When I was growing up, we used to have this neighbor Ed who lived right next door.  He was a huge baseball fan.  He had tickets for the Cubs, the Sox, even the Brewers up in Milwaukee, and any other set of MLB tickets you’d want for the whole region.  If you had asked him, he would have come up with St. Louis Cardinals tickets even.  Often, my brother would shovel his snow or do some yard work to earn one of those tickets.  I, however, had never shown any interest in baseball.  I’d tried to watch it on TV, but the games always went too long and it was so boring.  They wasted so much time between everything.  Ten or fifteen minutes passed between actual plays.  Five minutes passed between pitches.  And it felt like hours between innings.  All of that isn’t counting the time-outs they would call.  I wasn’t very athletic and so I’d never played baseball for little league or anything either.  So I never ended up doing any chores for Ed, not that he didn’t keep offering to take me to ball games.  I’d just say I wasn’t interested.  I’d still probably have done a few chores for him for free, but my brother would have beaten me to it.  He was always desperate for baseball tickets.