The game gets away from the Giants early, and it gets far enough away that they never really look like catching up, which on the one hand is not good for the Giants – they briefly had their heads above water after a solid May, but today’s 7-3 loss puts them under .500 again. On the other hand, though, it frees me up to give a good tour. With a six-run deficit at the end of three innings, I feel like I can leave my seat, and if it looks like there’s a real comeback brewing, I can get back in time to see where it goes.

The crowd coming into the park today is stupendous. The line for the Willie Mays Gate doubles and triples all the way down Third Street to the O’Doul Bridge and back, and back again, snaking up and down the block in a surprisingly orderly fashion given that the line isn’t regulated or marked out in any way, and the Marina and O’Doul Gates aren’t even open yet. Maybe that’s why the lines are shorter there – I briefly worry that we might not get our giveaway Gigantes jerseys when we get in, but we do, and in the right sizes. We stop in to say hi to Kenny at the Giants bullpen, take a quick look at the pitching mound – long enough for Tom to decide he doesn’t want to see how fast he can’t pitch (“It would probably be more convenient for the ball to take an Uber past the radar gun,” says he) – and then head up and around the Promenade to look at all the usual suspects – the organ and organist, the slide, the aquarium, the miniature park, the tragic blank space where the brisket stand should be, and the trophies and rings, and then to 152 to show the flag for a couple of innings before we eat and essay the third deck.

It’s a very busy day at the park and in my section. The attendance is listed at 35,571, and it feels like it. It’s a gloriously packed house, especially compared to the anemic crowds for most of the season so far; I doubt it’s the Orioles and it’s probably only partly due to the lovely Sunday weather; I’m going to guess it has more to do with the celebration of Latino players and the Giants’ history with them, and the free – and exceedingly handsome – jersey, a slinky black number with ‘Gigantes’ on the front and a 23 on the back. Felipe Alou, Tito Fuentes and Jose Uribe wore #23 for the Giants, so I hope that had something to do with the choice on this Gigantes day, but it is also possible that it’s because of the year we’re currently in.

Pretty much every time I bring someone to the ballpark, I get a question I don’t know the answer to. Today Tom wants to know if the Orioles mascot has a name, like Lou Seal or Mr. Met. Tom’s guesses – ‘Chico’ and ‘Pepe’ – don’t seem to ring true, and I suspect he is being influenced by the Latin flavor of the day. We have to go to Google to help out, and discover that it does not, in fact, have a name to call its own, and is known only as The Oriole Bird. Once we find that out, and that the Oriole is the state bird of Maryland, he offers up ‘Big O’ and honestly I can’t imagine why that isn’t The Oriole Bird’s name. It makes me remember how, for a good twelve years, people around here were trying to come up with a nickname for Barry Bonds that would match his stature – a Yankee Clipper, a Hammerin’ Hank, even a Charlie Hustle – but nothing ever stuck. Maybe there was a Big O just sitting there waiting for us to stick it on Bonds, and nobody ever found it.

Model railroading is Tom’s baseball, although as far as I know, he doesn’t pester people relentlessly to enjoy it with him. I’ve known him for almost forty years now, and while I can say that while his mid-1980s predictions for his future never included actual details about model railroading, they carried the dire potential for it within their basic structure. I suspect there is a genetic component to this part of his destiny. He always said he saw a life of quiet desperation laid out in front of him, and most of what he said was going to happen has happened, but in the best possible way. Instead of desperation, he ended up with a placid contentment, the kind where managing the new carpeting in two computer labs at once is a crisis, and figuring out how to build a one-square-foot model of the Capitol Bridge is the way you recover from it. We talk about Ted Lasso, as I seem to with everyone, and I realize that while these days I aspire to the compassion and kindness that Ted displays, when it comes to the trajectories of our lives, it seems like I am the Beard to his Lasso. Metaphorically speaking, of the two of us, I am the one who is going to show up in a random kitchen wearing a red thong.

I have a lot of questions about model railroading, which is good because the baseball that is going on is, while not boring, at least not very satisfying from a Giants fan’s point of view. Do model railroaders mostly do historical stuff, or do they occasionally indulge in flights of fancy? (Rarely, but there is one guy who does goofy stuff.) I just finished reading On the Beach on the train over, and I am in a post-apocalyptic mood and want to see a tableau with a forlorn, wrecked train that’s gone off the tracks and represents the tragedy of humanity’s ambitions come adrift, but it sounds like I might have to make it myself. Do model railroaders ever network with other kinds of model craftspeople? (Not really, although his tone suggests he finds that regrettable.) There are a few ballparks with train lines integrated into the design or baked into the history of the place, and I don’t know if there are people who build model ballparks, but there should be. Are there any major schisms in the world of model railroading that create rival factions? (Yes, his own club suffered a fractious split when the time came to make a choice between digital command control and direct control. What happened to the guys who stuck with direct control and seceded from the club? We don’t know, they just kind of faded away.) Like the dinosaurs they are (my words, not Tom’s). This is the first time I’ve ever heard of digital command control vs direct control, but picking DCC (we call it DCC for short) makes sense to me. If you want to know the difference or why there would be a fight over it, leave a message in the comments and I’ll see if I can get Tom to explain it later.

We appear on TV twice, once in the background when the camera is on the agonies of a player who got hit on the wrist by a pitch, and once when a foul ball crosses our airspace twice – once on the way out of the park and once on the way back in, when it rebounds off the rail. on neither arc is it within my reach, and it bounces off another guy and falls into the field club section below us. So close.

Today’s baseball fact: Of the five men in Wilmer Flores’ family, four are named Wilmer.