It is a failing of mine, has been a failing of mine for my entire life, that I just never remember to take pictures. It’s a trait that results overwhelmingly both in me not having pictures of things I was doing, and in me not being skilled enough to take very good pictures on the rare occasions when I do remember to try. It was the same today at the park, when after I thanked Greg for joining me, hugged him goodbye, and watched him disappear into the crowd on his way to finish off the day with a nice motorcycle ride down Highway 1, I thought “Shoot, I should have taken a picture with Greg.”

Instead of a nice selfie of us smiling amiably in my seats, I took two unremarkable pictures today – one of a Giant named Michael Conforto, and another of a Royals batter named Matt Duffy. Both of them were taken at a great distance, but kind of zoomed in, and both of them were for my sister. Conforto is a former Met, and I like to let my sister know when Mets show up to play on the Giants. I think partly we both have a feeling that when a Met ends up on another team, we want to cheer a little that they finally made the big leagues. That probably sounds a little mean, but the truth is that we both really like the Mets but also feel like they’re kind of a hard-luck slow-motion disaster, and anyone who leaves might finally catch the break he deserves. That might be just me, but I know that where some baseball fans can harbor ill will for players who move on, she always wishes them well in their future endeavors, like an HR person who really liked you but had to fire you because the bosses said so. She would have kept you on if she could have.

I took the picture of Matt Duffy because I remember my sister saying, several years ago, something like “Who among us didn’t know a Matt Duffy in high school?” I sent her the picture, with what I thought was a pretty self-explanatory caption (“Matt Duffy!”), which resulted in this conversation:

Sometimes you wake up in the morning thinking you know something and by the time you go to bed the world has changed. My sister’s relationship to Matt Duffy is now a mystery to both of us, instead of just her.

Greg, genial and solid, has joined me for Opening Day. It’s his first time in the park for a game, although he saw Lady Gaga here a while back. Like me, he appreciates the apparent tradition of the place. The Giants have done a really good job of infusing this park, less than 25 years old, with the gravity of an organization that has been in business since 1883. We reminisce about our baseball heritages – his involves the Cubs, passed down from his grandmother, and we talk about how many loyal Cubs fans there are all over the place. The Cubs are one of those teams that I feel like nobody can really root hard against, like the Mets or the Green Bay Packers, and every Cubs fan I’ve ever met seems pretty nice. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in White Sox territory, or in whatever city Cub-haters live in, but here it’s hard not to feel a certain fondness for them and their people.

Anyway, the game itself is unremarkable, a mostly uneventful 3-1 loss that perks up briefly in the bottom of the ninth when Joc Pederson bangs a ball off the right-field wall and ends up on third. Yastrzemski strikes out (aided by a terrible call from the umpire), Estrada smashes a ball so utterly directly at Matt Duffy that he might as well have thrown it at him, Crawford walks, and Sabol strikes out (aided by a slightly less terrible call from the umpire) to end it. We all stood up hopefully several times after the triple, but I was so busy talking to Greg that I forgot to put on my rally cap and the whole potential rally fizzled out. My fault; I’ll try to do better next time.

Greg had asked what my favorite part of the game was, and I didn’t even have to think about it. There are great moments and hilarious statistics and exciting wins, but at the end of the year, I almost never remember who hit what or which pitcher had how many strikeouts or who ended up on the DL. When winter settles in, though, and the last postseason game is over, I’m going to remember hearing about Greg’s kids’ short Little League careers and eating chicken tenders on Opening Day.