Eating baseball

I have eaten a lot of meat at baseball parks this summer. Specifically, at major league baseball parks. So, when one of the concessions I hoped to eat became an impossibility thanks to a changed menu, it was time to mess with the formula and find something different from everything else I’ve put in my stomach since June. As I had exhausted almost all that the majors had to offer in regard to abnormally large eats, it was time to focus on the minors to see what madness they were concocting in the hopes of getting noticed.

Have you ever been to a minor league baseball game? The games themselves can be a good time, especially if any of the players are talented, but that’s not necessarily the business the teams are in. They’re all about putting on a show, keeping fans invested and smiling, and giving them a reason to show up even if they aren’t a prospect hound or diehard fan. They want to be something for you to do, somewhere for you to go -- especially if you have kids -- so they put on little games between innings, emphasize their mascots and, in the case of the Lake County Captains of Eastlake, Ohio, created an enormous sandwich and attached a challenge to it.

To this point in my little tour of ballparks and their freakishly large concessions, I’ve been focused on dinner. Giant sandwiches has mostly been the point, because, hey, a growing boy needs his dinner. Eventually all of that needs to be followed by a refreshing dessert, though. For that, I headed to Chicago and US Cellular, the home of the White Sox, to give this monstrosity a whirl.

That’s a 12-scoop ice cream sundae, and it’s not served in one of those adorable mini batting helmets. You can’t fit over three pounds of sundae into a mini batting helmet, you know. Before I went to dessert, though, I had to have dinner first, so we’ll come back to this shortly.