Game 7 of the 2001 World Series was not the game that made me love baseball, nor was it the most exciting game I’ve ever watched. It was, however, the first game I watched where I was aware of the difference between a riveting low-scoring game and a boring one. I described it at the time – forgive me – as “the kind of game that would have you on the edge of your seat but that your girlfriend would think was endless and pointless.” There were reasons to be excited by it that went beyond just the action on the field – it was the last game of a World Series that the Diamondbacks had not been expected to get to, let alone compete in; every game to that point had been exciting in one way or another; it was also, we would come to understand, the last game of the Yankees as dynastic juggernaut (in the previous hundred years, the Yankees had played in 38 World Series and won 26; since 2001, they have played in three and won one). It was also the last game I watched with Peter Hartlaub, who joins me today for a much, much less exciting contest.

Today is the final game of the Tampa Bay series; the Giants lost Monday 10-2 and won last night 8-0, so it kind of seems like just about anything can happen. Spoiler alert: almost nothing does, or nothing good, anyway. Things go off the rails fast in the first inning, when the Giants give up a run on a walk and an error; the damage isn’t as bad as it could have been, but it’s very nearly all the Rays need. They end up winning 6-1, and most of the six runs they score happen when Peter and I are getting brisket. Another of my objections to the faster games is that a basic trip for a brisket sandwich can occupy three innings. The brisket is good, but three innings is a lot of baseball to miss for even a great sandwich. By the time we get back, it’s the seventh inning, in which the Giants – having managed to load the bases with one out – score a single wan run, almost against their will, Lamont Wade drawing a walk to push a run across. Two pitches later, of course, they hit into a double play to end the inning, and that is the last of the scoring (although not by any means the last of the Giants hitting into double plays).

Peter says, at some point in the game, “When did we pick up Camargo?” which alerts me to the fact that there is now a guy named Camargo on the Giants. If Peter hadn’t mentioned it, I probably would have noticed sometime in the next couple of weeks. It has become a fact of my life that being at every game instead of listening to the radio has narrowed my understanding of the state of baseball to what I can see on the field – I no longer know who’s feuding with who, who’s surging, who’s running out of steam, whose sister is married to what other player. My news is out of date. Peter, though, is a Real Journalist who works at the San Francisco Chronicle, which is an indeterminate but nonzero percentage of the reason I have been working so hard to get him to a game. I met him when he and my cousin were working at the paper together, and I was briefly vouchsafed a vision of what life is like for writers who aren’t lazy wastrels.

I’ve been pestering him in a desultory way for several years about helping me realize my vision of walking into a newsroom and telling the person in charge about my baseball writing project, at which point Perry White or possibly J. Jonah Jameson will say “I like your style, kid!” and hand me a fedora with a press card in the band, and I will be on my way to a rewarding career as a sort-of-sportswriter. Today Peter tells me, carefully and kindly not calling me an idiot out loud, that the days when you could get away with that kind of thing are well in the past, and I know on my own that that past may only have existed in the world of popular entertainment. Still, a dream is a dream. He also tells me that my fallback position, which involves signing up to work on the Bay ferry fleet if I can’t get some 1950s editor to give me a job, is also his fallback position if some 2020s editor takes away his. Working on the ferries, it seems to me, probably combines some of the romance of the sea with the romance of basically being able to stand up and wait for the ferry to come back and get you if you fall overboard. It’s good to know that at least some of my instincts are the same as those of a real member of the press.

(I should make it clear here that what Peter did today was not to discourage me from my dream, but to tell me that what I wanted would require (possibly) orders of magnitude more work than I may want to put into it. More on that later, maybe.)

• 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