About once a week or so, there’s a play on the field that’s just absolutely incomprehensible to the people in the stands. At least, to me, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m the model for the person who should be able to figure things out. I know most of the rules and I’ve seen a lot of quirky plays, but I still end up baffled unsettlingly frequently when I’m at the park. One thing I just can’t figure out, though, is the balk, which is maddening because it’s pretty clearly defined in the rules, but deciding when one has happened seems to be a very subjective activity. So, in the top of the fourth, when Alex Cobb is called for a balk, I have no real answer when we’re watching him stalk around the infield yelling at umpires and Julie says “What’s happening?” This is mostly because there’s no announcement anywhere in the park when a balk is called; strikes, balls, outs, errors, launch angles, exit velocity – there is an enormous amount of information of varying usefulness available on the scoreboard, but one of the hardest things to recognize has no presence in all that data. You have to wait until the word balk percolates around the ballpark, starting with people who were sitting near enough to the field to hear it or have been listening to the radio. After the word ‘balk’ reaches the arcade – well after it happened and accompanied by no replay – I tell Julie that the balk is the opposite of Potter Stewart’s pornography: It’s easy to define, but you mostly don’t know it when you see it.
For the first time this year, and the second time ever, I’ve taken the ferry over from Jack London Square. It’s a nice trip – I ask Julie if she wants to watch Oakland disappear as we leave or San Francisco grow as we approach, and she chooses the latter, so we sit facing the bow. It’s a much more pleasant ride than BART – quieter, more scenic, and less…fragrant, and although it takes a little longer, that just means there’s more time to talk. Julie tells me that she has a Mustang in her garage that she and her sons built – a replica of the one from “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which I haven’t seen but understand is about cars – and when I ask her if she’s a car girl, she says no and then says a really car person thing about what kind of engine it has in it, which I think has liters and maybe a block? and definitely some numbers. I like hearing about sexy car stuff like that, but as is the case when I read about meals with tomatoes and wild onions, I think “That sounds great, but it’s probably not something I should get involved in.” I like being involved with the ferry, though – Oracle Park is really impressive when you approach from the seaward side.
Julie lives in Piedmont, where I guess there are some people who are famous and some people who are rich and, I would guess, some people who are both. I’m not a lot better at famous people than I am at car stuff, though, and I briefly worry that I might not be interesting enough for Julie, but we’ve known each other for about a year now and this is her second ballgame with me, so I guess I’m doing okay. At least I know some stuff about baseball, although whn she asks “Who’s our star this year?” I can only think of Thairo Estrada, which is the right answer, but it worries me that I can’t call any other name to mind offhand except for Casey Schmitt, who just got here and is pretty much on fire but doesn’t have enough history yet to be calling him our star. Then some other names pop into my head and I review, but decide for now that Thairo is as good an answer as any and better than most.
As a brief followup to yesterday’s paragraph about us booing Bryce Harper: a lot of us still are, but late in the game, we have mostly autopiloted that, and one guy passing behind us, when Harper’s name is announced, just says “Boooo,” in a conversational tone and not loud enough for anyone more than ten feet away to hear, which kind of cracks me up because it’s such a pro forma thing – “Oh, Harper? Right; boo! What are we having for dinner?”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are some guys – about fifteen of them – in 151, one township to the east, who are keeping up a steady stream of mostly drunk chatter that is so constant that it’s hard to tell who they’re rooting for or against, when both Taylor and then Tyler Rogers are pitching, they just keep yelling, as a group, “Rooooogeeeeeers…Rooooogeeeeeers…” in such a steady monotone that it’s hard to tell if they’re truing to distract them or cheer them on. They’re turning the Ks on the wall, though, and I figure they wouldn’t be allowed to do that if they were too pro-Phillies.
It’s a busy night in Section 152. So far this year there’s been a brisk trade in nobody sitting near me – most games I have one or two other people in my township, and even they come and go. It’s a popular place to stop in for a bit. Sometimes that’s great, and I get to welcome travellers from faroff lands, and sometimes it’s drunk people who are past the fun drunk stage and well into the obnoxious loud stage where they think they’re funny. I’ve done my time as an obnoxious loud (but not drunk) person who thinks he’s funny, so I am comfortable judging them. Tonight, though, it seems to be mostly people who actually bought tickets for these seats – two couples right on front of me and Julie. It’s hard to tell what the exact relationships are, but it seems like one couple has been together for awhile and one is maybe just starting out. It’s easy to eavesdrop on them, because they are not being quiet with their conversation, which is OK by me for now, because I am always looking for quotes for the title of the blog. Anyway, tonight’s foursome (three of whom came dressed for the weather) are a surprising nerdy bunch. I am used to being the nerdiest, least sports-oriented person in my section, but these four spend a lot of time talking about celebrity scandals, science-fiction TV shows, and the eating habits of the one who is filling the Seth Rogen slot in the group. The whole thing comes to a head when that guy says “When I was into Pokémon Go, I spent a lot of money on it,” and I have to say that although I don’t care about Pokémon Go, I’m glad those people are at the ballpark. I’ve always felt like I was more nerd-adjacent than pure nerd, but I’m glad my people are winning the cultural battle.
The Giants are winning too. They score twice early, suffer a (balk-assisted) surge that ties the game in the fourth, but then score two more behind some comical Keystone Kops fielding and hold on for a 4-3 win in spite of a last-minute homer by Kyle Schwarber. We’re briefly worried, but Camilo Doval does his job and we walk away from the Giants’ second win in a row.
81 Dates 