Tampa Days, Miami Nights - SCP Foundation

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Tampa Days, Miami Nights

The First World Series of Based Ball

Sports Correspondent (Unofficial) Sofia Haugen

Long-time readers of this column (or short-time readers, I guess, it's only been like six months) will know that I have been thoroughly won over by the latest sports entertainment innovation from the ascended machine consciousness formerly known as Vince McMahon: Based Ball, the sport that is to baseball what the XFL was to the NFL, cooler, edgier, more scantily-clad, probably only going to last like four or five years but by god they'll be good ones. The first season is over, as is the first postseason, which is still part of the season, and it was your humble sports correspondent's honor to make the trip all the way down from her shitty Jackson Heights studio apartment1 to the great state of Florida to see the grand final, the very first Based Ball World Series.

The two teams in the BBWS this year are the Tampa Beys, a team owned and mascotted by His Imperial Highness Şehzade Nazım Ziyaeddin Nazım Osmanoğlu, Imperial Prince of the Ottoman Empire2, and the Miami Martians, all of whom are from Earth and one of whom is a dog. Like, one of the players, not a mascot. His name is Babe Woof3. The Beys have a slightly better record going into the series, but most of that can be put down to Babe Woof's long absence during the back half of the regular season—he was out for two and a half months due to complications from heartworm. He's all better now, though, and his return to the field helped the Martians sail through the postseason without losing a single game.

The series started at Outback Steakhouse Field in St. Petersburg, and moved to Greazeburger Park in Miami for games 3, 4, and 5. The first two games were pretty boring, or so I am told. I spent most of the first game in a Bloomin' Onion-induced food coma and almost got kicked out of the press box for snoring too loud; I actually DID get kicked out in the 3rd inning of game two, for reasons my lawyer says I shouldn't talk about until after the trial4, and had to finish watching the game from a TGI Friday's. God damn do I love mozzarella sticks. Anyway, the Beys won both their home games5, leaving the Martians at a serious disadvantage as we migrated down the shaft to Florida's foreskin, Miami.

Greazeburger Park is, if you'll excuse the tangent (and it's not like you can stop me), probably the strangest stadium in America. Weirder than Three Portlands' Alliot Chao Memorial Roller Derby Arena (She's Not Dead We Just Miss Her), which exploded this one time but then mostly put itself back together in a sort of superposition of exploded and non-exploded; weirder than the Grand Tlachtli beneath Denver International Airport, where the Secret World Government force captured mole-men to play ōllamalīztli, the ancient Aztec ball-game, with ritual sacrifice of the losing team on the line; weirder, even, than Fenway Park, which is just all kinds of fucked up. I don't even want to go into it. Fuckin' Boston, dude. No, Greazeburger Park is the strangest of all, because its corporate sponsor is just the worst.

I hate Greazeburger Incorporated, and if you had ever been to this goddamn baseball stadium you would too. First of all, in between innings, all the speakers in the park—yes, all of them, including (for example) the ones in my phone or my headphones or my fucking GameBoy—play this awful tuneless jingle on a loop, "you can't spell Greaze without EZ!" It's still stuck in my head and I think it will be until I die, another curse for the curse jar6. The food is somehow worse than the ambience: not only were there no burgers to be found (like, what the fuck?) but the hotdogs had some shit in them that gave me the most boring time-dilation trip I've ever experienced, and the fries tasted like feet7. And the seats were always a little warm like someone had just gotten up from them, and the press box was like, suspended from the rafters over midfield with a glass floor, and the toilet seats were all weirdly large or small, and it was generally just an unpleasant and vaguely discomfiting experience. The uncanny valley of sports stadia.

The one bright spot about Greazeburger Park8 was the cashier who sold me the aforementioned hot dogs. Her name was Katie, she hated her job, and when I half-heartedly flirted with her while slathering my meat-stick in honey mustard9 she gave me this deer-in-the-headlights stare that I found unfortunately endearing10. So I popped open another button of my classic vintage Tommy Bahama, got way up in her personal space, and put the moves on. Mainly by eating a hot dog erotically, which is pretty hard to do normally, let alone when the hot dog forces you to listen to some fuckin' Greazeburger corpo lecture about post-euclidean inventory management for a decade, but I managed it, I have skills.

It didn't work at first. Came on too strong maybe. But I am nothing if not persistent, and it only took two days and seven subjective centuries' worth of hot dogs for Katie to finally give in to my not inconsiderable charms11 and let me suck her off in the broom closet during her lunch break. Had to throw out the jeans I was wearing because of the greaze12 stains on my knees, but it was worth it. Not the first time I've ruined my clothes while giving head13, and I can assure you it won't be the last. Unfortunately Katie had to get back to work before she could return the favor (and also she was like kind of coated in greaze at the time and I don't really wanna know what that does in a vagina, especially not mine) but we met up after her shift and I took her back to my shitty motel room which was, apparently, nicer than her even shittier apartment. I understand, we've all been there.

We are going to fade to black there, because my editor has informed me that I can't just write smut about myself and have the Chronicle-Press publish it14, but I had a good time and I assume Katie did too. I gave her a ride to the stadium the next day but her manager got pissed at her when he saw me in the back of the hot dog stand, so I had to actually watch the game instead of [REDACTED]15. It was an OK game. Not really any suspense though, the Martians scored 7 runs off a multiball16 in the 3rd inning and the Beys couldn't pull back from that. The game ended with the Martians up 10-5.

