If it weren’t for baseball, many kids wouldn’t know what a millionaire looked like. — Phyllis Diller

M onths ago, when a friend of mine who lives in L.A. told me she wanted to plan her San Diego visit to coincide with a ballgame at Petco Park, I was a little taken aback. Not horrified or anything, more like the kind of surprise I experience when discovering a new blouse in my closet — its tags still attached — that I’d forgotten I’d purchased. Oh, right , I think. It’s totally not my color, and it kind of clashes with everything else I own, but, hey, it’s here, it’s new, might as well. The ballpark had only entered my consciousness in the form of the new buildings that had shot up around it and the impossibility of parking that led me to keep a copy of the game schedule in my purse. Distracted by what went on outside the park, I never gave a second thought to what went on inside it. It had never occurred to me to go there.