"I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” – St. Louis Browns Owner Bill Veeck
When you go to a Cardinals game at Busch stadium, where you sit is very important. That importance has very little to do with how well you can see the field of play; very rarely have I ever gone to a baseball game to watch baseball (for those of you already shaking with rage, I get it, and I’m sorry).
No, a Cardinals game is an opportunity for showing off. It’s for having loud conversations about remodeling your bathroom to impress nearby strangers. It’s for flaunting your money clip to buy lava-hot Bud Lights. And it’s also for looking as glamorous as possible in your finest Ryan Ludwick jersey.
It’s a clout-off, and everyone is participating whether they know it or not, and no flex is bigger than how close your seats are to the batter’s box. The closer you are, the better you are; it’s as simple as that, and no seats are higher in status than the Cardinals Club seats, those high-profile green seats behind home plate.
They’re the kind of seats I figured I’d never get to sit in due to not having any money ever. But one day out of the blue I found out you didn’t actually need money at all to sit in that section. All you really need is a friend with an extra ticket who can’t find anyone else to go with him. I had such a friend, and as a matter of public service I decided to document my experience and report back to the Riverfront Times. Here’s what it was like to sit in the Best Seats in Baseball™.
After making your way through the main gate and the fancy closed-door Cardinal Club entrance, the green seat experience officially starts with a buffet. In our pretend post-COVID world, a buffet and its germ potential can still be slightly off-putting, especially when you still see people wearing masks at the grocery store. But if you’re already at an event full of tens of thousands of drunk people screaming and spitting on top of each other, what difference does it really make?
The website describes the buffet as upscale, which, I don’t know, I guess so. It’s hard to tell when everyone is wearing blue jeans. It was basically the food you would expect to see at a wedding reception. There were mashed potatoes, an underpaid worker wearing a chef hat serving slices of beef, and sushi being served on a naked Fredbird. Being that I didn’t come to a baseball game to eat things like mushroom tapenade, I quickly exited the dining room past a busy and fully-stocked bar, through a concrete tunnel, and out into what I assume is a diehard baseball fan’s field of dreams, just a few rows behind home plate.
Now I like baseball fine enough, and the St. Louis cityscape view for an evening sunset game is truly a beautiful sight to behold, but the best part about sitting in these seats is the free junk food and booze, which they bring to you directly in your seat. An attentive serving staff provides a lengthy list of life-shortening foods and drinks to choose from and you just point your increasingly greasy fingers at what you want and they bring it to you all evening long.
The menu is mostly standard sports concession fare, but with a lot of razzle dazzle. Like, the nachos on my visit weren’t just those yellow corn chips in a clear plastic tray with the thimble-sized cheese compartment. They were a full plate of chips smothered in beef, cheese, jalapeños, onions, tomatoes and a hefty scoop of sour cream. The same goes for the hot dogs. Of the three listed, one of them was an applewood-smoked bacon-wrapped monster topped with baked beans, fried tobacco onions and pornographic amounts of dijon aioli. They also had some okay buffalo wings, toasted cannelloni (but no toasted ravs — what is this, Chicago????), burgers and grilled chicken pita wraps, and veggie wraps and fruit cups for cowards.
I ate through most of the menu as if I were scheduled to be executed the moment the game ended. You never know if or when you’re going to get the opportunity to sit in this section again, and I wanted to consume as much of the experience as possible. By the seventh inning I was more or less in a paralyzed state of digestive distress as my body was trying to figure out what the hell to do with all the salt and fat I was forcing into it. I sat silently with glazed-over eyes, breathing heavily and vaguely aware of my surroundings, but with enough wherewithal left to order some peanuts and crackerjack because baseball.
The whole experience is such an assault on the body and senses that I’m a bit fuzzy on some of the details. I’m not even sure who the Cardinals were playing. I think it was one of those teams that you barely know exist. Like the Rockies. Or the Padres. Whoever it was, there were fireworks at the end so I think the Cardinals won.
My awareness was not granted any favors by the addition of the all-inclusive free booze aspect of the experience. The disturbing amount of food I was consuming prevented me from getting any sort of sustained buzz, but that didn’t stop me from trying with a few beers and a couple shots of Pink Whitney, a neon pink-lemonade vodka made exclusively for children. In the end all I accomplished was packing on a few hundred more calories and enhancing a carb-induced brain fog.
One of the few things I do vividly remember was David Freese, who was also at the game and sitting a few sections away. The crowd went bananas when they showed him on the Jumbotron, which he didn’t look particularly thrilled to be on. The reason for that became clear as people keyed in to where his seat was, and a parade of my fellow red-faced Cardinal fans made their way toward him to get selfies and tell him their much less exciting version of his game 6 heroics, something that I imagine has been his perpetual nightmare for the past decade-plus.
One of the more alluring aspects of the Green Seats that you definitely won’t find in the brochure is the honorary elite societal class status you’re granted for the duration of the game. This section is essentially in view for everyone in the stadium to be jealous of due to its proximity to the action, and the aisle attendants are even armed with crossbows to stop the have-nots from sneaking in. The section’s exclusivity is further emphasized by being on television for the majority of the game (I was behind the Bally Sports logo for a couple innings until the people whose better seats I had been squatting in showed up). You can’t help but feel superior to the peons elsewhere in the stadium in their normal poor people red chairs that I am usually sitting in myself.
As mentioned earlier, I used to think you had to be wealthy to sit in a section like this, but it turns out you just need to work for the right company. My friend who I came with knows someone who works for such a company. The people sitting around us did too. A bank. A major local grocery chain. No one had actually paid for their seats. At least, not in a traditional sense.
Companies offer these tickets to their employees as perks, but that money comes from somewhere. The cynic in me sees this as an opportunity for corporate executives to sneak in a few baseball games a year in luxury seating on the backs of their employees. The lower-level grunt might get to go to a game here or there, but Debbie in HR probably isn’t getting first dibs on a Friday night Chicago Cubs matchup. Personally I think I’d rather have the hundreds of dollars it cost to be there instead of a few hours of stimulation overload and a completely unproductive next day. Maybe it works some other way. Maybe those tickets are an investment used to land deals and woo potential clients. Maybe they’re the boss’ personal tickets. Or maybe that free hot dog isn’t so free after all.
What I’m trying to say is, if you work for a company that has these tickets and want to start some major shit at your office, demand transparency in who is going to what game. You might find out something pretty neat and/or coincidentally be fired for reasons unrelated to your inquiry before you can find out anything.
Go Cardinals!
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