Katie came back to my motel room again after her shift, but we didn't fuck. Not even a little heavy petting. I guess she was more into me than I was into her (which I'm used to being on the other side of, it was kinda nice having the roles reversed on me if I'm being honest) and she didn't take it so well when I let her know I would be heading back to Tampa in the morning, and thence to New York once the series was over. I like offered her my couch if she wanted to get the fuck out of Florida because she really seemed to hate her job but apparently she couldn't leave it for "reasons she couldn't disclose", and the last time a girl told me she had undisclosed reasons for not moving in with me it turned out that she was secretly married and an undercover cop and also had been dead the whole time17, so I decided not to push.

So because of all that nonsense, I just held Katie while she cried for a while, and then we drifted off to sleep. She was gone by the time I woke up. Because I woke up at 11 AM, and by that point her shift had already started18. I checked out and headed off to Tampa after sending her one of my traditional morning after texts19 only to realize once I got there that I was still super banned from the stadium on account of my alleged misdeeds during game 2 and could totally have hung out in Miami some more since I was only gonna be watching the damn thing on TV anyway. So it goes. I went back to my TGI Friday's but there was a different manager working that day and she refused to turn any of the channels to Based Ball so I watched the Colts play the Browns in a forgettable regular season football game instead. Colts won 23-1020.

Footnotes

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Footnotes

1. Yes, I moved to Queens, the Backdoor got too fuckin' expensive, gentrification affects even Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriters. But hey: no roommates! Now the only people I ever have to talk to are my editor and the night shift guy at the bodega where I buy my smokes.

2. He goes by Naz, real funny guy, he was on Horrible Histories once, although he played Napoleon rather than like Suleiman the Magnificent which I think is kind of a waste.

3. I love this sport.

4. Joke's on him though, footnotes aren't admissible in evidence, so I can tell you that I cursed out the reporter from the Washington Post so badly (so well?) that he couldn't stop crying and had to be sedated. But he talked shit about Björk. Can't just let people get away with that.

5. Game 1 was 6-5 in extra innings, game 2 was 7-4 thanks to a walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the 9th by Tampa catcher Manuel "Manatee" Hernandez. It was a beautiful hit—everyone in TGI Friday's went apeshit. The manager was so excited he comped my mozzarella sticks. Nothing tastes better than free mozzarella sticks.

6. It's me. I am the curse jar. And I am overflowing.

7. And not in a sexy way (not that I have a foot fetish but sometimes you gotta suck some toes, you feel me?).

8. And because I know some of you skim these fucking things until you can find the hot goss about Sofia's latest self-destructive romance, here it is, you can start actually reading now, CHRISTINE.

9. Not that they had any there, I brought it with me from home. The only condiments at Greazeburger Park are greaze-based. And I do not want to find out what honey greazustard tastes like.

10. I learned later that the stare was because I reminded her of a regular that she hated. Something about the aloha shirt and the sunglasses. But I don't have any fungal growths most days and my skin hardly sloughs off my bones at all, so that's a point to Sofia B-)

11. Eagle-eyed readers will note that these were days during which I was not watching much Based Ball, and so once more I can only report the final scores of games 3 and 4. Both went to the Martians, 5-3 and 6-5 respectively. For a play-by-play please consult the sports pages of other newspapers whose correspondents have never won a goddamn Pulitzer.

12. I realize that I've just been throwing the word "greaze" around like you'll know what it is, but it's so central to Greazeburger's whole deal that I forgot most people have never even heard of them. Greaze, basically, is like grease but more so: slimier, slipperier, grosser, and just generally worse. It's everywhere in that fucking stadium and I hate it.

13. June 15th, 2014, Kylie Huber's garage, her mom walked in and I got startled and knocked a whole bottle of motor oil off a shelf and it burst open and splattered all over me. Kylie's mom was very understanding, shoutout to April, thanks for pretending that never happened it was very embarrassing for 18 year old me.

14. It's up on my blog, don't worry. I know you freaks are really here for my erotic autofiction.

15. I'm redacting this shit myself because my editor kept sending it back to me with the same damn note about smut. Personally, I don't think the phrase "choking on girlcock" was excessively pornographic, nor were the (artistic!) descriptions of the tastes, textures and smells of that experience, but I guess that's why SUSAN gets paid the BIG BUCKS while I have to live in QUEENS like I'm PETER FUCKING PARKER. I would never be a photojournalist. Or a superhero. I consider them equally loathsome.

16. For a full overview of the game of Based Ball and the ways it diverges from baseball, please see my article from May, "Based On What: The New Sport That Has My Panties Saturated", or like, google it, or bing it, or duckduckgo it, or kahonk it, or whatever hip new search engine the kids are using these days.

17. This was when I was living in Rio for nine months covering the underground anything-goes-including-magic MMA scene (see my series of articles in Parasports Illustrated from May 2027 to January 2028, or the "brazil" tag on my blog starting with "How To Con Your Editor Into Giving you A Tropical Vacation"). More vampires than you would expect in Brazil so it's not like she was the only dead girl I slept with down there but Alessandra was dead in like a ghost way, which you'd think I would notice, but I've never been particularly observant. Maybe not the best trait for a reporter. C'est la vie.

18. Katie if you're reading this sorry for making you take the bus to work I really should've woken up in time to drive you that's my bad

19. "hey last night was fun! hmu if ur ever up in ny and we can hang out!"—in retrospect I should have changed that first sentence but it's a shortcut in my phone and I was worried I would be late to the game so I wasn't thinking clearly.

20. Editor's Note: Sofia decided to end her article here, and refused to add the actual Based Ball results because they would "compromise [her] artistic vision". I have decided to overrule her. The Martians won the game, and the series, with a 5-0 shutout, mostly thanks to Babe Woof's incredible outfielding. Never knew a dog could throw that far.

This was originally written for RomCon. Katie Theta was created by Prismal, whose take on this romance can be found here.