“To me, baseball has always been a reflection of life. Like life, it adjusts. It survives everything.”

– Willie Stargell

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the Minor League baseball season is right around the corner. Well, it should be.

Let’s face it, the past few weeks have been crazy, staying home and trying to keep everyone healthy and sane. I personally have done more puzzles than I care to admit.

The Major League Baseball Opening Day has come and gone. Minor League Opening Day is a little less than two weeks away and will undoubtedly pass us by just as its counterpart did. So many people have been posting photos from times they were at a game with family, friends, or even by themselves. Despite what is going on right now in the world, people are still connecting through baseball. Players, teams, and fans are all connecting through various social media platforms and sharing their love of the game.

I guess that just goes to show that baseball truly is America’s Pastime.

One thing that has been great to see during this tough time has been this connection of thousands of people through something as simple as a game. So many different organizations are giving fans a way to connect to the game whether through printable activities for kids, contests to win cool team apparel, or something as simple as the Fightins’ Mascot Mania where fans vote for their favorite mascots as they face off on social media in a March Madness style competition. Different organizations have been sharing videos from players, coaches, and other team members encouraging fans to stay safe and to not worry, baseball will be back. As Willie Stargell said, “It survives everything.”

April 9, 2020 would be the beginning of my 16th season working in Baseballtown. I have faith that my 16th season will still come this summer and I cannot wait to return to America’s Classic Ballpark. Until then I will continue to share funny stories from my days spent at the ballpark. I might even share some tips on how to make it feel like baseball season at home.

Stay safe everyone and don’t worry, there are still plenty of confessions to come from this concessions worker!

Confessional: What is one thing you are looking forward to when baseball begins?

So I have mentioned in previous posts that when I worked at the Longstrike Deck we were not the most well-behaved employees and certainly caused our fair share of shenanigans (see You’re Out, Day 15, Throwing Food.) Today I thought I would share another fun story of one of the ways we caused mischief on the deck.

Let me preface the story by saying we were allowed to have free fountain sodas while at work so don’t worry, we were not doing anything wrong in terms of taking stuff we weren’t allowed to have. That being said, let me tell you about soda roulette.

The Longstrike Deck had two soda fountains and they both contained the same four sodas plus lemonade, iced tea, and fruit punch. Many times we would mix two flavors to create a new flavor. Sierra Mist with Fruit Punch or lemonade with iced tea were a few favorites.

There were also times when we took mixing drinks a bit too far. A favorite practice became mixing all the flavors in one cup and seeing how much you could drink before it became too gross to handle. Why we thought this was a good idea I will never know.

Being the mature young adults that we were, we of course took it to yet another level. This is how soda roulette was born.

Everyone knows the age old advice about not leaving an open drink unattended at a party or any type of large gathering. This advice also became a warning in the deck stand. If you left your drink sitting around or left the stand for any reason, you had to be a daredevil to risk taking a drink when you got back to your cup.

Did I mention we also had a hot chocolate machine in the stand? Have you ever tried Mountain Dew mixed with Pepsi and hot chocolate? Trust me, you don’t want to.

Confessional: What is one prank that you and your coworkers have ever played on each other? What was the end result?

I’ll never truly understand why we thought this was a good idea or what made us decide to start doing it in the first place. It became a habit that if you went out to go to the bathroom or even just to refill the condiments or napkins, when you got back to the stand it was in your best interest to toss out what was in your cup and get a new drink. We became very good at sneaking a cup back to the exact location it came from after messing with the drink. It was also very hard to tell if anything was wrong with your drink if you had a lid on it. Yes, we would take a lid off and add different sodas before replacing the lid. This went on and on all summer – for multiple summers.

There were some occasions when someone would come back to the stand and take a drink without thinking. Those were the best moments. The look of pure disgust on his or her face was the end goal. No one would ever rat out the perpetrator either; we all teamed up against the one person who dared to leave his or her drink unattended.

Now, we do deserve some credit. We only ever pulled this prank on each other and never on any of the adults in the stand. They all knew we did it though and never said a word. I’ll never truly understand how we got away with everything we did, but in the case of soda roulette it was simply a fun prank we all played on each other. It would be impossible to do in most of the stands at the ballpark now, as most of the stadium has switched to bottled sodas. We have a soda fountain in the UIC, but seeing as there are only two of us who work there it would not really be a fun game.

Despite some of the disgusting concoctions that were ingested during those few summers, soda roulette still remains one of my favorite memories from working at the Longstrike Deck.