What a revolting development this is.

A good day for baseball was spoiled by a lackluster effort from our local 9 on Wednesday. True to my word, we did arrive in plenty of time, although our seats were in dead right field and we had to deal with the sun for 4 hours, since the cloudy skies originally promised by the weather guessers did not materialize. There was little or no drama this time, so I'll spare you the multi-part posts.

One thing aroused my interest, outside of the game itself. They told us that it was the second-largest crowd in Citizen’s Bank Ballpark history – 43,655. The place supposedly holds 43,647. I wondered how sell-out’s could have different numbers of fans in attendance. Apparently there is no maximum number. In the National League, they count tickets sold, not asses in the seats, so I would expect the sell-out number to be identical every time. The top 10 crowd figures range from 45,102 to 45,755; all sell-out’s with a range of 653 tickets. They probably could have sold more tickets if they wanted, so how did they wind up at that number?

It’s birthday time, (soon) and the offers are rolling in. My mailbox was jammed with exciting savings from places where I wouldn’t otherwise shop. Ten bucks off at Charlie Brown’s Steakhouse, Twenty bucks off a pair of over-priced sunglasses at the Hut of Sunglasses (which probably used to be a Hut, but is now just a Mall store) and the disgusting aide memoiré that my age will soon afford me a discount to lots of things, including time left on Earth - The AARP membership card, which serves as a fervent reminder that I have endured 5 decades and am more than likely on the downside of the slope of life. Thirteen bucks a year for that privilege.

In addition to the depressing postal mail, I received a bit of electronic mail from the Phillies, telling me that I had an opportunity to purchase tickets for the National League Championship Series. The sale began at 6pm on Wednesday – or, approximately a half-hour before I and most of the 43,655 fans got home from the game. What this assured was that most of the tickets would be purchased by ticket brokers and other scalpers who will now sell them on StubHub or Ebay for ten times the purchase price. Nice going, Phillies. Would it have killed you to wait until 8 o’clock, when we were home, surfing the web looking for naked women to salve our disconsolate minds? Since StubHub is a “corporate partner” of Major League Baseball, I’m sure that the deadline was no accident. Naturally, the tickets were gone by 7pm.

For those of you who are remotely curious, this is my desk at work, studded in red and white (along with a cat and some golfers) – for at least three more days. The baseball, that is. The rest is staying.