When Kevin made his offer, it became apparent to me almost immediately that what my sister calls “the family touch of OCD” was going to be a big factor in my season ticket experience. I couldn’t let any of these tickets go to waste. I knew that I could make it to every game, but as for the second ticket – I just don’t know that many sports fans, even casual ones, let alone the kind that would or even could go to every game in the long season, but I also knew that it would nag at me if even one ticket went unused.
How was I going to fill that extra seat every night? 81 games is a lot, and when the homestands are seven to twelve games long, it can really impact your social life. So I decided to make it my social life, and I decided that I was going to take a different person to every single game. I embarked on a campaign to invite everyone I knew and a lot of people I didn’t. I hustled all the time to find people to go with – I took the station agent from my BART stop, I took a Facebook acquaintance’s visiting mom, I took the drummer from my dad’s old jazz band, I took an ex-girlfriend’s husband; I took people I hadn’t seen in years and people I had met the same day; I took my uncle and my mom and my sister and her husband and kids.
For most of those games, I sat next to the same woman – a charming sprite named Christine who had had season tickets for years and came to every game alone. Early on, I was fantasizing about my baseball odyssey as a Hollywood movie, and I told my guest that day that it would be called 81 Dates, and it would be about a guy who used OKCupid or Tinder to take a first date to every game; he pointed out that if I were really in a Hollywood movie, I would eventually find out that Christine was the true love I had been overlooking the whole time. I turned to her and said “I’m sorry, Christine, but it looks like if this movie thing works out, we’re going to have to get married.” She frowned a faint frown, shook her head a little and said “Oh, I don’t think you want to do that.”
We didn’t get married, but I did spend more time with her over the next two years than I did with anyone I was actually dating.
Eventually, I managed to fill 78 of the spots on my schedule with 78 different people. I took one person twice in the regular season, one person once in the preseason and again later on, and went to one game alone because of a last-minute flake.
The next year was a different story.
81 Dates 