“Americans will eat enough hot dogs at major league ballparks this year to stretch from R.F.K. Stadium in Washington, D.C., to AT&T Park in San Francisco,” the council claims.  Shea Stadium ranks No. 1 among major league ballparks who responded to a questionnaire from the National Hog Dog and Sausage Council, with annual consumption of more than 1.5 million hot dogs. (Yankee Stadium sells about 30,000 a game but did not answer the survey.) According to Aramark, most of Shea’s dogs are sold by 48 vendors who roam the stands, as opposed to concessionaires who sell from fixed locations. The average vendor sells 150 a game, and 10,000 to 12,000 a season. Working for commissions ranging from 13 percent to 16 percent depending on seniority, they can make $150 to $200 a game, and as much as $30,000 a season.  I met a sampling of my fellow vendors as we wended through the bowels of the stadium. Along with several minimum-age 18-year-olds from the Bronx and Queens, they included a school principal, an accountant, a day trader, a bus driver and Bobby Lee, a 48-year-old retired firefighter who now lives in Kansas City, Mo., but still commutes to Shea to work baseball games. “I’ve been doing this since 1974 because I just love the Mets,” Bobby explained.  At noon, I reported to the so-called money room on the stadium’s field level. It featured a row of teller windows where I exchanged a $50 bill for a roll of quarters and a stack of $5 bills. Tom Morely provided me with a black apron, a black cap, a greenish-yellowish T-shirt with “VENDOR” on the back, and a plastic button marked “4.75,” signifying the price of a hot dog, sans dollar sign.  I proceeded to a bustling commissary redolent with the aroma of freshly popped popcorn. In lieu of formal training, Tom paired me with Arnold Henriquez, 27, a recent graduate of York College of the City University of New York. Arnold had been at it for 10 years and had sold enough hot dogs the previous season to qualify as the Mets’ designated vendor at the 2006 All-Star game in Pittsburgh.  We hurried to the back of the commissary where a porter was loading each steel bin with a can of lighted Sterno, 30 hot dogs, 30 plastic packaged buns, 30 foil wraps, 30 paper napkins, packets of mustard and ketchup and a long metal fork. Arnold patiently tutored me in the proper food handling “barrier” technique. I was supposed to grab a foil wrap with one hand and grab the fork with the other, use the fork to split open a bun and place it in the wrap, and then spear a hot dog and place it inside the bun.  “The thing that’s going to be challenging is separating the buns without touching them with your bare hands,” Arnold said.  In fact, bun-splitting proved to be only one of many unexpected challenges for me. Hot-dog vendors must balance their bins on the tops of their caps when they parade through the stands. My fully loaded bin weighed 40 pounds, but it felt heavier than Sisyphus’s rock. With each step, I feared that I was going to trip and fall, igniting a Sterno-fueled trial by fire in which I perished amid sizzling meat, flaming dough and melting plastic.  To my chagrin, most of the Mets fans in the field boxes to which I was assigned recognized that I was a rookie vendor, and took a kind of amused pity on me. My first customer was Steve Plotnicki, a food industry blogger with a nameplate on his box. I mentioned that my day job was writing. “Fantastic,” he replied. “This is like ordering a hot dog from Hemingway.”  Moments later, a fellow sitting a few rows behind Mr. Plotnicki gave me my first tip, a crisp dollar bill. “I like the way you handle those buns,” he said, grinning.  As I hoisted the bin back on top of my cap, I heard cries for hot dogs from customers on every side. I all but abandoned proper barrier technique in a frantic effort to supply the surging demand. I got my second tip, a whopping $5, from a stockbroker named Joel Klein. By the top of the third inning, I had only two hot dogs left. As this happened to be “Kids Day” at Shea, I gave them away to a pair of 11-year-old boys.  I retreated to the commissary for a refill, only to find that Arnold was on his third bin, and Bobby Lee had sold 150 sticks of cotton candy. “Move it,” Bobby hollered. “You’re getting paid by the piece, not by the hour.”  By the time I returned to the stands carrying a second bin, my arms and legs felt like rubber hot dogs, and my hastily affected Queens accent had become a mournful wheeze. Worse, the Mets were losing to the Nationals, and I hadn’t managed to see a single pitch. Nine hot dogs later, I decided to turn in my bin and watch the game.  At the bottom of the seventh, I went to the money room for the inevitable accounting. Arnold the All-Star had sold 180 hot dogs, netting more than $136, not including tips. I had moved a measly 39 hot dogs, losing $29.75 because of giveaways. “I can send you to a minor league park in Brooklyn,” Tom Morely said, exhaling a puff of cigarette smoke, “or I can just fire you.”  I reckoned I deserved the latter, and we shook hands on it. Then I slunk away, back to the No. 7. As the train pulled into Grand Central, I reached into my jacket pocket and found a solitary fork-shredded bun.  “Hawt dawg,” I muttered. “I need a red hawt hawt dog.”  The Executive Pursuits column in Business Day on May 5, about selling hot dogs at Shea Stadium, misinterpreted a survey by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council and referred incorrectly to hot dog sales at Shea. Although the stadium sells an average of just under 20,000 hot dogs a game, and ranks No. 1 among major league ballparks who responded to the questionnaire from the hot dog council, Shea does not lead all ballparks in sales. It trails Yankee Stadium, which sells about 30,000 a game but did not answer the survey. (A reader raised the issue after an article on May 11 about the introduction of Latin food at Yankee Stadium mentioned the higher figure for the Yankees. Unfortunately for the reader, who vowed not to “consume any dogs at either stadium until it has been settled,” this correction was delayed for research; but the Mets have a home game tomorrow night.)  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Hawking Hot Dogs: Some Are All-Stars And Then There’s ... Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The New York Mets were warming up to play and I was warming up to sell a food item as famously American as baseball and apple pie.