The San Francisco Giants baseball team plays 162 games each year. And each year, my family turns on the radio or television to watch, on average, 162 of them.

So when I bought four tickets to bring my father, mother and younger sister to their first live Major League Baseball game, I didnít expect anything unusual. After years of watching televised games, we were all familiar with just about everything related to the sport.

I overlooked one thing, though. My family members are a lot like dogs in the sense that they canít be exposed to a large amount of environmental stimuli at once. And at AT&T Park, there was an awful lot of environmental stimuli. There were the sights: 42,000 people had dressed in the ridiculous color combination of black and orange. There were the sounds: I counted six new profanities my sister learned during our first five minutes at the stadium. There were the smells: The guy behind us smoked weed.

Naturally, they were overwhelmed. I remembered that commands keep my dog calm when sheís distracted, so I gave my family simple rules to follow: Don’t get lost. Don’t throw up. Don’t run onto the field. And when my sister had trouble obeying the last one, a YouTube video of a fan getting tasered on the field helped make up her mind. After herding them all to our bleacher seats and enduring my fatherís belting, off-key rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he’d memorized specifically for the occasion, I thought they’d settle down. They did — but they got a little too comfortable.

My father insisted on doing his signature victory dance, which consists of cap-throwing, stomach-slapping and high-pitched “yee-hoo!”s, every time the Giants pitcher threw a strike. Which was 118 times. “Sorry, he’s drunk,” I said apologetically to the people staring at us, even though he clearly wasnít. And when the Giants scored a run to break the tie, he took it a level further, bro-hugging three balding men with huge beer bellies. This is coming from a guy who: 1) lectures me daily on the dangers of drinking and 2) thinks the most interesting part of baseball is the rule book.

My mother, on the other hand, became fascinated with the idea that you can put trash on the floor and just leave it there — “You don’t even have to pick it up!”. The change must have been liberating; she produced a bag of salted peanuts from her purse and began to pop them into her mouth, spitting the shells on the ground with clear satisfaction. It actually took awhile for the guy next to her to notice all the stuff landing on his shoes. But eventually he did, sighed and ordered three more beers.

You might be waiting for me to tell you some profound revelation about accepting my family the way it is, but that’s not what I learned. What I learned is this: My father has self-control issues, my mother salivates way too much and my sister picks up new words — especially dirty ones — really, really quickly. I also learned that the next time we go on a family outing, I need a bunch of those child leashes that parents use to drag their toddlers around the mall.

We won’t go to another baseball game anytime soon, since the entire thing cost $200 out of my wallet. But we will be watching from the comfortable (and private) confines of our home. Yes, we will be watching — and we will be singing, swearing and spitting.