Stuff Your Peanuts and Cracker Jack, MLB

F rom the fans’ grandstand perspective, the ideal professional-baseball experience has always gone beyond mere cheering of Texas leaguers, runs scored, double plays, stolen bases, and walk-off home runs. And now, in 2023, of watching stupefied as religious-bigotry groups are honored by team ownership.

Real live baseball-game attendance is also about the stomach — about strapping on the feedbag at the ballpark to enjoy a caloric tsunami. And about the liver, that never-sleeping organ anticipating a few pints of suds once it is through the turnstile.

Tin Pan Alley songwriters Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer nailed it in 1908 when their hit, “Take Me Out to The Ball Game,” mandated that a trip to the stadium required the purchasing of peanuts and Cracker Jack.

Is this where another front in the culture-war counteroffensive might commence? The light bulb goes on: Surely the area of concessions — the lucrative province of beer, hot dogs, soda, pennant flags, programs, and numerous other items of vendor-hawked grub — could prove the unexpected battlefield where fans of the National Pastime might manifest a deserved financial fungool at the Baseball Gods, to punish them for the deliberate offense the Los Angeles Dodgers will show (wage!) this Friday night to (against!) Roman Catholics and women religious (and, frankly, all peoples of all faiths — for what creeds and what worshipers are not fair game in this time of belligerent wokeness?) when the team’s corporate marketeers genuflect to the pancake-makeup men masquerading as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

The idea comes from a co-religionist friend. Irate at the Dodgers’ intentional insult, he called to bemoan the effrontery, but really to spitball a counter-attack idea: encouraging fans, at all Major League venues, to abstain (a nice Catholic word!) from, or cut back on, purchasing brewskis and programs and all other fare found on the bloated and often-bizarre menus of modern ballparks. The suggested economizing would be an expression of contempt, with bite — nothing less than a middle finger of pecuniary protest waved at MLB’s woke leadership, infested by MBA SJWs content to insult fans and a faith by exalting the creepy, XY-chromosomed bogus “sisters.” They thrill to sacrilegiously flipping their birds — and other members — at what millions of us still call Holy Mother Church, and at the wonderful ladies (yeah, a lot of us love them) who dedicated their lives to teach us in parochial schools and care for us in Catholic hospitals and hospices.

My pal’s notion may be far-fetched, given the ingrained cultural throupling of baseball, Ball Park Franks, and Ballantine Beer — a reality that is layered onto the league-wide policy banning fans from squirreling grub into the ballpark. Still, the suggestion gives aggrieved fans — especially papists far afield from Dodger Stadium and the to-be-honored Indulgent Men, from Fenway to Wrigley to the House that Ruth Built (2.0) — the means to rap the knuckles of MLB. To hit the sport’s kowtowing owners and administrative lackeys and marketing mavens where it has always hurt most — in the pocketbook.

Aside from broadcast and cable revenue (right now a thing very much in trouble) and sponsorships, MLB is a glutton for concessions cash, and has every reason to be. Currently, the per-game revenue from food, beverages, and team-related crapola (on average, as there’s a staggering gap between the cash take at Yankee Stadium and Marlins Park) amounts to $3.1 million, an amount dwarfing ticket revenues. And MLB is trying to figure ways to supersize that obese bottom line.

Live in the past if you prefer, but 2023 professional baseball has come a long way from your father’s 1970s day game at Forbes Field.

Indeed it has, in a lot of ways: Because there is no way any franchise in 1970 — or 2010, for that matter — would have had on its payroll a marketing staffer who, even in a drug-induced fevered dream, could have imagined it a corporate benefit to play ball with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or any other hate-steeped group.

What’s a baseball-loving Catholic to do, especially one who has already bought season tickets?

Spend less at the stadium, that’s what. If MLB could feel a hit in concessions revenue, and connect the dots to the Dodgers’ bareback embrace of the whiskered, gay, ersatz Sisters, maybe we’d have no more of this cultural insulting in 2024. Maybe by then a day at the ballpark will not have to be a day of woke sermonizing. Or religious insult.

Yeah, if there were to be fewer sales, the hawkers (who work on commission) would take a hit. But then, after all, we live in a time when elementary-school kids are being groomed into changing their gender without mommy and daddy knowing. Even so, having been a vendor at Yankee Stadium, I am not too sure the typical ballpark denizen — or even the untypical one who might have rosary beads in his pocket — would sign up for my pal’s proposal.

But maybe they would. After all, in early May, right after the Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light keg exploded, fans at Fenway Park appeared to make the Bud concession stand a ghost town. Maybe protest against woke corporate types, even those who own Major League Baseball franchises, has become hip.

Hip enough to watch a game without a cold one in your hand? A long shot. One fewer brewski? Maybe. Let us pray — Hail Marys to be specific. And do so assured that this ancient Catholic prayer to a gentle woman, the Mother of God — the very woman in essence mocked by these hairy masquerading bigots — a woman who is the model for real Sisters, of Charity, of Life, of Mercy, of Carmelites, Dominicans, Ursulines, Maryknolls, and dozens more religious orders — is a prayer that would stick in the throats of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. And maybe even in those of the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the lords of Major League Baseball.