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Major League Baseball 2025 is right around the corner, and I’m literally piddling my pants with excitement. Some of my favorite memories revolve around the ballpark- like that time my uncle got us box seats at Franklin Covey Field back in Salt Lake. Or the time we stayed fifteen innings at Wrigley Field and a kind stranger saved us from tromping around the Chicago ‘hood at 2 in the morning. Or the time we went to the Oakland Coliseum, then drove around Oakland trying in vain to find any redeeming quality about that city. Not all ballgames are created equal, and sometimes even the magic of the ballpark can’t save a rotten evening. This is the story of the worst baseball game I ever saw: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. the Colorado Rockies, on July 30, 2022.

Denver is a Strange Place

When you travel to watch baseball, you have to see the city. Sports teams reflect an element of the culture. For instance, Oakland Coliseum was strange and dilapidated. Chicago teams never win anything. Coors Field in Denver, Colorado is just stunningly beautiful, but about as functional as a stoned teenager trying to run a cash register.

Let’s begin with a few words on Denver, which everyone knows is pot central. Marijuana is central to the city’s identity in exactly the same way that it’s central to your most useless coworker’s personality. Colorado was the first state to legalize weed, and considering that the city is populated by half a million ski bums (and plenty of actual bums), it seems like the most logical place to make spearhead the legal weed movement. In other words, it was always a lazy city, and legalizing pot was an effect of that culture.

I don’t smoke pot, so hanging out in Denver had the same energy as meeting a friend and all he wants to do is rip bowls and listen to shitty music all day. I got very bored very quickly. As I wandered around the city, taking the train towards downtown to catch the baseball game, I noticed a very prominent pattern that everyone is either slow, not paying attention, or just not giving a shit about anything. The first place I went was a coffeeshop by the hotel. The barista didn’t even bother to ring it up.

I got lunch at a pizza place that my friend recommended. The food was good, but service was mind-numbingly slow. I was there, by myself, for over an hour. It wasn’t even busy. That’s crazy.

The only tourist spot that caught my attention was called the International Church of Cannabis. I had to check this out because it’s exactly as insufferable as it sounds. Members call themselves “elevationists,” and they use the “sacred flower” as a sacrament during their closed-doors meetings on Sundays. No consumption is allowed when the church is open to the public, but you can still buy a ticket to the light show that they run every hour or so. I ponied up for that, and it was actually pretty neat. However, same story- slow service, nobody seems to really care, and someone was definitely roasting an illegal bone during that show because, it’s just like a vibe, man.

I got closer to downtown and checked out Millenium Bridge, which was cool. I got snacks at a Sooper Pooper or whatever that grocery store is called. I milled around in a bookstore across the street from Coors Field, killing time until the doors opened. Wherever you go in Denver, you smell the skunky aroma and people move sluggishly. I’ve known many potheads in my life, and much like drunks, some handle the vice better than others. Most potheads wake up, rip a fat one off their coveted pen, and become completely useless for the rest of the day. It seems like the whole city is operating at that latter elevation- all the time.

I think it is fair to say that Denver is the laziest city in America. Is that a cause or an effect of marijuana culture? I’ll leave that one for the philosophers to work out when they put their bongs down. I just want to set the stage of what this city is like for a non-pothead, because once you enter the doors of Coors Field, nothing changes at all.

“We’re out of corn dogs.”

The first thing I had to do in order to get into Coors Field was ditch my pocket knife in a bush. As an Idaho bumpkin, I forget that the handy utility tool I keep on my hip at all times is viewed as a WMD by your average city ninny.

From there, it was a simple matter of joining the cattle drive through the front door, into the concourse, and up the stairs to our nosebleed seats. Coors Field is a beautiful building, and the entrance really drives home the glory of the baseball game you’re about to witness. The top level concourse has an incredible view of the city. It’s a really cool stadium, one of the biggest in the league, and a great place to watch a baseball game.

At least, I imagine it is, because I missed the game.

For context- my family and I travel a lot for baseball, and we’ve worked out a system to keep from bankrupting ourselves. We’re all adults with jobs, so everyone pays one expense. On this trip, my job was dinner. I figured we’d get dogs and soda pops at the game itself, because that’s the American way. We found our seats, and wanting to beat the line to the concessions, I took the fam’s orders and got to work early.

