It’s taking me a while to finish this post. The end of the season, no matter how it turns out, is a complicated time. It is for me, anyway. I have set myself this task, given myself this job that at this point in the year is almost a burden, as silly as that is to say. The last game is always a little bittersweet, especially since the Giants haven’t had a winning season while I’ve been attending on these season tickets (I don’t want to talk about 2021). It is simultaneously just another game and a special one, and this year carries some extra weight. The Brandon Crawford era is almost certainly over, the Gabe Kapler era is definitely over, and there are others ending as well. The team next year will have to be very different, and we don’t have much f an idea how – all we know is that Things Have to Change.

Gerry would get rid of most of the current players. We agree that there aren’t a lot of bright spots, excepting a few of the rookies who may pan out in the long run – Casey Schmitt, Patrick Bailey, maybe Blake Sabol, maybe Kyle Harrison. Lamonte Wade can stay, Thairo Estrada can stay, Mike Yastrzemski can stay. We love Wilmer Flores – who could not? – but you can’t have a MLB-level baseball team where Wilmer Flores is the standout. Some of the pitchers can stay – Cobb, Webb, Doval, the twins – most of the bullpen, honestly – but we need more than two reliable starters. We need at least one superstar, maybe two slightly lesser lights, to carry the rest of the team, and it is going to be a hard road to making that happen in the off-season.

There is not a cloud in the sky, not even a wisp. The game starts at noon, although we got in at only a little after 11 am. It is officially Fan Appreciation Day, although honestly I feel very appreciated every time I come in here. I had originally hoped that I would get a Norm-on-Cheers type reception from my fellow season ticket holders, but none of them, except for Christine of long-ago memory ever showed up, if there were any in my section in the first place. I get it from the guest services people, the ushers, the people who work the kiosks where I get food or merch, the ones who all know my season ticket number and how I like my brisket sandwich, the ones who know I won’t buy the hats with the straight brims, the people at the gate who never have to ask how many tickets I’m using today. Kenny, Margie, Han, Charlie, Victor, Jason, Frank.

Gerry is the traditionalist I want to be; he went to the games I read about, saw the players whose statues I walk past every day when I come in, and his opinion of how thigs should be is untempered by the way things are now. When Kyle Harrison hits two batters in a row in the first inning to virtually no notice from either side, he wants the benches to clear, makes it clear that he regards the lack of response as a lack of character. He is a more vehement critic of national anthem performances than I am, and isn’t afraid to start sentences with “In my day…” I don’t really have those days; I feel like I do – I want to – but all my nostalgia was passed on to me by David Halberstam, Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Jim Bouton, by reading books about Ted Williams and Satchel Paige and Bill Veeck and the Greatest Game Ever Pitched and the Summer of ’49. I long, I suppose, for a simpler time, a time when a pitcher could knock a guy down for something another guy did and everybody thought that was okay.

There are a lot of near misses today. A guy three seats to our right in Row 2 catches a foul ball – it’s the closest a ball has ever come to me while I’ve been in these seats. The woman sitting three seats to my left in the same row wins a $500 Visa gift card in the Fan Appreciation lottery. Some of the people I wanted to say goodbye to didn’t make it to the park. Brandon Crawford starts but leaves without making a final mark, unless you count fouling a ball off his foot in the third inning; we had all hoped he would hit one more home run to bookend his career – he began it with a grand slam in Milwaukee thirteen years ago – but he goes hitless. We still stand for him at the beginning of the game, at every plate appearance, and when he comes out after the game to make a farewell statement.

It’s not a barn-burner of a game, as much as it feels like it should be. The only thing really at stake is whether the Dodgers are going to win their hundredth game; for a while it looks like we might deny them that much, but five scoreless (if at times precarious) innings from Kyle Harrison don’t quite hold up – Brebbia and Taylor Rogers give up five runs between them in the sixth inning, after which Ross Stripling – of all people – closes it down. Two home runs from Casey Schmitt are all the Giants can manage. The first of those come literally seconds after Gerry says Schmitt can’t handle major league pitching and I reply that he needs consistent at-bats, that he’ll be okay when he’s not getting shuttled up and down between leagues, and after the second Gerry says “Well, I guess maybe I was wrong about Schmitt,” and I feel as baseball-smart as I have ever felt in my life. Taking Gerry to a game is probably – no, definitely – as close as I will ever get to going to a game with my dad in a period when I can claim to know things about the game.

The anemic ninth inning ends without a bang, as do the game, the homestand, the season, and maybe my time as a season ticket holder. I have given out my tips and my gifts and said my farewells, eaten my last hot dog of the year, carefully chosen my last hat. We get Gerry to the curb outside the ballpark and I see him into his car and off home, and then I sneak back into the park for just a couple more minutes. I’m prepared to claim that I think I left my phone at my seats, but nobody challenges me, and I walk right in and back up the stairs.

The park is the way I like it before and after games – emptying out, quiet, with just a little bit of wind and the late-afternoon sunshine that makes for the best games. The scoreboard says simply “Thank You, Fans.” It will say that until the last one has left tonight; in previous years, when I’ve been in the city hours after the park closes on the last day, I have passed by hours after and seen that message shining like a beacon in the dark. Most of the people in the stands are gone, although there is a line of people stretching out through one of the arcade archways; fans have been invited to run the bases after the game – not just kids 14 and under this time, but every one. I could, but I have been on the field a few times before in much less restricted circumstances. Just going from first to home in a crowd isn’t going to awaken much for me, so I head out the Marina Gate to say goodbye to Ken and his wife Elena (she came to the game today).

When the hopper ferry leaves to go to the Ferry building, I take it and watch the park dwindle in its wake; it will strike me later that this is an interesting and fitting way to leave the park, perhaps for the last time as a season ticket holder – like a general on the last boat out of a besieged city. The Giants haven’t had a winning season while I’ve been in the park. I know people who will go stand in the kitchen when the 49ers are in the red zone because one time in 1984 the Niners scored while they were getting a bowl of chili; I am not really a believer in that kind of micro-managing magical thinking, but it’s hard to not correlate the Giants’ stretch of epic badness and then just mediocrity with my presence, especially since they had their best season ever in 2021, when I was in Sacramento and didn’t make it to any games at all. It’s hard not to feel like they were somehow sprung from a cage of bad luck, realizing all the potential being wasted because the bootheel of my unluckiness was holding them down. I can manage to back away and see how silly that is, but still … it might be time to take a year off an see how they do.

We’ll see what happens with Shohei Ohtani and whoever manages next year.

• 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