Emily has some questions about baseball – what’s the deal with tagging up on a fly ball, what’s up with a check-swing strike, don’t the visiting players get walk-on music, did that guy just break a bat – but her real concern with sport lies in other fields. Courts, really. Among other endeavours, she teaches acrobatics, and she has travelled with circuses, performing with Jaleen, who you may remember from a few weeks ago, or just because most of you have probably met her at one some point. Given that she is a performer of physical feats, I can’t just wave away her opinions about athletic matters, so when she opines that basketball players who can’t make free throws should just practice more, and that the entire NBA is lazy, I have a lot of arguments that tend in the opposite direction, the main one being that if she thinks the NBA free throw average is lower than it should be, maybe that’s because free throws are harder than they look. She is unshaken, though – her feeling is that if throwing a ball through a hoop when nobody is allowed to try to stop you is your job, you should be making those throws all the time. It turns out that I will have to go home and do some internet research before I can wave away her opinions. So, Emily, this next paragraph is for you:

The league-wide free throw percentage in the NBA so far this year appears to be about 78%, with the lowest team average at about 72% and the highest at around 83%. That’s considerably higher than you thought it was, and even the league’s worst free-throw shooter so far this year – Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks with 64.5% – is doing better than your estimate. The best – Tyler Herro of Miami – is shooting 93.4%, which seems pretty acceptable. I mention all this not to chastise you for being too harsh on us lazy people or to preen about being right, but instead to tell you that I think the NBA in general is living up to your standards. I hope when you read this, you will be prouder of them, and that if I ever become a famous writer and this blog post surfaces, the retired NBA players from the 2023 season can sleep easy in your good graces. (If you really just want a reason to argue that the NBA should be working harder, the field goal average across the league is only 46%.)

Aside from the free-throw issue, Emily can only be described as charmingly positive. She’s cheerful about almost everything, from hitting to pitching, from the music and the temperature in the park to the – let’s say – Callipygian proportions on Matt Festa while we watch him in the bullpen. She is even delighted – twice – with an admittedly well-executed Mariners double play in the fourth. When she realizes she’s cheering for the wrong team, she’s momentarily contrite, but I assure her that the 152 is a safe space for all fans, even the casual ones (she realized while getting ready that she doesn’t have any orange clothes, but she was able to scrape up a warm hat repping the state of Washington). Emily isn’t sure about the groundskeepers raking down the infield dirt every three innings, but even that isn’t outright disapproval – more just dubious about whether it’s necessary.

Also charming is her announcement very early on that she is going to get some cotton candy when the cotton candy guy comes by. I don’t know why i find it endearing, except that maybe I am just happy to see someone who teaches acrobatics eating something made of pure sugar. It makes me feel better about the likelihood that when I get home I am going to consume at least one giant Otter Pop after eleven pm. She has french fries, too, and a little piece of my heart.

Tonight’s game is not an ideal game, but it is the game we need. People talk about ugly wins – this isn’t one of them, but it isn’t especially pretty either. It feels like one of those situations where you keep thinking traffic is about to clear up and you can put your foot down and get moving, but then you come around a curve or over a hill and see another half-mile of taillights. Eventually you get where you’re going, but it’s not as much fun as it might have been. The Giants eventually get where they’re going, but it’s neither easy nor graceful, and, unlike a lot of games over the last few weeks, it never really feels like they have the pedal down. Still, as they say, a win is a win – ultimately one run in the third and one in the fifth are enough to do the trick. We can hope it is enough to bring some order to the skidding Giants, with the tragic Rockies coming to town. Not Oakland tragic, but tragic.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that we both, without consulting about it, thought that the guy sitting in the row in front of us looked like a discount Trent Crimm. I said seventy-year-old Trent, she said Trent Crimm’s cousin, but we were both on the same page.

• 1 October: Farewells and Almosts
• 30 September: For the Love of God, Max Muncy
• 29 September: Flower Mary Child Lavender Blossom
• 27 September: Junk Time
• 26 September: Mathematically