2002-07-16 10:31 p.m.
How the Other Half Watches Baseball
Back when Pacific Bell Park opened, they had a story in the Chronicle detailing the new ballpark food -- including a portobello mushroom burger and several other things that sounded both tastier and more vegetarian-friendly than the usual stuff.
If you're a vegetarian baseball fan and go to lots of games, you will have had your fill of nachos by the end of May, and even garlic fries get old pretty quickly. So the prospect of getting a dinner at PacBell that would be both tasty and not deep-fried made me very, very happy.
At my first several games at PacBell Park, then, I surveyed just about every food booth along the promenade and third deck and found no portobello mushroom burgers. In fact, they seemed rather lacking in things that weren't standard ballpark food, with the possible exception of some rather forgettable pizza.
Finally, I went to the guest relations booth. "Where might I find these portobello mushroom burgers that got talked up in the Chronicle earlier this season?" I asked.
"Oh, those are on the club level," she told me, in a tone of voice that said I wasn't fit to lick the boots of club level dwellers.
"So because I'm sitting in the cheap seats I'm not allowed to purchase a portobello mushroom burger."
"Not without a club level ticket," she drawled.
And so I slunk back to the third deck, if one can be said to slink while climbing ten flights of stairs.
But yesterday I finally won admission to the fabled Club Level, in the form of freebie tickets from a vendor. (Software and hardware vendors like to bribe IT departments with sports tickets in hopes of gaining or keeping business, even though many IT people have no use for sports.)
The door people who previously sneered at me threw open the doors as if they were porters in a bad cruise ship commercial. All of the fabled food riches were there, and then some. They had cases of baseball memorabilia which only the chosen few were allowed to gaze upon, and a full bar with better wine than the masses can buy. They even had a drawing which you could only enter at the "concierge" desk (nothing so mundane as "guest services" here).
I finally got my portobello mushroom burger and tried to find the seat, which took me about 15 minutes because they'd hidden the entrance so well. The seats are fenced off to keep the riffraff out, so you need to walk down to the bottom of the correct section, then double back through a tunnel and find the door that leads you back up to your section. I can't tell you if the burger was any good because it was cold by the time I found my seat.
In the extra-cushy section, they actually deliver food to you -- not as good as the stuff in the club level, but better than at the walk-up counters in general seating. They didn't actually have any scantily-clad cabana boys with palm fronds and trays of peeled grapes, but they probably just work weekends along with the water dogs.
My brother and his turtledove were up in the usual seats, so after I finished the hard lemonade I'd had delivered to my seat, I took a little time away from being important to visit the little people. (And they really were little -- I could barely see them from my seat.) We hung out for an inning and a half, sung an enthusiastically loud round of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," and then I went back downstairs for the rest of the game.
The seats (which, I should note, cost twice as much as comparable seats at the NetAss, home of the A's) really were much better. Seeing things up-close makes it that much easier to rip on JT Snow's defense. But while it was fun to visit, and I sure won't turn down more free tickets if they come my way, I couldn't bring myself to shell out $75 a pair for this. And the whole food thing was completely bogus.