I like the Red Sox at lot and I like going to baseball games, too, though admittedly at a much more modest level for the most part. Modest like the Watertown Wizards or, you know, the Toronto Blue Jays. Having learned my lesson from the wallet lightening I once took at an Ottawa Senators game, I presume when at at top level sporting match I do not want the over-priced poorly-made beer handled by an unknown number of people before it is passed to me. But apparently there is an issue related to this in fair Boston this season, as issue about what sort of seats you can afford:

Beer vendors at Fenway Park can ply their trade in the field boxes, the dugout seats, and up in the pavilions, areas where customers pay more for their tickets. Fans elsewhere have to fetch their own... What's really going on here? It's all about money. Not making it, but who has more of it. The beer polloi, those of us sitting in the (relatively) cheap seats, are out of luck. "It's elitist," Pokaski frankly admits. Indeed, it is, with the somewhat outrageous subtext being that only the rich can be trusted to hold their liquor.

Price and value and exclusivity are dangerous waters to wade if the point of liking beer includes the freedom to like your beer in equal measure with your fellow travelers along this mortal coil. It comes in many forms. Stan has noted the frankly absurd phenomena of a forty three dollar bottle of beer though, to be fair, he warned us all when this plan was first announced a year and a half ago. As I noted in the comments, "worth" is contextual and not just inherent in the fluid itself. If I feel that someone is fleecing me, I am insulted. The sweet fluid in the glass gains the bitter tang that comes when one knows he is being treated like a fool. Now, to be fair, there are far far worse examples of how one might be taken by a brewer's marketing team. And some very fine brewers are facing a bit of a back lash when one is expected to pay for experiments which may well gone wrong. But these all exemplify the tangled web of value, price and worth. Not to mention the need of the beer fan to step carefully as he goes.

Which brings me back to baseball. Look up there at that scene up there. The beer is in a corner, likely a Genesee of one sort or another. Likely cost me two bucks. Likely went down a treat as the game played itself before me on a gorgeous late spring evening. Is it worth less than the one at Fenway or those supposedly precious drops offered at ten or more times the price? Is it not in fact worth more? It is the one I day dream of as often as not.