COMMENTARY : FanFest Offers Baseball Feast, but Don’t Expect Fast Service

Major League Baseball finally has come up with something more tedious than a pitching change. It’s waiting in line for the attractions at the All-Star FanFest.

And so it went Saturday for my 13-year-old son Christian and I--and about 20,000 other souls--at the All-Star FanFest at the San Diego Convention Center.

I had envisioned an intense, close-order meeting of generations on a common field of dreams. What I got from the four-hour experience was an aching back and knees from the waiting, waiting and more waiting.

To step into the Power Alley Interactive Batting cages, we stood in line for 90 minutes. Yes, it was fun, we agreed, going up against Rollie Fingers’ video image from which five 50-m.p.h. fastballs, curves and changeups were thrown by cannon. But we were so tired of standing that it was more a relief than a thrill to get through it.

Waiting proved to be the order of the day. Getting Curt Flood’s autograph at the Heroes of Baseball hall took an hour. Getting our fastballs clocked in the Rolaids Bullpen blocked out 30 minutes. Having a free picture done by Upper Deck sports cards would have cost us 45 to 55 minutes, a guard told us. Getting a mouthful of Milwaukee Bratwurst on the Extra Innings Terrace took 15 minutes of standing in the hot sun.

Clearly, the crowd that descended onto the convention center demonstrated Major League Baseball’s hold over the populace. Just as clearly, whoever planned the show was unprepared for the quantity of fans that FanFest would attract. That is, unless the organizers--Upper Deck and Major League Baseball----really expect people to wait in line that long and like it.

So on the whole, the experience for me was was about as happy as a bad day at the San Ysidro border crossing or a visit to the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. Christian, as enervated as I, was slightly more sanguine, comparing it to waiting for rides at Disneyland.

Was it worth it?

Parts of the FanFest were indeed glorious and, surprisingly enough, we agreed on which ones. The exhibit that Major League Baseball borrowed from the Cooperstown Hall of Fame was nearly worth the price of admission, which is $10 for adults and $8 for children. Parking is another $4.

The baggy uniforms, well-worn shoes and sweat-stained hats of players such as Lou Gehrig, Roberto Clemente and Mel Ott were awe-inspiring. The Cooperstown show is a statistics junkie’s dream, with a dozen categories of all-time batting and pitching leaders written large on the walls so that one can easily ponder their import.

There were fascinating photos of the grand old stadiums that have long since fallen to the wrecker’s ball: Crosley Field in Cincinnati, the Polo Grounds in New York and Griffith Park in Washington D.C. They now seem as odd, ancient and heroic as a Roman arch.

The exhibit also included rows of seats that were salvaged from Forbes Field, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and other long-gone stadiums. The seats provided our weary bodies with welcome respite and an opportunity to mourn what we have lost with the passing of the old generation of structures, of which Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are the remaining landmarks.

Also on display were the new uniforms that will be worn by players of baseball’s two expansion teams, the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins. The purple- and aqua-colored uniforms look strange now but will become familiar next year once the two new teams, both National League franchises, start visiting here.

“They’re going to stink unless they get some awesome draft picks,” Christian said of the Marlins’ short-term prospects. “That’s one Florida team that’s not going to be good,” He’s a die-hard fan of the Florida State Seminoles and Miami Hurricanes, by the way.

But the Cooperstown exhibit represented a small fraction of the show’s floor space. The bulk of it is given over to commercialism and collectibles that gave it an air of a well-oiled swap meet. A big piece of the exhibition’s top floor is the Hall of Heroes, laid out to keep hundreds of autograph seekers snaking through the cavernous room as quickly as possible.

Much of the ground floor of the convention center is rented out to sports card and memorabilia dealers and collectors. And not just baseball collectibles. Christian haggled briefly with New Yorker Danny Schmidt of M&M; Baseball Inc. over San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson’s rookie card. “I’ll give it to you for $28. You won’t find it no cheaper,” Schmidt said.

All the standing around did give Christian and me the opportunity to compare notes on some current stars and on a few old-timers. Watching a video highlighting Roberto Alomar, he wondered why Alomar had to leave San Diego to become a star. “Everybody does better when they leave San Diego. We always have good players but we never have good coaching,” he said.

Walking through the Cooperstown show, he recognized Ted Williams because his eighth grade basketball team played games in the gym at Hoover High, Williams’ alma mater. One of the gym’s walls is dominated by a huge photo of the Splendid Splinter.

And there, in the Cooperstown exhibit, was Williams’ name, high on the lists of several all time batting categories including lifetime batting average, home runs and runs batted in. Williams was present as the honored guest at FanFest’s opening on Friday, I told him, but was not there Saturday, I said.

Was there anything missing from Fan Fest that he wished was there?

“Ted Williams,” Christian said. “And shorter lines.”