Extra Ordinary Ideas

Beer and Baseball

As you surely know, Boston has been in a state of transcendent baseball bliss for the last ten days. While baseball bears the distinction of being the only major sport I enjoy, I certainly don’t qualify as a “fan” the way people here define the term. Still, it’s nice to have the whole city in a good mood at the same time.

City bureaucrats were as excited as anyone else, which makes one wonder why they couldn’t come up with some less punitive crowd control strategies for the week. In an effort to discourage the, ahem, overexcited fans, local bar owners agreed under pressure to a set of guidelines for The Series, one of which was “not to permit lines to form outside establishments.”

The mandate left frazzled bouncers trying to break up lines on public sidewalks over which they had no jurisdiction, and the result in at least one Boston bar was a small “mob” rather than a prohibited “line.”

A friend pointed out before Game Four that what Boston really needed was emergency bars. The goal of keeping people off the streets would certainly have been better served by issuing licenses for beer-serving, playoff-watching venues in vacant commercial real estate. It’s the sort of pareto optimal solution city employees might come up with if they weren’t so used acting as fun police.