Fool me twice ...

The Royals are trying to go to a ticketless system this year. Under most circumstances I’m in favor of using computers to cut down on paper waste, especially as the tickets haven’t been all that attractive for the past two or three years. They even offered us $50 to try the new system.

However, we declined. Here’s why:

1.  If we wanted to sell or otherwise transfer our e-tickets to anyone, we’d have to give the Royals all their contact information. So this starts to smell like the franchise’s attempt to increase its marketing database.

2.  The $50 originally sounded like it would be a refund or a discount, but then it turned out to be a gift card. And as we all recall from their fabulous gift card giveaway in the wake of bulldozing our seats, the damn things are only good in the team store. You can’t even buy food with them.

3. And this one’s the real kicker: the Royals are too messed up to ever pull this off. The franchise has a intensely well-deserved reputation for treating its fans with incompetent disrespect. Case in point: we were supposed to get All Star ticket info in September, and it finally arrived last week (January according to the calendar on the wall). Was it really four months worth of difficult to make sure the Sports Authority got first dibs on all the tickets it wanted?

So the ticketless thing just conjures nightmare visions of being trapped outside the ballpark unless and until someone on the staff can be summoned to straighten out the almost-completely-inevitable problems with the system. I’m sure we all remember being marched around the ballpark and regaled with the finer qualities of Lou Piniella while waiting for the factotum armada to straighten out a fail with old fashioned they’ve-had-decades-to-get-this-right paper tickets.

I think we’ll let them use someone else as guinea pigs for this one.

Hooray for free crap!

The Royals have released their promotional schedule for this summer. I don’t have our ticket information in front of me, so I’m not sure what we do and don’t have tickets for. But some of the highlights include:

• A Jackie Robinson T-shirt
• A thumb band (because I don’t know how I’ve lived this long with an unbanded thumb)
• Focus on Driving night (how about Focus on Not Drinking So Much night?)
• Alex Gordon Gold Glove Replica night (what, no bobble glove?)
• Pine Tar Bat night (sadly it’s one of the Yankees games)
• Mystery Gift Cards (yes, that’s really a thing)
• Mr. Royal Retro Lunchbox (on Retro Night! Hooray for Retro Night!)
• Moose-takas Antlers (yes, that too is a thing)

And of course the usual parade of caps, T-shirts, Sluggerrr crap and the like.

Better late than never

The ballpark blessing went well this year.

The weather in particular was exceptionally cooperative. We’ve done blessings in thick snow more times than I can remember, but this year it was close to downright balmy. Indeed, if it hadn’t been windy it wouldn’t have seemed cold at all.

Mom brought a blessing sign as usual, and she also handed out film canisters of blue and gold glitter that were great fun to toss to the wind.

I must admit that I miss the days when the George Brett statue was out front rather than behind the fence. Hanging the sign on Brett’s neck didn’t prove to be better juju for the team, but it seemed more fitting than just pinning it to the wire. Still, being a Royals fan teaches one to make do with what one has.

After the ceremony we got food from Dean & Delucca. The videos of choice were Major League and a chat between Kevin Costner and some retired players (including George Brett) from the special features on the Field of Dreams DVD.

No! No! Noooooooo!

The Onion knows what it feels like. Of course in our ballpark it looks like this:

Moneyball is here

The disc has deleted scenes, a documentary, the whole nine yards (or nine innings, given the subject).

We need to get together and watch it on the big screen. What day / time works for everyone?

We need a blog

And now we have one.

Still awhile before pitchers and catchers report, but I thought I’d get a blog started so we can share baseball thoughts.