Its that time again, where I we let the one girl on the planet that can deal with us take over the blog for a few hours.  This week’s bombshells include finding out Jess has a boyfriend, what exactly the worst job in baseball is, and why I never understood how anyone could shake a baby until I saw just what exactly “day care” is.  From all of us here at FWG-MLB, enjoy!

A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend (what was that? The noice of 1,000 collective boners retreating? Relax, gentlemen, continuing on…) and I decided to stroll on over to Petco Park and take in a Padres game. Unfortunately, the Dodgers were in town, so the game was sold out. The next night, after the Dodgers packed up and left town,  Petco returned to its desolate old self, so we bought ourselves a pair of $10 bleacher seats (don’t judge, we are poor law students).  We file into the stadium, buy peanuts that surely must have been made of gold ($5 for peanuts?!) and make our way to our seats. Now I know that when it comes to ballpark tickets, you get what you pay for, and was prepared for a bad view and baseball players the size of sea monkeys. What I was not prepared for: the sandbox. Yup, in dead center field, right behind the fence, is a sandbox for the youngster baseball fans to play while their parents watch the game.

Allow me to digress.  When Petco Park was built some years ago it was a gem. Beautiful, state of the art, perfecto. Until one day just a couple weeks before opening day someone pointed out that something….I can’t quite put my finger on it…seems to be missing….. there isn’t a visitors’ bullpen! Clearly two teams can’t be expected to share the beautiful Padres’ bullpen that had been built, so in a brilliant maneuver a makeshift, half-ass bullpen was shoved into first base side foul territory.

So let me make sure we are all clear on the situation. The engineers and architects building the stadium overlooked the fact that a professional baseball stadium generally requires two bullpens, but by golly they sure did a top notch job on that sandbox!!

Back to the sandbox that induced the above rant. Ok, so it might be understandable, California baseball is known for weird things, like sushi bars, coming late and leaving early, monkeys believed to incite rallies (that one is legit), but seriously, a sandbox? “No little Timmy, it would be best for you not to sit in the seat we paid for and spend some quality father son time, go get tetanus in the sandbox instead.”

The worst part of the sandbox is that I could not, for the life of me, concentrate on the game. All of the action was happening more than 300 feet away, but right in front of my face was a fabulous little microcosm of society. There were the cool kids in the corner filling up buckets with sand, the ADD kid throwing sand at unsuspecting children, the strange kid eating the sand, and the troubled artist just trying to create his masterpiece until ADD kid destroyed it.

That is when I made this astonishing anthropological discovery: the worst job in baseball. I had previously been led to believe that the worst job in baseball probably had something to do with cleaning the bathrooms or sweeping up peanut shells, but alas, I was wrong. The worst job in baseball is in fact the Petco Park Sandbox Security Guard. That’s right, there was a security guard posted at the sandbox, and I’m not talking about an usher who just stood there. This security guard meant business. She was a fully uniformed, walkie-talkie toting, ear bud wearing security guard who would have made the Secret Service proud. Obviously taking her job far too seriously, this glorified babysitter went as far as to confiscate a plush baseball from a small child.

Apparently the Sandbox Security Guard is a job that requires one to be on their toes at all times. There is no room for error.  After 5 long innings, things were getting a little dicey so a call was made to the bullpen, and out came trotting Relief Sandbox Security Guard.  After a short meeting, Sandbox Security Guard got a pat on the butt and was sent to the showers after 5 innings of shutout guarding. Not a single dead kid; bravo! Relief Sandbox Security Guard did some solid work, but after a couple innings it was time for the big guns: Sand Box Security Guard Closer.

By now the kids were cranky, dirty and likely to incite unlawful activity and storm the field at any moment. It’s a good thing Petco Park made a clutch offseason acquisition when they got Sand Box Security Guard Closer for a concession stand worker and two ushers to be named later.

Unfortunately, the Padres’ lead was lost (oh yeah, a baseball game was going on), and here we go extra innings.  But since this is California, and it was getting chilly, we left after 9.