Last time I had a job at which I had to generate my own content ideas, I found the easiest way to do it, given my particular limitations as a lazy, unmotivated layabout, was to kind of mechanize the process. I came up with three or four ideas that I could apply to every new day; I worked in the adult industry, and so I latched onto the idea of pairing, for instance, the birthdays of porn stars with days of celebration – National Pancake Day, International Unicorn Day, et cetera. That way all I had to do was go to a couple of sites and there would be ideas just waiting for me to pick them up off the ground, like gold nuggets in California in 1849.

When I started thinking about this blog, my first ideas involved making it about first dates. I was going to set up profiles on dating sites – OKCupid, Tinder, Feeld and so on – and just invite potential partners to games: “Come to a ballgame with me! You don’t have to like baseball, you just have to be able to sit next to me for three hours!” In retrospect, the idea that I would be able to arrange 81 dates feels like hubris. However, even assuming I could find a date for every game, I felt like there would be a lot of space to fill, so I started thinking of ways to do what I had done at the work blog – lay down a couple of basic ideas that would serve to fill a couple of inches every day. I thought, for instance, of getting a different food item at every game (this was before I discovered that I never wanted to eat anything but brisket from the Carvery), of associating the score of the game with whether or not I scored on the date (the answer to that one was going to be, every single day, “A gentleman never tells”), and of offering a review of the national anthem.

The national anthem has become a troublesome and complicated experience for America, in some ways. I should note for the record that I am in favor of athletes and anyone else who feels the urge being able to kneel or otherwise abstain from observing the rituals of patriotism, but that I also believe the anthem, like the flag, exists as a symbol of what we believe we should be as a nation and not just a reflection of what we are. You may believe that the anthem, like the country, was born in a state of original sin, and I can’t really argue with that, but I can say that I believe the anthem, the flag, and the nation are eligible for reclamation. We offer up redemption for words and concepts that no longer belong to the oppressors, we repurpose institutions and traditions whose original meanings no longer fit our ideas of what is correct in the world. I think the ceremonies and symbols of national pride deserve the same chance.

That said, I choose to stand for the anthems at games as a gesture of respect for the performer presenting it, but not to remove my hat (or other headgear). I offer that as a gesture of alliance with and respect for the people who are being failed by the nation, harmed by the directions it may take, or disadvantaged by its institutions. I live in a place of privilege in almost every way – I don’t belong to any of the groups that routinely suffer from the depredations of the greedy, the cruel, or the inhumane, but I recognize that am far luckier than most.

Politics aside, though, I have decided not to offer reviews of the daily performance of the anthem. It’s a sad truth that most of the performances are not great – overachievers trying to turn it into a showpiece for a middling voice, creative types offering up weird arrangements and bizarre instrumentation, Metallica*. Mean criticism is really fun to write; it allows for a creativity that just doesn’t obtain when you’re trying to be nice – nice is kind, nice is generous, nice is good, but it’s not as funny as not-nice. Still, on the very first day of the season, I realized that every performer who goes out on the field to present the anthem deserves to hear applause and not petty (however fun) sniping. At the very least, they are doing a better job of it than I would, and I have gone up on stage and known the whispering, breathtaking terror of the moment before you open your mouth.

So, going forward, I am going to try to limit myself to only noting terrible national anthem performances when they are also somehow delightful: children’s choirs where you can hear one kid louder than all the rest or a half-second behind, for Instance, or Easy-E.

Or my favorite national anthem ever. I wish I could remember exactly what day it was so I could go back in the MLB.TV archives and listen to it again, although I doubt it would have the power it had in the ballpark. It was a couple of years ago, before the pandemic, and it was performed on a night celebrating Girl Scouts. The singer was something like ninety-seven years old, and she had become a Girl Scout in the 1930s. In my memory, she was announced as a member of the first class of Girl Scouts to graduate or be confirmed or coalesce or however Girl Scouts reach their final form, but a little research shows me that that is unlikely – the Girl Scouts were formed much earlier, so maybe it was the first troop in California or San Francisco or something.

She sang the National Anthem; her voice was thin, she missed most of the high notes and some of the middle ones, and even with the microphone, she faded in and out. It was one of the most touching, heartbreaking, beautiful things I have ever heard, and I say that as someone who is fully capable of getting weepy over a particularly sentimental car commercial. I am an easy touch when it comes to this kind of thing, but this was something special. Even thinking of the power of it – power that lifted it above any guitar solo or marching band or operatic tenor – gets me misty.

Maybe I’ll go try to find her name or see if I can dig up a recording, but for now I am content to let it be a memory.

*Feel free to complain at me in person, at a ballgame.

