The sun keeps threatening to come out, but never really does. There’s a moment, around the middle of the third, when it actually does peek through, and I think it’s going to be one of those days where Thor or Fujin or Tempestas or whoever is in charge of the wind today remembers just a few minutes late that there’s a game, waves a hand, and the clouds are gone. Whoever’s running the show isn’t a baseball fan, though, and although it never gets cold or too windy, it never gets hot, either. Luckily, Nina and I know how to dress for San Francisco.
Nina is a relative of a sort-of relative – first cousin of a family friend who has known me since I was born. In spite of more than fifty years of proximity, we’ve never met before this, although we have almost certainly crossed paths in the ballpark. Given that I’ve been to about three hundred and fifty ballgames since 2017 and that she has participated in several season ticket packages in that time, it is nearly inconceivable that we haven’t been within about five yards of each other at some point. Maybe the moment when we meet in the shadow of Juan Marichal (or what would be the shadow of Juan Marichal if the sun were out) is the first time, but it seems unlikely.
It’s International Trading Card Day, apparently, and the gate giveaway is a pack of Giants trading cards. I give mine to Nina, who has young relatives who will want them. It is a mark of how mature I am that I feel only a momentary pang of loss when I hand them over – they are appealingly glossy and just for a second I want them back because they were free and I had them in my hand, but I remind myself that I have never opened the packs of trading cards that I got the last four times I was here on International Trading Card Day, and I wouldn’t open these either. It’s for the best.
The game is by no means boring, but the first few innings consist of a lot of good pitching and defense. A Lamonte Wade homer – not quite into the cove, but close – in the fourth inning turns out to be the only run of the game, but we are pretty much riveted to our seats anyway. There’s a lot of family stuff to talk about – family members we haven’t seen for a long time, family members I didn’t know about, connections I wasn’t clear on.
We also discover, in a cordial way, that we disagree on a lot of things. Not family things; Nina is a big fan of the all the new rules speeding up the game. She likes the pitch clock, she likes the batter’s clock, she likes the shift being outlawed, she likes the bigger bases, and, to my barely concealed (I might be fooling myself about having concealed it at all) horror, she is also in favor of the free runner on second base in extra innings. It is that more than anything else that finally makes me aware of the difference between us, and between me and a lot of people. The truth is that other people – some of them baseball fans – have other things to do that are more important to them than being at the ballpark. It’s not that Nina and her like don’t want to stay till the end of the game -they do, but they want the end of the game to be sooner. I don’t care how long it is. If I don’t get to work on time in the morning, well, that’s just too bad for work. This definitely brings up some other truths about me, but we don’t get into that.
We’re a little closer together on the issue of booing. Nina thinks it is unsportsmanlike and, I get the sense, possibly unconstitutional. I don’t know that unsportsmanlike enters into it – fans aren’t sportsmen (sportspersons, I guess) but I do think most of the things fans boo about are kind of stupid. I could write an entire post about people on the arcade, who are ten feet from being outside the stadium, offering opinions about the home plate umpire’s eyesight, and I think it’s time we stopped booing Manny Machado (I’m okay with booing Justin Turner, though).
One thing we are in complete agreement about – it’s pretty far down the list, but we get there – is that the new patch on the Giants uniforms is a travesty and a sign of baseball’s final descent into the depths of barbarism and greed. It’s a “collaboration” between the Giants and Cruise, a driverless car company; it’s appalling, huge, out-of-place, and it seems to be the first herald of a trend tat will leave baseball players looking like NASCAR drivers. The Giants are going out of their way to make it seem as though there’s some kind of tradition being honored here, like Cruise was the company that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, or maybe a Cruise vehicle was the first one to cross the Golden Gate Bridge when it was completed, but it is nothing more than a gaudy money grab and everyone knows it. I doubt that the universal revulsion will matter – Cruise paid a lot of money to sully the uniforms with this abomination – but the organization ahs to know it’s a misstep.
Less upsetting, which is to say not upsetting at all, is the T-shirt I saw on the train on the way over – if Patrick Bailey is the new Buster Posey, this woman gets to say she knew it first.
What Did You Think of the Afternoon, Nina?
“If you speak to a Giants baseball fan, you are guaranteed a lively discussion. Do you like the pitch clock and extra inning ghost runners? Is booing at a game just clean fun or bad sportsmanship? Should Barry Bonds be in the HOF? Conversation is mixed in while waiting for a Giants homer. Defining ‘baseball’ is our national pastime, as much as hitting and catching. Should baseball evolve or stay traditional?”
81 Dates 