One writer’s night of cheap thrills

Every time the Portland Beavers have a home game scheduled for Thursdays, they hold what they call “Thirsty Thursdays.” If you’re thirsty, try it. Aside from getting to watch baseball in the newly remodeled PGE Park, you can quench your thirst for a few bucks.

This event opens the floodgates to the Widmer beer garden along the first base line, because beer is only $1. Yep, only a buck. But, all those people in the beer garden have to wait in a long line and stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, like the MAX train at rush hour.

You don’t have to be in the beer garden to get the dollar beers though. Every beer and food vender offers the buck beers. So, instead of fighting through the drunken crowd, a photographer and I just grabbed some beers up at the food vendor’s and took our seats. The vendors limit you to two beers per person at a time. That’s all right; I only have two hands anyway.

Not only is the beer cheap, but the tickets aren’t too bad either. The prices range in the cheap seats from $3.50-$8.75. Other seats are in the $20 price range, but there’s no need to get anything but the cheap seats. I paid $7.50 and sat on the third base line, just four rows back from the season ticket holders’ seats. It’s not like PGE Park is so big or the stands are so full that the seating makes that huge of a difference.

If trying to get game balls is your mission, then the cheap seats is where you want to be. That was where all the foul balls were hit. If you weren’t paying attention you might have been the victim of a stray ball, or some crazed fan diving for it.

Pounding some beers and watching the Beaver center fielder, Kory DeHaan, make a great catch over the wall, robbing the Nashville Sound’s Chad Hermansen of a homer was great. The Beavers emerged ahead of the Sound by a score of 3-1, in part thanks to shortstop Julius Matos’ two-out, two-strike single in the fifth. That drove in the two runs and the win.

Although there wasn’t a big crowd, even if you counted the mob of people in the beer garden, “Thirsty Thursday” is an event that I will return to.