Tonight’s game makes me aware of a weird lacuna in my baseball experience. it’s the first time I can remember arriving at the ballpark expecting to see the Giants win. In the first years of my season tickets., the Giants were almost historically woeful – there have only been a couple of worse three-year stretches in their history, and for one of those you have to go all the way back to 1900, which doesn’t even count as modern baseball. From 2017 to 2019, there was really not much reason to come into the park feeling like we were going to see the win flag. The stadium sound crew used to play “Don’t Stop Believin’” when the Giants were behind in the middle of the eighth, but sometime in late 2017, they quietly replaced it with “Hip to Be Square.” They were tacitly acknowledging that if any of us were still Believin’, it was acceptable if we wanted to Stop. There wasn’t a lot of believin’ to be done over the next three years, and then there was the pandemic season. In ’21, there was plenty of reason to believe again, but I was in Sacramento with my mom, and when I came back in ’22, the Giants had the year we expected them to have had the year before, coming in at .500 and demonstrating early on that they weren’t going to be the same streaking fireball we’d seen in Buster Posey’s last year. Now, though, something different is in the air.
Tonight, the Giants gave up two runs in the top of the third, and we all just shrugged our shoulders and said some version of “No big deal; we don’t start hitting until the fifth inning.” It definitely has notes of “We win in the even years,” and we know how that worked out once we got complacent about it. There is a kind of magical thinking with which we bind and capture hope, circumscribe and try to make manifest our desire for things to go our way. It is believing in streaks and clutch hitting; it’s wearing the lucky socks and not going to the bathroom until the inning is over, and sometimes it’s “Belt is 3 for 15, so he’s due” and “Lincecum will be back on top soon.” Tonight it was “47 of the 55 runs we’ve scored in the last 7 games have come after the fifth inning, so we’ve got plenty of time.” And we did have plenty of time, and we won 4-3. Our faith was rewarded, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that we were feeling that certainty, that inevitability, and it’s the first time I can remember feeling it in the ballpark in a long while. We felt like we deserved this one.
Christian texted me a couple of hours before the game: Giants are starting to look legit and I replied the number of ways they are finding to come from behind is astonishing. I was joking a little, downplaying, warding off the evil eye – three of the last seven wins were last-chance miracles, and you can neither start depending on that nor risk jinxing it – but they found yet another way to come from behind tonight, with a run each in the seventh and eighth and then a bases-loaded walk in the ninth to end it. We were just as happy with the walk as we would have been with a single or a home run. We knew what we were owed, and we didn’t care how we got it.
Another thing we got tonight – and by we I mean me and my guest Miller – was a free taco. It’s season ticket member appreciation week – yesterday there were photos with Lou Seal and tomorrow there will be ice cream, but today we get a taco at Underdogs, the sports cantina across the street from the park. The tacos we get are, while delicious, the smallest tacos I’ve ever seen. maybe the size of a silver dollar. Miller and I linger over them and make them last for several teeny bites before we head over to the park. We’ll have bigger food later.
Miller came to me from Facebook, a friend of a friend; he used to go to Giants games pretty frequently, but hasn’t been in a while. For one, he appears to go skiing about as often as I go to ballgames. Also, he’s been more into basketball lately, but admits that that’s more because the Warriors have been hot for the last few years then because he likes the sport better. As a person with a mom who was interested in anything whose finals were on TV, as a person who was perfectly willing to become a fan of curling when that was featured in coverage of the winter Olympics, I understand completely. As he says, and I concur, it’s just great to watch a sport played well, and the Warriors have been playing it very well for a while now. He also cops to being a regionalist – he’s willing to root for pretty much any team from the South, where he’s from.
I want to say Miller’s name over and over; I have a deep love for people whose first names are last names. Baseball is a great place for that, especially when you look at the classics: Rogers Hornsby, Ford Frick, Brooks Robinson, Ferguson Jenkins, Carlton Fisk. He says he’s only known four other Millers in his life, so I introduce him to a fifth – Yankee Hall-of-Famer Miller Huggins, another all-time best baseball name.
Even though he’s not as into baseball as he used to be, this is a great game for Miller – I doubt it’s going to drag him back into the fold, but it sure is exciting. A walkoff win – even one predicated on a lot of bases-on-balls – is a hard thing not to get wrapped up in, and Miller does just as much high-fiving as anyone else in the end. We (sort of) end up on TV twice – once off to the right of a foul ball to section 151 and once over the shoulder of an umpire at the beginning of the ninth, when Juan Soto is late to get on the field – rumor has it he was in the bathroom – and Gabe Kapler is arguing for a clock violation. He doesn’t get the call, but he does talk to the plate ump long enough for me to pick out Miller’s pink hat on the arcade. I very much with I’d worn my own pink hat, but I’m trying to wear a different cap every day and I used that up a couple of weeks ago. Better luck next time.
81 Dates 