Baseball season is upon us once again. Even if you’re not a baseball fan, you may find yourself at a game or two this summer. If you aren’t much interested in baseball, you may enjoy some alternate ballpark activities instead. In fact, baseball lovers and bored spectators alike can enjoy passing the time by playing these three baseball game games.

Premature Evacuation¹

This first game starts as soon as you get to your seats, and plays out over the next several innings. To begin, look around your section and pick out a mark, someone likely to leave the game early. Each person then announces his or her prediction and in which inning the mark is expected to leave. The winner is, of course, the person with the most accurate guess. Side bets on the over/under for each prediction are also welcome.

Strategically speaking, families with small kids are a good bet, as are couples where a man has clearly dragged his disinterested girlfriend to the ballpark. Once you make your pick, you’ll have twice as many slow-to-develop events to watch! And if you’re really smart, you’ll watch someone with better seats, then nab them when they go.

Cute or 15?

It’s difficult to describe this game without sounding like a degenerate pervert. Let’s just call it…an anthropological exercise.

When a possibly-attractive, age-nebulous young woman is spotted in the ballpark, the titular query is posed: “Cute or 15?”. Healthy debate then occurs as to whether the girl is cute (and above the age of consent) or if she is, in fact, 15. Valid answers are ‘Cute’, ’15’, or ‘Neither’. An answer of ‘Both’, however, is problematic in many regards, so ease it back there, Nabokov.

Beerconomics

Perhaps the best of all the baseball game games, Beerconomics starts out great and just gets better as the game goes on. The concept is simple. Just watch your fellow fans as they return from the concession stand, laden with overpriced snacks and beverages. When they inevitably spill some of their drink, simply make a call as to how much beer was spilled.

The twist is that your guess isn’t made in liquid ounces – it’s in dollars and cents. A 16 oz. beer at Fenway Park runs at least $7.25, which means those suds go for 45 cents an ounce or more. Even the smallest spill is equivalent to dropping a nickel on the ground, minimum. Great spills can be worth multiple dollars, and are, frankly, hilarious.

Beerconomics works especially well at Fenway Park, where there are no beer vendors in the stands. If you’re not in Boston, however, there’s no need for concern. All 30 Major League Baseball parks have plenty of drunk, clumsy idiots, as does every minor league park², and even a good portion of Little League fields around the country. Wherever baseball is played, you’re sure to find overpriced beer, and with it, spills and lost money.

Closing

With these three games to play, even the least interested attendee should be entertained. So when they shout “Play Ball!”, start playing your own baseball game games. Have fun!

Footnotes:

1. Apologies to Season 5 of The Wire and the Baltimore Sun newsroom, but Merriam-Webster’s definition 4c disagrees. ↩︎

2. Possible exception: Salt Lake Bees home field Spring Mobile Ballpark (a.k.a. “The Apiary”), in Salt Lake City ↩︎