Another swing at it

Kids and ballparks: Was there a game going on?

I have always heard the past is prologue. Well, as my father used to say, I’m fixin’ to find out.

By the time you read this (ominous sounding, huh?) I will know or be painfully aware of whether my previous experiences with small children and baseball games are consistent across time.

The Lovely Mrs. Smith and I planned to join our oldest son, his wife and (most importantly) his two young daughters at the home season opener for the St. Louis Cardinals.

In advance of the big day, I imagined it will either be a magical experience the memory of which will last a lifetime or a quick trip through a few of the Circles of Hell. Potentially both. At the same time.

I say this because I am a hardened combat veteran of taking small children to large events generally and baseball games specifically.

All I can say is it’s a great process if you don’t weaken but do lower your expectations.

An aside here: Whatever the event you take your young children to — sports, circus, wedding, coronation, funeral, whatever — realize your sole focus will be on them and not whatever it is a lot of people paid good money to witness.

This focus will be a frequently vain attempt to keep them from turning from the cute, cuddly, delightful little bundles of joy they typically are into loud, grouchy wolverines with a toothache.

Also, we have a name for people who glare at folks trying desperately and failing to calm a screaming toddler. No, not that name, though we will certainly think it. The name is “childless.”

Yes, like so many others, I was such a great parent before I had kids.

My first swing at taking young children to a game coincidentally also happened to be in St Louis and involved our oldest son and his oldest sister.

This was back when my wife was just coming out of the “my husband is so smart and so clever and all his ideas are wonderful and he knows exactly what he’s doing” stage. Which was probably a good thing for everyone.

Still, she did sign off on the whole idea of a baseball game, so who’s the greater fool — the fool or the one who follows him?

The game itself was … not great. The Cardinals were in a “rebuilding” year that would eventually cost their manager his job, so he was, to paraphrase, an unemployed man walking.

They were playing the New York Mets, whose manager was certifiable. At one point during the season he would be thrown out of a game for arguing a correct call and then try to return to the dugout from the clubhouse wearing a fake moustache.

This was also St. Louis in the summer, so it was hotter than the surface of the sun and muggier than a steam bath.

We discovered fairly rapidly that the only way to keep the kids from going full bat guano and stay long enough to justify the cost of parking, let alone the tickets, was to make repeated trips to the concession stand.

We went through hot dogs, hamburgers, nachos (the super messy kind with melted processed cheese food), candy (cotton and otherwise), popcorn, big soft pretzels, chicken fingers, barbecue and soft ice cream in a small batting helmet.

Would have been easier if I’d just gone to the counter and said “I’ll take two of everything. Do you have a cart?”

Even with all that, we only made five innings. Which was just enough time to see the Mets hit into a double play made possible when two runners tried to occupy second base at the same time.

Apparently their manager was as good at coaching as he was at disguises.

We wound up taking the kids back to the hotel and hosing all the ice cream, etc., off in the shower. The next day we went to the zoo and let them swim in the hotel pool. All in all, a great trip they still talk about. Particularly the soft ice cream.

I departed hoping for basically the same thing this week. A wonderful time without a little disaster just isn’t as colorful. Scars are, after all, tattoos with better stories.

So if the past is prologue, the future looks if not entirely shiny, at least very, very interesting.