Mari has come from Australia to see today’s game with me. Well, she has come from Pleasanton. She came from Australia to visit friends and maintain ties, but she’s finishing up her visit by spending Friday evening with me. She brought a backpack, which for no real reason we are no longer allowed to bring into the ballpark, and in the course of trying to explain that she came from Australia and could we please relax the rules for just a minute, we end up accidentally gaining admittance to the special Friends party in Triples Alley.
I can’t explain the process by which this happens, except to say that I feel like a character in a movie who gets mistaken for a spy and has to bumble through an adventure. We didn’t take any of the swag on offer – a Giants-themed Friends t-shirt and a bobblehead – but we did eat free chili-dogs. There was a raffle too – I was conflicted about what I’d do if I won, considering that I didn’t pay the fee I was supposed to have paid to get into the party, but I didn’t win and was spared enduring the moral failure I surely would have suffered if my number had come up for the Mike Krukow signed baseball.
We did have our picture taken pretending to share a chocolate shake, which I assume has some relevance to Friends but can’t remember what it might be, in spite of having watched the entire show. We did also have the opportunity to take a picture on a couch, but we declined, opting instead to go out on the field to watch batting practice and then walk around the warning track to head to our seats just before game time. It was unexpected fun, in spite of the fact thaat neither of us really cares about Friends. Honestly I’d probably go to a Proud Boys-themed party in Triples Alley if I didn’t have to pay for it and got free hot dogs.
Before the game starts, Mari and I talk a lot about stuff we’ve had in storage. She downsized pretty drastically when she moved to Australia a few years ago, and I have done the same several times recently. Almost all my stuff is in a storage unit in Richmond right now, waiting on my next move. It feels strange to be divorced from my baseball stuff – hundreds of books and all the paraphernalia I’ve acquired since 2017. I have a stack of signed balls in my current place, but very little in the way of bobbleheads and the like.
I want my stuff back, but for now I will have to be content with this year’s junk – the Splash Hit counter bobblehead, a few hats, the Pride and Gigantes jerseys, and the Indiana Jones Night bobblehead that Javier brought by 152 in the first inning. It’s Indiana Jones running away from a giant baseball rolling down on him, and pretty clever, as a lot of these things are.
Mari contributes to my stash by giving me two enormous Giants-patterned fleece scarves – you could use them as blankets for a python – that I end up being very grateful for later in the cold evening (it’s not the coldest this year, but I’m deeply glad for the scarves).
It’s an exciting game, although it doesn’t really start off great for the Giants. Then again, quite a few games lately have not started off great for the Giants but ended up just fine. Evan Longoria parks a homer in the garden in the second inning, but the Giants answer pretty quickly with three of their own; it goes that way – a run here, a run there – but the Giants manage five in the fifth, and that pretty much puts a hat on it. The final is 8-5, and although the Giants lost yesterday, they’re still nine for the last ten and rolling steady.
I told Mari a while back, as I have over the years told many of my friends who have no interest in sports, that if they want a pathway to finding something to like about baseball (they don’t have to, by any means, but if they want to), one good way to do it is to pick a boyfriend on the team and follow his fortunes. My advice is almost always to pick the catcher, but tastes vary. Mari, who has been in Australia since about 2016, has chosen Bailey and Crawford this year. They do good work today – mostly defensively for Craw, but two RBIs for Bailey isn’t nothing. This approach can backfire – my friend Sunny picked Tim Lincecum in 2011, which was a good choice at the time but became a painful but necessary lesson in how faith, no matter how deep or sincere, is not always enough. Mari is a very pragmatic woman, and I expect she will survive Crawford’s coming retirement with aplomb.
The Diamondbacks are strangers to me. I only know two names – Christian Walker and Ketel Marte – and it’s weird to be rooting so hard against a team that has meant so little for so long. I feel like the last time the Diamondbacks mattered was in 2001, when they beat the Yankees to win the World Series. That’s not true – they’ve won the division three times since then, and finished ahead of the Giants a handful of other times, but I don’t ever remember feeling like the Diamondbacks were something to be actively rooted against. The Dodgers, yes. The last couple of years, the Padres, yes. But the Diamondbacks and the Rockies have mostly seemed like they’re just around to fill the division. Now they’re a definite obstacle, and part of why it’s strange is that they are, like the Giants, not loaded down with superstars and hired guns. Their payroll is, in fact, a little less than two-thirds of the Giants’, which is in turn about three-quarters of the Padres’, but the D=Backs are on top of the division. I heard a radio commentator the other day talking about calling them the D-Bags, which seems to me both sophomoric and unnecessary. More as the year develops, I guess.
81 Dates 