Thaddeus Ward is warming up in the Nationals bullpen in the bottom of the seventh, but he doesn’t need to. Honestly, I could go in to pitch for Washington, and the Giants would not win this game. The score is 10-2, and Ward’s first couple of throws are a little lackadaisical – you can tell he’s just loosening up the arm, not really aiming. Still, the ball is moving pretty fast, and Fred and I have positioned ourselves right behind the practice catcher; when the place is crowded it’s a hard spot to get, but today, although the official count is 21,283, there aren’t more than maybe 12,000 in the park. We’re alone at the rail, so when Ward’s first real hard throw arrives, we’re the only ones who see it. We see it really close, though, because it’s very high – a right-handed hitter would have had to hit the deck – and the catcher leaps to pull it in. The second pitch is in exactly the same place, and we laugh and clap and wave to Ward, who puts the third one right where the last two went, except this time, the catcher doesn’t stop it and with a mighty bang it leaves a mark on the clear plastic a foot in front of my face. I don’t flinch; I was half expecting it – the last two were so precise – and I yell “Now you’re doing it on purpose!” and I think I get a grin out of him. He doesn’t aim for my face any more, though. When he was wild, I was thinking “Put this guy in now – he’ll give up ten runs!” but on reflection, if he actually was aiming for my head, holy cow is he good.
We spend a couple of innings in the 415, and when a ball arrives in right center via a Michael Conforto homer in the eighth, the NBC camera catches us looking… let’s say not super involved. That brought the score to 10-4 (the final was 11-6), and it wasn’t as close as it sounds. The Nationals scored eight in the first three innings, and after that it was all conversation and walking around the park. This year I’ve mostly taken people who have already been here, and on the occasions when I’ve had new people, the shortened games have made a 45-minute tour a bad investment. Still, this time, we manage to get by the aquarium, up to the third deck and the views of the bay, over to the Lego statues and back down to the brisket stand, which it turns out is, tragically, closed. We end up with a perfectly serviceable plate of default chicken tenders instead.
Now that I am remembering to take photos at the ballpark, it’s probably time to start working on how to take good ones. I got three of me and Fred, all of which were inferior to the one that he took, but I may have to begin grappling with the concept that I’m just not very photogenic.
Fred is an engaging companion, and I feel like we have a lot of the same ideas about things – relationships, our responsibilities and duties as men, the way we label ourselves in various communities, and board games. He is, in fact, so engaging that I basically forgot to make notes about anything we were talking about because I was so busy enjoying talking about it. We get all over the place, and most of what I remember involves Fred saying something that I think is reasonable and smart and then me saying “Yeah, me too!”
Speaking of photos, this is the one I took to show Fred what I looked like when he was on his way to the park, and it represents a new era in pictures this year, because I finally opened up one of the boxes of Giants hats that have been in storage for the last six months, so you will be seeing a lot of new (to you) headgear. This one is a Mothers’ Day hat that came out four or five years ago.
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