One of my favorite aspects of having season tickets is that I’m entitled to buy all the special event items – Irish Night, Jewish Night, Star Wars Day, whatever – ahead of time and just go collect them at the game. The Giants offer a package in which you can pay something like two hundred dollars and get a random selection of all the items, including gate giveaways, after the season ends, but you don’t get to pick which ones and you probably get stuck with the Santa Clara University blanket or the Firefighters Night soft-sided cooler (to be clear, I have nothing against Sant Clara or firefighters – it’s the blanket and soft-sided cooler part I would feel cheated by). Anyway, I prefer being able to choose which swag I get, which is why I go over the schedule early in the year and see which events have hats, T-shirts, or good creative bobbleheads. This year I plumped for tonight’s UC Davis hat, among other things; I don’t usually get the college items, which are often all of the same type, but this one was a nice design. I realized, though, that I was going to have – purely by coincidence – a UC Davis grad with me, and it was immediately obvious that she should have the hat.
Natalie is the daughter of my sister’s lifelong best friend, with whom she is in constant text communication over the course of this, the last meaningful Giants game of the year (where “meaningful” is purely a notional mathematic quality). She and her mom stopped by my demesne to say hi a few weeks ago when I was looking to fill the last couple of spots in the season, and I leaped at the chance to take someone who I have known for twenty four years but don’t know very well at all. Natalie has just moved to San Francisco to work at a law firm, having just graduated from law school. She took the bar exam and says she is statistically more likely to have passed it than not, although she is still on tenterhooks about the results (not so much because she’s afraid she didn’t pass it as because she really doesn’t want to take it again).
It has been a really long time since I was a young person who had recently moved to the Bay Area, and I have a lot of questions. Things have changed a lot, to the extent that a lot of the resources that she has available to her for arriving in a new city just straight-up didn’t exist for me. I am a little jealous, although the truth is that she got here with a job, a plan, a neighborhood full of friends, and a dog named Archie, and I got here with two boxes of comic books, a drawer full of cassette tapes, and a bag of swords. Looking back over these posts, I notice that a lot of my guests are much more responsible people than I am. Really, all I have going for me is charm.
Natalie got here three weeks ago, with another three to go before she starts work, so she has some free time to settle in and explore the city. I pester her with questions all night long (what have you done in SF so far? Walked the dog in Golden Gate Park; did you ever have a non-law-related job? Yes, pear-packer; did you have to break up with anybody to move here? No; what kind of law do you want to get involved in? Government law, ideally with the Attorney General’s office; what kind of entertainment grabs your interest? True crime) to the extent that I forget to keep any notes. I did remember this time to get a selfie, and to ask her to send me a text about the evening, which is better than I managed last night.
We are both very much resigned to the mathematical elimination scenario that plays out tonight; Juan Soto’s homer in the first inning seals the deal, although we don’t know it at the time. Luciano apparently forgets how many outs there are in the third and blows a potential inning-ending double play , and then the Padres score two more in the seventh, but only the homer matters because the Giants can’t push any runs across, and the final score is 4-0 San Diego. The season has effectively ended with a whimper. Several times tonight, in the park and on the radio, I hear the phrase “time to think about next year,” but mostly what I’m thinking now is that at least we were eliminated by San Diego – it would have been especially galling had it been this coming weekend against LA. We stayed, as is right and proper, until the very end, although Natalie’s mom was out after the second Soto homer in he seventh (as we learned from a disgusted text). All that is left for us now is to root for every other team in the playoff picture until the Dodgers inevitably fall short.
What Did You Think of the Evening, Natalie?
“It was a lovely evening at the ballpark for my first Giants game as an actual Bay Area resident! Chatting with you and seeing all the friends you’ve made at the park for the past seasons was such a wonderful treat. If the Giants can’t be good, great company and good weather are still nice reasons to be at the park. Here’s to hoping for a better season next year (maybe without the new rules and with Ohtani)!“
81 Dates 