Murias – pronounced Muir-ish – is a sprightly, gleeful Dodger fan. I don’t think she’s the first Dodger fan I’ve taken to a game, but she might be the most memorable, and she’s definitely the first Druid. As with so many other baseball people, her history with the game comes from family; she says when she was six, her grandmother gave her a Dodger hat and wrote her a four-page letter about the history of the Dodgers, back to the old Brooklyn days, and that when Tommy Lasorda moved up in the Dodger family from coach to manager in 1977, the deal was sealed. “It’s all about family, see?” she says. My uncle wrote me a four-page letter when I turned 21; it was mostly about how to get girls, and was almost all terrible advice. It ended with a plea for me to buy him a Jaguar when I got rich (joke’s on you!) and didn’t mention the Giants even once.
One could wish the Giants had given Murias less reason for glee, but that is the way things are right now. There are two angles to the SF/LA rivalry: wanting to watch your team win, and wanting to watch the other team lose. Head-to-head matchups allow you the possibility of indulging both of those things at the same time, but only if your team is on the upswing. The wheels have really come off for the Giants, and Murias is able to revel – while being scrupulously polite about it – in just exactly how much she is enjoying watching our sparking, battered chassis skid along the last few feet of road.
Three people asked me on Wednesday if I thought the Giants were about to fire Gabe Kapler; I didn’t know if they were or not, but I did express the opinion that whoever they hired next wasn’t going to do any better. The Giants’ problem hasn’t been the manager; it has been that they aren’t a very good baseball team. The ghost of John McGraw could inhabit the zombified corpse of Connie Mack and use Casey Stengel as a lifeline and not be able to manage these Giants to a World Series. Blaming Kapler for the Giants’ record is like blaming the president for the price of gas. Anyway, the Giants have gone from being in a tailspin to being in freefall, and Murias can’t quite conceal the touch of schadenfreude.
Up in the club level – thanks to Javier for stopping by at the last minute with a pair of passes – I’m waiting while Murias is in the bathroom, and there’s a kid standing with his family while they discuss something, and he’s practicing his throwing motion; he’s chucking an invisible ball past me down the hall, and after a couple of tosses I catch it and throw it back to him, and we play catch for a couple of throws until his folks decide what they’re doing. Murias and I stop by the exhibits behind the broadcast booths; turns out she’s a fan of Peanuts, so she takes special delight in the statues of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Upstairs, we take in the views from the left and right wings of the top deck, and then we head down to get some chimichangas out behind the scoreboard. Murias has been craving one since she tooled around the park before I arrived, but she is doomed to disappointment – they are out of chimichangas. It’s hot dogs for her. While we’re out and about, though, the Dodgers score three more runs, so at least there’s that.
In the bottom of the sixth, Kai Correa, the Giants interim manager, initiates a challenge based on the positioning of Dodger shortstop Miguel Rojas’ feet; it is the ticky-tackiest challenge possible, a pine-tar level thing that takes advantage of the new rules about defensive alignments, and the Giants win it; Murias complains about the Giants rules-lawyering (as though the Dodgers have never abused the regulations – looking at you, sticky-fingers!), and I get to take this small opportunity to smirk at her. It doesn’t ultimately make any difference in the game, but small comfort is still comfort.
Murias qua Dodger fan is mostly tolerable, but it is particularly satisfying to me that every time we get into a bit of one-upsmanship about which team is better, I’m able to answer her gloating (her entirely understandable gloating) about the current situation with facts about the overall history of the rivalry – more total head-to-head wins for the Giants, more World Series titles, more players in the Hall of Fame; it’s nice to be able to hold my own. Murias announces herself as a stat geek a little later, and I beg off, replying (as you know) that I only care about statistics when they’re funny. One of the last things we spar about is Clayton Kershaw’s record against the Giants; she has mentioned several times her opinion that Kershaw is a lock to win tomorrow’s game. He probably will (NB – he did not) – the odds are in his favor, although not overwhelmingly – but I don’t think I have ever wanted Kershaw – not just the Dodgers, but Kershaw – to lose more than I want him to lose tomorrow.
We’ll see.
“What Did You Think of the Evening, Murias?
“Had a great time… oh and ya.. there was a ball game.. of course the dodgers won!“
81 Dates 