I came late to the Orioles' party.

Sure, I had attended games through the Seventies, two or three a year starting in 1976, but I always had a ticket in hand when I arrived on 33rd Street. It wasn't until I moved to Baltimore in 1988 that I began attending forty-plus games a year, usually sitting in Upper Reserve.

Then, there were the Dugout Club Nights.

Back then, the Dugout Club was a Sun-sponsored program for everyone, though kids were certainly the focus. For $20, you got general admission tickets to 10 games, plus decals and a cap. I took advantage in 1990, purchasing one each for my wife, my stepson, and myself. And, for the most part, we enjoyed the games on the field...but there was the matter of the beer.

Yes, the beer.

When I was a minor-league Richmond Braves fan, I drank a lot of beer. The club featured a 22-oz. cup with a photo of a Jolly Green Giant-type - one hand holding a frosty overflowing mug, the other on his hip - wearing a lascivious grin as he looked down on a couple of scattered subjects below. (My friends and I often conjectured that the 'Thirsty Giant', as he was called, should have been wearing the same grin as he performed a certain 'task of nature' on the unfortunates below, especially considering the properties of the product being hawked, but that's something for me to talk up with ARA, perhaps.)

For several seasons, my friends and I sat just off the visitor's dugout, pelting the invading ballplayers with the drunken witticisms only early twenty-somethings would find amusing, and drinking three or four of the Thirsty Giants as provided by a portable beer stand set up in the aisle directly behind us, probably because we were his best customers.

Those were salad days, and I mean that in every positive sense. Nothing feels as good as the experiences of youth: food, sex, drinking, cards, kibitzing, razzing, cars, staying up late, and SPORTS, both playing and watching. Nothing like it, and not likely to be recaptured.

Even in my thirties, I remember drinking too much at several Cleveland Browns games, especially the ones when I sat in the Dog Pound. I'd exchanged tosses of beer and fisticuffs with Yankee fans at the top rim of Memorial Stadium when attending with friends in the late Seventies.(They started it! Honest!)

But now I was over forty. I still drank beer, to be sure, but at a typical ballgame I'd have two...maybe three on a hot afternoon. I had my senses about me, to be sure. And I noticed the drunks - a number of the fans in the General Admission section who claimed to be 'cheering on the ballclub', but who were mostly there to take off their shirts, rant, curse, insult the other team, their fans, and the people around them. It was impossible not to notice them. I had a son and a wife now, and they both loved baseball - but the General Admission areas at Memorial Stadium, I discovered, were not a good place for a family to watch a ballgame. Not our family, anyway.

After three or four games of having beer spilled or poured on us, listening to countless entreaties for passing girls to 'show us your t-ts', witnessing countless fistfights, engaging in shouting matches, watching ushers struggle with fans blitzed out of their minds - we stopped using the Dugout Club passes and bought better tickets.

I saw a lot of bemoaning for the 'old days' in reading the Blog entries after the death of Wild Bill, and I have to say I was left with mixed feelings. I loved watching O's games on TV in those days, and attending them was fun, too...the energy and excitement were palpable, to be sure, and there's nothing like that. The current idiocy of scoreboard-inspired clapping (especially when it's all wrong, like putting up 'Let's Go O's!' when the team is in the field, not at bat, or 'Two Strikes' when the count is 0-2) is truly appalling...but the idea that what went on in lots of places at Memorial was just 'colorful and harmless' isn't accurate.

I read yesterday that 'everyone was welcome in Section 34, no matter where you were from, etc., etc.' From my two experiences there, this was only true until about the fifth inning, by which time the massive consumption of beer had kicked in. From that point forward, it's only the haze of alcohol and the passage of years coloring the happenings up there as all 'fun and games.'

A lot of folks were bemoaning the 'corporate nature' of the O's, how unaffordable tickets, are, etc. I couldn't help but thinking that a 'between the lines translation' of those comments were 'hey, we can't get into the ballpark for the equivalent of six bucks and drink beer we brought in with us or beer for, say, the same $2 we pay for it at the corner bar until we get plastered! Now that's a good time, and it's all Peter Angelos' fault that we can't do it any more!' Hey, we had some great times in Camden Yards in the nineties. And we drank, too. We could just still stand up when the game was over, and 99.9% of the fans left with all their teeth still intact.

I would agree that the corporate/sterile nature of our games has taken some of the fun and excitement out of the sporting experience. Some of my fondest sports memories are at Memorial Stadium, RFK when the Skins were playing there, and the old home of the Brownies, Municipal Stadium. But I recognize that alcohol played a big part in the atmosphere of those places, too.

Look, I cried at the last game at Memorial just like everyone else there did, and I had only been attending games there regularly for three years. No one waxes nostalgic for the past more than I (if you ever visit my house and see the Coke machine in the kitchen, you'll see what I mean.) And I loved the idea of Wild Bill, and the guy himself seemed to be pretty harmless. But the part of the 'Memorial Stadium experience' best symbolically represented by throwing a cooler from the upper deck into the playing field because you would no longer be able to bring in your own beer?

I won't miss that a bit.