I’ll most likely be a lifer in the restaurant business myself, so I’ve got a lot of patience for slow service- especially at a venue serving 41,000 drunken sports fans. Never in my life have I seen service as bad as I did at Coors Field. It’s almost like it’s slow on purpose. Whichever concession stand you decided to choose, hungry folks were lined up around the base line. It was really, really bad.

The first line I stood in dispersed after a little while, and I was up to the register. There, a teenager girl looked at me like I’d just interrupted her manicure.

“My system is down,” she said. She tapped uselessly at her screen for emphasis.

I’d already been standing in line for twenty minutes. “What can we do about that?” I asked.

She shrugged, said nothing, and waited for me to leave.

“Can we use that computer over there?” I suggested, pointing at the functioning POS five feet away.

“You’ll have to wait in line,” she said, and shrugged again.

That line was a mile long, so to hell with it. I found another concession stand and got in line, and it was a similar story. Six kiosks to work with, four of them were empty, and one was occupied by two teenage girls prattling away about the boys at school. Surely, their “system was down” as well, so I toughed it out in line.

This is the line my dad found me in, wondering where everyone’s food was because the game was now three innings deep. I explained what I’d been dealing with, and we worked out a system where I would get the chow, he would run it back to the seats, and he’d come find me at the next place. That worked pretty well, and at least I was able to see parts of the game on TVs posted around the stadium.

The most important thing at a baseball game is beer, and luckily you didn’t have to deal with a blank point of sale to get those. Coors Field has automated beer coolers around the concourses, which is a brilliant way to escape the dead stare of cashiers who wouldn’t flinch if you leapt from the side of the stadium. Those lines were also long, and pints were $18. I decided to suffer my queue time in tortuous sobriety just so that I could finish my shopping and get back to my seat.

Five mouths to feed. Three shops to visit. My sister wanted funnel cakes, and I found a stand selling those. By this time, I hadn’t even eaten since the pizza I had earlier, and the funnel cake place had a few more corn dogs rotating happily on the rollers. Fine. That’s dinner. It took half an hour to get to that window. The guy in front of me scooped up the last two corn dogs, and the cashier wouldn’t even look up from his phone at me.

“What?” he groaned.

“Can I get a funnel cake and a couple corn dogs?” I asked.

“We’re out of corn dogs.”

“Do you have any more coming?” I asked. I know how long it takes to cook a fucking corn dog.

He glanced up from Snapchat, peered lazily around the corner and said, “No.”

“Are you sure?”

He leaned up against his computer terminal with a sigh as if I’d just asked him to retile the kitchen. He tapped the screen as aggressively as he could, driving the point home of how inconvenient it was that I was hungry. “We stop cooking at the seventh inning,” he explained as if I were a kindergartner. “Now what do you want on your funnel cake?”

I’d missed seven entire innings standing in line. I was not about miss nine. “Chocolate,” I said. “And make it two.”

Another irritated glance, he doubled the order, and I was done shopping at last.

According to this box score, it looks like I missed a pretty exciting game. I sat down in the middle of the 7th Inning Stretch, with no need to stretch, and had funnel cake for dinner. The last couple innings were pretty exciting. I liked seeing Kershaw lose, and I liked when the closing pitcher of the Rockies walked out to Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold. It was a kickass end of the night.

One thing I can’t wrap my head around is that I was only one upset by the whole ordeal. As I waited in line after line, my impatience getting worse at the absolute lack of function in this place, nobody else seemed the least bit perturbed. Long lines, just for some brat to make up an excuse about why things are working better, and fuck you for wanting that. Is Coors Field always like this? Have the Denverites simply given up on anything working? Has the whole city simply resigned itself to this “it is what it is” way of life?

When I think of baseball and drugs, I think cheap beer, cigarettes, and blow. You know, the staples of the good old days when men were even manlier thanks to steroid injections. I don’t think of weed. However, when I think of Denver, weed fits the personality of the city well. Perfectly well. Too well. It makes for a lousy baseball game. ■