Doubleheaders: Two For The Price Of Two

See that picture?  Even Mr. "Let's Play Two" doesn't get it.

Remember "real" doubleheaders?  Teams would play back-to-back and a person would get seven or eight hours of baseball enjoyment for the price of one ticket.

Like playing without performance-enhancing drugs, they seem to have gone the way of so many other pre-Bud Selig era cool things about baseball.

It was always a big deal for our family to go to a ballgame. We lived about three hours from the nearest ballpark, the old Riverfront Stadium of Cincinnati.  Plus, my mom and baseball heretic brother weren't baseball fans.

So that left me and my stepdad to pull for the Reds.

I'm still not sure whether or not he did it on purpose, but my stepdad snuck us into one "real" doubleheader. To top things off, it was my favorite kind: a twi-nighter!   

Other than being against the Dodgers, getting to see an Orel Hershiser start, Kal Daniels socking three long balls in the combined games, and my brother falling asleep... (alright, so I don't remember very many details).

The Kal Daniels part was super sweet.  He was a member of the Fairbanks Polar Bears, my snail mail fantasy team.

Mom was a trooper. Despite the bro asleep since the fourth inning of the first game, we stayed for the entire doubleheader.

I just read this on Wikipedia with regard to the traditional double header:

"Except in special circumstances with the approval of the MLBPA, such as a makeup game resulting from a rain-out, this is prohibited under terms of the 2002 Collective Bargaining Agreement."

Stupid Collective Bargaining Agreement!  Stupid MLBPA!

Well criminy! 

Just like Dusty Baker, it gives me one more thing to complain about—and everybody knows that complaining is half the fun of baseball. 

Don't they?