Rose arrives at the park having started the day with some yogurt, but not recently enough that we could wait to get food. I myself didn’t start with anything, so I’m ready to go too. “What is there to eat?” she asks, and I feel like the radio announcers telling the audience who’s in the field. From right to left, starting behind the scoreboard, crab sandwiches, clam chowder, shrimp bowls, tri-tip, barbecue, vegetarian sandwiches and flatbread pizza, and then getting back onto the promenade, ice cream, burgers, organic chicken, burritos and tacos, brisket, lumpia, poke bowls, different barbecue, porchetta sandwiches, cheesesteak sandwiches, complicated nachos, fancy hot dogs, and pizza. and sprinkled in there are a half dozen places with the ballpark standards – hot dogs, chicken tenders, garlic fries, simple nachos, and various Impossible meat items. She opts for brisket, which is both wise because it is the best food in the park but unlucky because it turns out that the Carvery, which appears to have had a curse placed on it sometime during the pandemic, is closed. This whole brisket imbroglio deserves its own post, and it will get one, but for now we pass the forlorn, blank-faced hole where the brisket was supposed to be and head to Rose’s second choice (tri-tip!), but are happily distracted by the Organic Coup, which has organic chicken sandwiches, tenders, and tater tots. The decision is made; I’m almost glad that we didn’t get brisket because Rose is so happy at the thought of tater tots. Luckily the lines are short, and we have tater tots and a sandwich in hand in a matter of moments. “Tater Tots, ” says Rose, “are my guilty pleasure,” and I think that given all the dangerous, forbidden pleasures this world has to offer, surely tater tots are among the most innocent.
I don’t think I’ve ever missed so much of the action in a game as I did today, but as I said to Rose today and have said many times in the last couple of years, I’m honestly not really here for the baseball qua baseball any more. I mean, yes, I love it, and I love seeing whatever crazy new thing happens every day on the field (in this case, a rookie’s first home run and a truly lovely comical inning-ending pickle in the fifth, but it has really been all about talking to the people I bring; about two-thirds of the time, I’m looking at the person to my right instead of the field. Today, though, we leave my seats in the middle of the second inning while the score is 1-0 Marlins, and by the time we get three-quarters of the way around to the 415, it’s 4-3 Giants.
The 415, a section behind the deepest part of the outfield fence, is a really interesting place to be but a terrible place to try and pay attention to a game – you’re more or less at field level but also pretty much as far away from home as you can be and still have that angle, so if there’s a close play at any of the corners, it’s just a two-dimensional melee, and if you look at the scoreboard to see the replay, you’re basically looking directly up a cliff face. Our time in the 415 is livened up immeasurably by 1) a guy mistaking Rose for someone who caught a home run ball there last year (he says she was Rose’s exact twin) and 2) a very friendly woman named Wren who is 2a) maybe a little bit drunk and 2b) maybe hitting on Rose. At first I thought she was maybe under the impression that we were a couple and hitting on both of us, but it becomes apparent almost immediately that whatever her plans are for the near future, I am definitely not part of them. When I ask Rose to take a picture with me, we invite Wren to participate, but she declines in a way that makes it clear that she is not interested in any activity involving me. She does, however, trade info with Rose, who isn’t sure what was going on there either, but assures me that she’ll keep me posted.
By the time we get out of the 415, the score is 6-4 Giants; I watch the game later on MLB.tv, and it turns out to have been very exciting. The Giants and Marlins each manage to push another run across in the last inning for a final score of 7-5, which we see from the 152 as the game winds up. A good result, and one of the nicest days yet at the park. Yesterday was freezing, but today the weather was what baseball weather is supposed to be. It was so nice, in fact, that Rose arrived with a ladybug in her hair that she brought from her garden. Usually, even the wind outside the park would dislodge a passenger like that, but not today.
81 Dates 