benefit” for the peanuts, we talked about chemical companies and refineries and how they release pollution into the air as part of their processes. Pollution is bad, but the products these companies produce are, in many cases, very good. So, the government charges these companies — fines them, in a sense — based on how much pollution they release into the air. The companies have to calculate that they can sell their finished products for enough to offset the cost of these pollution credits. And, they’re incented (in theory) to find ways to reduce the amount of pollution they release into the air — either by fundamentally changing their processes, or by figuring out a way to capture the pollution to prevent it from dispersing into the air.

Not too surprisingly, I guess, Benton seemed to get it. We actually used a little math there, too, as an example.

I decided I’d pushed things as far as I wanted to — didn’t seem worth getting into a discussion of the debate over how effective these programs are in practice.

Fun kid.

“How did you get on the mound? The Make-A-Wish Foundation?!”

“Burnt orange?! Burnt toast!”

(Heckling Jordan Danks, who opted to come to Texas rather than going in the first round of the MLB draft): “Our freshman (Josh Romanski) is better than your freshman!” (Romanski played left field, pitched 3 shutout innings, DHed, and had several hits, including a home run, during the series)

(Referring to Clay Van Hook): “151 pounds? Sopping wet, maybe!”

When it all comes down to it, there’s no such thing as a bad game of baseball, in my opinion. The weather was great. We met some great people. And, we got to check out some parts of San Diego that we’d missed last time.

The one glitch in the trip was that we mis-read the itinerary for the return trip and showed up at the airport 7 minutes after our flight departed. That delayed our departure a couple of hours. But, even that had an up-side, as that put us on the plane with the UT baseball team. That was pretty cool.

In no particular order, some interesting episodes during the trip — possibly to be elaborated on in a later entry:

• The father of a red-shirt freshman pitcher from Rockwall sat across the aisle from us on the Dallas –> San Diego leg of the trip. His son didn’t actually make the trip, but his parents already had tickets. The father gave Bill his card — he’s an “editorial artist” for The Dallas Morning News. We’re going to do some digging on that. I think his son is Drew Bishop.
• We met a former volunteer assistant coach for the USD team. He is now the assistant coach at a high school in San Diego. Nice guy.
• On Sunday, we sat next to a couple who were from Pasadena. He is retired Air Force, and both of their sons live in Houston — they both attended Rice and are both now doctors. He noticed my brass rat, which sparked a discussion about MIT, as he spent some of his time in the Air Force at Hanscomb and in Cambridge, and worked with a number of MIT folk in the process.
• We walked around the Coronado Hotel, which was pretty interesting. We entered through the “shops” area underground and were there for all of 45 seconds when the fire alarm went off. We walked back outside, and it didn’t look like the main hotel (on top of the shops) was being evacuated, so we went in. The alarm was shut off pretty quickly.
• We walked around La Jolla a bit. The seals were interesting…but the shops really weren’t.

Back to work tomorrow. ’twas a good trip, overall!

I’m going out with my friend and co-worker Bill. We went to a number of games a couple of years ago, decided to buy season tickets last year ($180/seat for 28 home games, plus guaranteed seats for any post-season games at Disch-Falk Field). It’s a steal. We split the cost of two seats. Neither one of us can attend all of the games. So, whichever ones we can’t attend the other one of us gets first dibs at the ticket. I got to take my five-year-old (at the time) to a half-dozen games last year, as well as take other various friends to games. And, Bill and I manage to go to plenty of games together. It works out well.

We also went to San Diego together last year. We both had free airline tickets, and Bill’s sister works for a major hotel chain, so we got a Friends and Family deal at a top-notch hotel in a great location for a ridiculously reasonable price. She wasn’t able to get us a room this year, so we’re going with Priceline. We’re not flexible on the dates, obviously, but we are extremely flexible on the location, and there are not any major events going on in San Diego that weekend, so there are plenty of available hotel rooms. We’re hoping to land a 4-star hotel for a good price, but, if we wind up at a Best Western, we’re fine with that, too. Between the two of us, we can basically bid 12 different times in one shot (two different credit cards each, 3 different zones that we’d be equally happy staying in) for a 4-star. If we can’t get something at a good rate, we’ll drop down to a 3-star. We’ll see. It should be interesting.

After the drought we’ve been having in Central Texas, it just figures that the rain would come in time for the Alumni Game tomorrow. My six-year-old is interested in going — even though it’s not a “real” game — so I hope that works out.

General warning: there will likely be a baseball-centric tone to my posts for the next week or so. I’d like to try to see if I can clearly articulate (and understand) why the game of college baseball appeals to me so much.