At 4pm on Tuesday, it looks like I am about to have my first solo night at the ballpark, having come up empty on the three or four social media platforms that I usually use to find people to take with me. I am working on some other venues, but nothing has really gotten going yet, so at about 430, almost on my way out the door, I call my season ticket guy to tell him that I’m going to need to turn one of my tickets in for credit tonight. I’m actually in the process of saying that to him when a message from Heather pops up asking if the set is still open, and I sheer off with Javier, asking him if I can call him around six if I haven’t found anyone. Of course he says yes – he has not said no to me yet, and although I don’t want to overstep on asking for favors, I feel like – as with Kevin, my rep from 2017 to 2019 – if I told him I needed to watch a game on horseback from the pocket of the left-field glove, he would find a way. Heather is in, though, and so my first night alone will be some other time. At the game, when we’re talking about how close I came, she asks (as Michelle did) “Will you have to call it 80dates now?” I have worked with low-hanging fruit myself on occasion, so I forgive both of them.
Hands down, this is the best game so far this year, baseball wise: it has everything you could ask for. Early Giants lead, consistent, exciting hitting, great pitching, late Cardinals surge, and a two-out, two-strike, three-run homer from a rookie in the ninth for a 5-4 Giants win that feels, to the crowd and to the team, like a World Series win. This is the fourth W in a row, but before this streak, they hadn’t won consecutive games and the surface was getting farther and farther away, so the win makes it feel like they’ve turned a corner, finally playing like they feel like they can play. If anything great happens this season, I can imagine us looking back on this game and and thinking “that’s when it started to come together.”
Heather feels it too – when Sabol’s ball goes over the center-field fence, she’s jumping up and down and screaming with delight, and I’m pretty sure if she’d had a drink in her hand, we’d be wearing most of it right now. It’s such an exciting win that it’s hard to remember details of the rest of the game, except that a guy in my section barehanded a foul ball that came into 152 at about a hundred miles an hour; he did it so casually that it looked like he’d just been waiting for it. He was the only other person in the section, too; he didn’t even have to reach for it. It was like fate, and then equally casually, he tossed the ball down to a kid in the field club seats below us. “That’s a hell of a man right there,” I say to Heather, and she nods: “The whole package.”
We spent a while walking around the park last night, in particular down under the left-field bleachers where Kenny was managing the thing where you can see how fast you can throw a baseball-shaped object (they don’t use real baseballs, just these spongy approximations that apparently kids like to steal, because by the time we got there, there were only like nine of them left from the bucket Ken started out with). It probably has a name, like FASTBALL! or Hot Hand or something, but I didn’t really look and Kenny just calls it “the pitching mound downstairs” when he invites us down. Heather apparently used to be on a competitive softball team until she suffered a rotator cuff injury, by which I am secretly impressed because it sounds very glamorous, but I left Little League about fifty years ago and have since only thrown things casually since, aside from a brief career as a rounders star at the Renaissance fair. Last time I tried my hand at a radar gun, it was at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on a day when I sunburned my shaved head so badly that I woke up the next day…OK, that story is for another time, because it is not baseball-related and also is super gross. Suffice it to say that finding out I could only throw a baseball about 50mph was only the second worst part of the trip. Anyway, for some reason, Heather took this picture of me looking as though I have never seen a baseball before and am wondering if I should eat it or what:
There is no picture of my pitching form, but she did get one of the results of me looking far more satisfied than I probably should at the results of what I think was my best pitch.
It’s good to know that my fastball has only degraded by about five mph in the last twenty years.
NB: Heather also pointed out to me on BART that there are five claps, not four, in the Friends theme song, so if you read yesterday’s post yesterday and then read it again today and you were wondering if there was some kind of Nelson Mandela/Berenstain Bears-type alternate universe split happening, no, I just went back and changed it.
81 Dates 