When I am At The Ballgame…

…I shall eat a hot dog. Nothing better to watch a crumbling home team better than by eating a hot dog. To be fair, tomorrow’s game will see Halliday on the mound so a Bosox loss would not be a fraud upon the gods but I will still root for the last knuckleballer and eat a hot dog and so will the lad. The selling of hot dogs is big stuff in MLB. The Mets apparently sell the most:

Shea Stadium leads all major league ballparks with annual consumption of more than 1.5 million hot dogs. (Yankee Stadium, interestingly enough, is not ranked among the top 10.) According to Aramark, most of Shea’s dogs are sold by 48 vendors who roam the stands, as opposed to concessionaires who sell from fixed locations. The average vendor sells 150 a game, and 10,000 to 12,000 a season. Working for commissions ranging from 13 percent to 16 percent depending on seniority, they can make $150 to $200 a game, and as much as $30,000 a season.

Some say it’s going to be a twenty buck dog but for me it is all about averages. In the next 30 days I plan to see MLB, Double A in Maine and a Watertown Wizards game just over the border and I shall eat a hot dog each time. I know the Watertown dogs are about two bucks so even if the wieners at Portland are six to eight, I think over all I can invest in the twenty dollar dog knowing that I can look over the end of it and seem Manny Ramerez about twenty feet away.

If you plan for these things, you can have these things. Apparently they may play the Canadian national anthem at Watertown, too. You just have to ask.