The 2018 season was a very different one – for me, anyway. For the Giants it was more of the same – 73 and 89, a slight improvement from the previous year’s disastrous 64 and 98.
It was no longer possible to take a different person to every game – I had run through my sports friends (sport friend, really – my social circle leaned more toward swords, sorcery and comic books than baseball) and also my non-sports friends. I started branding the experience as a chance to spend time with me at a place where a baseball game just happened to be taking place. Even so, some people felt like maybe they’d rather just go to lunch someplace where the food was reasonably priced. An uncle said maybe I could just give him a call when I came back to visit Sacramento; an ex asked why it had to be baseball, since she really didn’t like sports at all. Another uncle kept asking for tickets. He talked agreat game, but he lived in the Philippines and couldn’t really be counted on to show up.
I’m sure I had amazing experiences, but honestly I can’t remember thenm specifically. I hadn’t started taking notes yet. I know that during that time I took a friend of a friend, an 8-time (maybe more now) MMA champion who turned out to be the only bad experience of the year. She spent almost the entire time on her phone, posting to social media and chatting with other people. I found out later that she had somehow gotten the impression that I thought we were on a date, and she was probably afraid I was going to start hitting on her. Her solution, I guess, was to disengage entirely.
My records are incomplete for that year – the scheduling wasn’t so impacted that I needed a spreadsheet, but I kept one anyway. Kind of. I took several people more than once, went alone several times, and even missed a few games. At the end of the year, things changed – my season ticket rep Kevin called me with an amazing opportunity.
81 Dates 