I arrived really early at the park, much earlier than my companion for the day; Lisa had some holdups on public transportation and made it in just after the first pitch, so I had about an hour to myself in my seat. I was watching the grounds crew set up the field – taking up the tarp from the mound, laying down the chalk for baselines, hosing down the infield – and just enjoying the rising chatter in the same way that I enjoy listening to it fading away after the game is over, and a voice behind me, someone talking to his friends, said “…and the bases are three inches bigger? Too many things are changing too fast!” and I wheeled around and said “Right? The pitch clock, and the National League DH, and the free runner in extra innings? Everything sucks now!” The guy, a compact, happy-looking Latino in a Nationals cap, laughed and said “Totally! What happened to the classic game we love, dude?” “What happened to the classic game,” I echoed, and he put out a fist for a bump, and I said “We are old men now, my friend,” which he loved. I am essentially sitting on my porch talking about how the game was so much better in my day, when my day was really just the mid-nineties.
Lisa, who works in Golden Gate Park, sometimes gardening and sometimes supervising, arrives just after the first pitch. That turns out to be the perfect time to show up if you want to see baseball, because a single, another single, a third single, a fourth single, and a fifth single result in two runs. A comical baserunning error involving two runners on second base and a popup to short left result in two outs, so it doesn’t feel like the game is totally out of control, and I say “Well, this isn’t good, but it’s not a disaster.” Later on when I’m reviewing the game on MLB.tv, at exactly the same point, Kuip says on TV “This is still a manageable inning if you can hold it to two,” which makes me feel good about having the same analytical instincts as a veteran ballplayer and TV announcer. A sixth and seventh single put three more runs on the board, and looking back I feel pretty good that Kuip and I were exactly the same amount of wrong at the same time. “Well, now it’s a disaster,” I say to Lisa, who figures maybe it will light a fire under the Giants. The problem with that, I say, is that sometimes when you get a fire lit under you, you just end up on fire.
That is pretty much the extent of the baseball for the evening. Either the Nationals forget how to hit or Anthony DeSclafani remembers how to pitch; he goes six more innings without giving up another run. I forgot to take a picture again, which is astonishing because the next thing that happens aside from a couple of spectacular catches in the outfield, one from each team, is that Joc Pederson hits a home run in the bottom of the ninth, and then the game is over. Except for the first inning, this is one of those games that some people think are boring but others treasure as a brilliant pitching duel.
We have a lot of time to talk during this pitching duel. I strike up a conversation with a pair of paramedics loitering in my section; in spite of the fact that like twelve people read this, I promise them I won’t publish most of the answers to the questions I ask them. All I can say is that 1) mostly they deal with people who have had too much to drink, 2) one of them solved a crime at the park once, and 3) somebody fell down an escalator the other day, which they assure me can be very dangerous, and I tell them I know that because my sister did it once in her first year of college while trying to impress a boy by sliding down the handrail. I imagine it’s worse if you fall down an escalator that’s going up; that could be an endless tragicomedy.
Lisa’s working on a degree in horticulture – I imagine partly for her job with the SF Parks Department, but probably also just because she likes gardening. That leads to talk about schooling and writing – she says she used to think she was good at math and bad at English, but then she took a statistics class and realized she had it the wrong way around. She’s selling herself short – statistics isn’t math – but admits that she likes math because the answers are either right or wrong, which gets us into a discussion about prescriptivism, descriptivism, my mom, and grammar as gatekeeping mechanism which leads to talk of dating profiles where people say they won’t date you if you can’t handle the your/you’re and there/their/they’re issues. I manage to stop short of saying I think apostrophes should be done away with, but mostly because we’re in the ninth inning and I run out of time.
Just before the game ends, a woman standing at the end of my row says loudly “Not with that attitude!” and I am devastated that I was paying attention to Lisa and I can’t tell if it was angry or sarcastic or joking, nor what the attitude was about. That’s the way the ball bounces, I guess.
81 Dates 