It’s strange to me to be doing something with Quinne that’s my idea. In our nearly fifteen years as friends, nearly everything we’ve done has come as a result of her relentless and irresistible urge to Do Stuff and my uncontrollable compulsion to Say Yes to Quinne. Because of her, I’ve been on two cruises, I own a terrycloth bathrobe, a Santoku knife and a Salvador Dali print, I have lied to a stranger about being a marine biologist, and I have been involved in a fake engagement. There is also a universe very nearly the same as ours in which I never met Quinne and thus never started writing this blog; she is the only person still alive whose expectations of me mattered enough to play a part in making it happen. She doesn’t care about baseball, but her boyfriend’s daughter, who joins us later in the game, has a lot of good questions, almost all of which I know the answers to (the only one I fail on is “What exactly are tenterhooks?” although to be fair I did identify ‘tender hooks’ as incorrect).
You have to be very, very careful with Quinne, because if you make an offhand joke, there is about a ninety-five percent chance that the next thing you know you will find yourself complicit in planning the best place to fake your heart attack, or getting back in line so Quinne can have her picture taken with the mascot but this time with her arms tucked up in her shirt so she looks like a cartoon. As Shriekback said, “every shout becomes a ziggurat/and every prayer becomes a citadel or car-park.” Tonight, only fast footwork on my part allows me to avoid making a credible attempt to steal a truck or allowing Ken to throw me off the arcade wall, and the only reason I don’t write a bespoke Mad Lib is that Quinne doesn’t have any paper. In some ways, keeping up with Quinne is like being Gromit laying track in front of the speeding train, but that might just be my relationship with her.
It is possible to feel like there is a guiding hand somewhere that is constructing a narrative in which the struggling Giants find their groove and become a team of destiny. It’s especially tempting to look at it as a sequel to 2021, in which – you may recall – a patched-together team of veterans and unknowns came off the first pandemic year to win more games than any other team in Giants history. Yes, with the season not even half-over, entertaining it is a folly of the grandest sort but we are enjoined by Ted Lasso and Journey to Believe and to Not Stop Believin’. After tonight’s game and the last two weeks, what else can we do? I remember in the middle of the ’21 season, when nearly everyone was saying the Giants couldn’t possibly maintain their pace against the loaded Dodgers and the extremely expensive Padres, coming to the conclusion that maybe they were what their record said they were. it made 2021 – a very difficult year for a lot of people – marginally more tolerable.
There comes a point in the ninth inning when I and everyone around me starts to feel like something unstoppable is developing. We’re down 4-2, but it seems our faith is doubles with each batter. I have to say that while I think that the extra runner on second base in extra innings is an ugly piece of graffiti on the elegant structure that is baseball, it has been working out well for the Giants. I hate it and would applaud its demise, but the Giants have been winning some games behind it. In the aftermath of today’s game, I got involved in a brief discussion with a guy who felt the same way. “I want to go to eighteen-inning games,” I said; “I want to be here till two in the morning.” He agreed, and we bumped fists, but we were also willing to take this win. Subtract that runner and we probably still take the game, but Yaz is probably happy about the extra RBI.
The ninth and tenth innings, taken together, are a thing of beauty: a lot of tactical walks, bunting, pitching changes, good baserunning, and a total of five runs scored (although we only needed three, we count all the RBIs now), with the winner coming on a three-run splash hit that leaves us all delirious; there is very little in this world more pure than high-fiving strangers after an unlikely win. Every pitch ratchets up the tension and the excitement, until nobody needs the scoreboard to tell us to GET LOUD. We are loud and can’t get much louder; the magic of a tying inning and then a winning one makes everything organic, spontaneous, self-sustaining. I think this is the first extra-inning game I’ve been to this year, and it’s a perfect one.
We’ve stopped booing Manny Machado now, which is nice, but now we’re booing Fernando Tatís Jr., which is not – a guy behind me says he’s booing Tatis because he’s so good, but he has, at least, the good grace to look like he knows that’s stupid while he’s saying it.
Bonus Baseball Fact: Fernando Tatís Sr. is the only MLB player ever to hit two grand slams in one inning. He did it against the Dodgers. Junior has a much better chance to end up in the Hall of Fame, but I bet even if he does this will still come up at Tatís family holiday dinners.
81 Dates 