You may remember Paul from the 9th of April. I’m with him again three weeks later, this time at the Oakland Coliseum. We have accommodations that bring to mind in equal measures a sportswriter’s desk, a theater box, and a Soviet prison. I’m in this…chamber?…with a dozen people I don’t really know, watching a game I can’t see a lot of and only have an academic interest in, and I am subject to one of the most dangerous conditions a man can endure: I have access to an unlimited amount of food that isn’t very good. Paul, the only person I have met more than once, has taken on a fairly robust quantity of beer and is revealing himself to be (more accurately, confirming my belief that he is) the kind of guy who is exactly the same drunk as sober except happier. At least three times in three hours, he joins the crowd (crowd is a very strong word for the number of people currently in the Coliseum) in expressing our disapproval of one on-field event or another, and then follows up with “Wait, what are we booing about?” Paul is my favorite kind of inebriate: the Friendly Drunk. He’s a big guy and a lot of beer doesn’t take him away as it does with some people, but I am sure that if he got really into it, he’d be an I Love You Man Drunk, like my dad (who was a little guy and could get there on a lot less alcohol).

I made a special trip to a storage unit this morning before the game so I could wear my As hat with Stomper the Elephant, the Oakland mascot. I briefly considered a classic Oakland on-field cap, but the mascot logo is a really good one. These two hats are the only pieces of real As gear I have, aside from a Coco Crisp jersey that was a gate giveaway the last time I was here and a T-shirt that has my number, 8, on the back and the name “Salad,” which I bought a few years back as part of a very complicated joke that got a laugh from two people. Lest you think I am complaining, that is the exact effect I was aiming for.

Paul invited me as a secondhand guest to a friend’s birthday party. Rich is turning 40 (I think), and he is a grown-up in a way that I have both always envied and never had the gumption to become – he has a wife and a kid and an apartment that has a good view and no possums in it, and he has rented out a thing at the Oakland Coliseum for his birthday. I call it a thing because I don’t know how else to describe it. Imagine the ambience of a theater box in a Russian prison, with a view whose aspect ratio is about the same as those big wide windows aboard the Death Star. It’s very, very dark, and the field is dazzling compared to the cavern of the box – if Tolkien’s Dwarves had excavated an underground arena to watch whatever sports Dwarves watch, and had they hewn luxury suites out of the living rock, those boxes would have looked very much like this. It has a dozen seats or so, and they are bolted to the ground in an attitude such that if you (assuming you are a person of my height) lean back you can’t see the game and if you lean forward the edge of the seat cuts off the blood-flow to your thighs. The discomfort is palliated by the fact that we have unlimited free food – hot dogs, pizzas, sodas, nachos, candy – which we can have delivered to us via the use of an only moderately infuriating app. I will not say how much I ate of what, but I will tell you that Paul – generous, thoughtful Paul – insisted on ordering several more hot dogs at last call so I could take them home and have lunch tomorrow and the day after.

There were also unlimited free peanuts. You can say what you want about the crumbling infrastructure and the plumbing problems and the fact that no owner since Charley Finley has really cared about the As, but you can’t fault the peanut delivery system.

Being at the Coliseum is bringing up a lot of emotions for me – none of them strong, all of them weirdly kind of academic. I feel like I’m experiencing nostalgia for a place I should have been, instead of a place I know well or have strong memories of. When I arrive at the stadium, I end up walking in on the second level, and it is utterly deserted – the only people I see in half a circuit of the deck are employees talking to each other, and I can’t help but compare it to Oracle Park, where two hours before the game sees an early crowd bigger than the total crowd here. Yesterday’s game drew around 6400 people, and today’s will come in at 7052. It looks lively from the vantage point of our box, when Stomper is out throwing T-shirts to the crowd, but at least some of that is because we can only see a narrow slice of the park – fly balls vanish and the only way you can track them is to watch the fielders. The acoustics of our bunker are such that the announcements and music are bafflingly muffled, and the crowd noise is somehow both minimal and thunderous, like the ocean when you’re too far away to hear actual waves. Unless we lean way out, we can’t really see most of the empty seats. We also can’t see the scoreboard or any blue sky, but at least we have a good view of the plate.

It’s a good game, exciting and tense, and the As score first and hold a lead until the very end, when Cincinnati mounts a comeback to win 3-2. Embarrassingly – and I blame this on the stadium and the fact that we can’t see an actual scoreboard – I have only a hazy idea of the score through most of the game because it turns out that I have been looking at a display that shows how many mound visits each team has remaining instead of how many runs each team has. Because of this, every half hour or so I find myself thinking something like “3-2? Wait, I thought we had four runs a few minutes ago,” and it is only in the last couple of innings that I realize I have not in fact been missing lots of exciting scoring and have instead been seeing lots of boring mound visits.

• 1 October: Farewells and Almosts
• 30 September: For the Love of God, Max Muncy
• 29 September: Flower Mary Child Lavender Blossom
• 27 September: Junk Time
• 26 September: Mathematically