Sam and Joe were longtime friends and baseball fans. Soon after his 90th birthday, Sam dropped dead, leaving Joe alone with his box scores. One day, Joe looked up from the sports pages to see his old buddy Sam standing there. Sam! Joe said. Tell me: Is there baseball in heaven? Joe, in heaven, theres baseball like youve never seen: The field is sown with fairy dust, and the strike zone is marked in gold. Joe grinned. But theres more, Sam continued. Youre pitching next week.

People have been thinking about baseball and the hereafter for a very long time (or at least since my late grandfather picked up his favorite joke). But the connection is unavoidably explicit at Riley Park Club, the new wine-and-dine space at Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park. Regardless of what you believe happens after you expire, this upscale buffet venue comes pretty close to approximating it.

Perhaps your idea of the afterlife is a paradise where angels remember your drink order and the tiered cookie tray is never bare. As you see it, if you perform the right number of good deeds, youll be rewarded with an unobstructed view of a winning baseball team to the east, the sun setting majestically over a maze of marshland to the west and high-def flat screen TVs in between. Welcome to the Riley Park Club.

Or maybe you dont put any stock in a world to come, believing instead that death amounts to a kind of sensory deprivation chamber. According to your world view, once this stay on earth ends, you wont be able to feel sunlight on your skin; hear the crack of a baseball bat or taste a boiled peanut. Welcome to the Riley Park Club.

The RiverDogs and restaurant group partner The Indigo Road have done a bang-up job of creating a luxury experience along The Joes first base line. By definition, though, its an experience so removed from traditional game-going that its hard to say conclusively whether fans should seek out a Riley Park Club spot for post-season ball. (Barring a last-minute losing streak, the RiverDogs are set to host Game 1 of the South Atlantic League playoffs on Sept. 6.)

In other words, spectators who arent in the habit of buying 10 hot dogs and a few beers every time they go to the ballpark will probably have to calculate for themselves whether the clubs $105 entry fee is a good value.

For their money, ticket holders get a padded upper deck stadium seat as well as the run of a spacious lounge done up in polished executive style: The wood-floored room is furnished with leather club chairs and couches in manly brown tones. But to keep the space from feeling stuffy when its at capacity, meaning 300 people banking off the crudite tables and checking out the dessert selection, there are bands of floor-to-ceiling windows on either side.

A drinks rail is affixed to the window overlooking the field, and on the night I visited the air-conditioned club, thats where most of my fellow patrons congregated. As for the drinks, the three-figure ticket price only covers some of them: Club goers can have as much Woodbridge wine, Bud, Bud Light or Michelob Ultra as theyd like, but better wines and spirits are sold by the glass.

Up to a point, that makes sense: Charleston is home to plenty of practiced drinkers who could guzzle hundreds of dollars worth of liquor over the course of nine innings. But Woodbridge, which retails for about 16 cents an ounce, feels a little chintzy for the setting. And its a shame that there isnt at least one local beer on a free-flowing tap.

Still, thats about the only real error committed by the Riley Park Club, unless too-cool fries are scored as a significant problem. The front-of-house staffers, officially Indigo Road employees, are attentive and cheerful. And the food from Mercantile & Mash is mostly serviceable, albeit far more refined than the peanuts and crackerjack being foisted off on the peons down below.

In fact, the all-you-can-eat buffet would probably benefit from the addition of a few more finger foods, since a ballgame typically takes about three hours to resolve. Thats a whole lot of Dijon-crusted roast beef slices with rosemary jus.

Riley Park Club only provides plastic cutlery, which has the dual drawbacks of seeming cheap and accentuating the beefs toughness. Yet theres enough flavorful fat on the roast to keep eaters from cracking jokes about catchers mitts, along with a pair of standout sides. The corn in the almost all-corn succotash is crisp and sweet, while mashed potatoes bulked up with sour cream and cheese are rich and savory enough to nearly make up for the lack of nachos.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, when the roast beef is served, Riley Park Club also offers strangely gamy slabs of fried chicken, presented with waffles that respond well to honey butter and pecan syrup. Other menu items include blandish biscuits with thick cream gravy, and a supposedly chopped salad thats really just a pile of iceberg lettuce shreds, shredded cheddar cheese and carrot slices. Skip it for the far superior cucumber salad, featuring feta crumbles and red onions as points of interest.

Those meats and vegetables presumably add up to Southern Night, although its not promoted as such. Mondays and Thursdays are devoted to barbecue, with pork shoulder and brisket taking the place of fried chicken and roast beef. Wednesdays and Saturdays bring Caesar salad, pasta and burrata; dumplings and chicken teriyaki are served on Sundays.

Every night is burger and hot dog night: So long as the RiverDogs are playing at home, there are beefy kosher hot dogs, halved and tucked into ruddy buns. As big around as silver dollars, theyre better than the drastically undersalted burgers.

Then again, its possible the seasoning restraint was intentional, since mildness is something of a guiding principle at the Riley Park Club. Within the clubs sealed confines, there are no crowd sounds or pesky gnats. When the games announcer, whose broadcast is piped into the lounge, noted the humidity level stood at 74 percent, a surprised murmur went up from the protected fans.

No matter what transpires, it seems, everything is calm and timeless at the Riley Park Club. Is this heaven? No, its baseball.

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Riley Park Club offers a baseball utopia that denies reality - Charleston Post Courier