• 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

Margo, who first came to a game with me in 2019 (and who I haven’t seen since that game), is a big Bay Area sports fan, and she shows up decked out in more Giants gear than me, which isn’t unusual for the park, but isn’t usual for people I bring, who mostly aren’t big rooters. Margo talks about going to see the Warriors, Sharks, Raiders and Niners as well, and her enthusiasm is nearly boundless. She is excited the whole time and never stops bouncing. I lose track of the number of times she says, in marveling at how difficult it has been for me to fill all the dates with ballpark companions, “How could you not say yes to this?” or some variation thereof. I have to agree.

She wants a crab bowl from the seafood ghetto behind the DiamondVision scoreboard, but the line is apocalyptic; one of the downsides to the new rules speeding up the game is that a decent tour of the ballpark, a 30 to 45-minute endeavor, now takes up a significant percentage of the game. Margo doesn’t need a tour, but the thought of a half-hour in line for a crab bowl is unappealing; we decide instead to stop in at the big ground-level dugout store, where she would really like to buy a beanie with a lot of orange in it but ends up taking advantage of my season ticket discount to pick up an overpriced but astonishingly soft sweater, in which she delights in fondling herself for the rest of the game.

It seems like the kid next to us might be new to the game – he’s maybe ten or so, and it seems like he can’t quite decide where he wants his rooting style to land. Mostly, he says things like “Go Giants!” or “Yeah!!” but once, about midway through the game, he lets slip a “Dodgers suck!” It’s quiet and a little tentative, like he’s trying it out, and Margo laughs in delight and throws him a high-five, which he accepts with a slightly sheepish but bright-eyed grin. He delivered it at a volume that he clearly hoped was going to slip under his dad’s radar (it did not, but Dad just smiled a fond little smile. In the modern world, it’s probably nice to be dealing with a kid whose idea of rebellion is to screw up his courage far enough to say ‘suck’.)

The same kid is positioned directly in front of Margo in the last couple of innings when she starts really letting loose with the rhythmic, singsong cadence of the ancient tribal “Let’s-Go-Gi-ants!” chant. At this point, she has partaken enough in the park’s offerings of what Jeopardy calls Potent Potables that the singsong part has mostly given way to the need for volume, and he takes a few of those right in the earhole before turning around, taking stock of her and her current drink, and saying “You might want to ease up on that a little…,” to which Margo’s response is a succinct “Nope!”

It’s nice too, that he is still innocent enough to think that’s the point at which a person in the ballpark should start to moderate.

At another point, he asks his dad what that smell is, and Dad says “That’s marijuana,” and the kid nods and says “Right, got it.” The whole evening is a charming little episode in the history of this kid’s exposure to vice; he recognizes in the smell the presence of a substance and he has made a direct connection between the can in Margo’s hand and her just-at-the-edge-of-control enthusiasm, but it’s still kind of academic for him. At one point, Margo has left a can unattended on the seat, and Dad tells us for a moment he wondered where his kid got a Mimosa. “Wait till you’re 21 for that,” he says to the kid, and I chip in with “Don’t drink beer,” which gets a nod and a “Right!” from the kid, and then I follow up with “Drink whiskey instead – you get to be a snob about it,” which earns me a laugh from both of them.*

We end up seeing a pretty good game, a 5-0 Giants win that stays close at 2-0 until the late innings when a double and a couple of homers make it a more-or-less sure thing (although Monday’s Sean Hjelle adventure reminds us that a five-run lead is not a rock-solid insurance policy. We head out the gate feeling good.

*Sure, you can be a snob about beer, too, but it takes more work.

• 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

I know this isn’t possible under the current baseball rules, but I think somehow reliever Sean Hjelle gave up a seven-run homer to three different Dodgers in one at-bat last night, and the kid sitting next to me said, disgusted, “Sean Hjelle pitching to Max Muncy is exactly the kind of forward thinking strategy I’ve come to expect from Gabe Kapler.” I love Gabe Kapler, and I couldn’t just let it go. “Be fair,” I said. “It’s the age of the statistician. You know Kapler didn’t make that call – somebody up in the analytics room did. Kapler probably gets to decide what uniform they’re wearing tonight.”* He nodded sadly.

As is my practice, I forgot to take a selfie with Lena on Monday night, but the damage was minimal because pictures were taken: Lena took pictures, my friend Kenny took pictures, my friend Mic took video, and the Giants took pictures and video. The evening was so well documented because I had been invited to make the game ball delivery on the field, so at least somebody thought about it.

I’ve been on the field a few times before, but Lena hadn’t, and watching her was like seeing a kid in a movie – taking in the bright lights, the mascot, the noise. She had to stay on the sidelines while I went out to the mound with Lou Seal, but I got the feeling that it was still amazing to be out on the field.

Lena stayed lit up all night; in spite of a disastrous loss to the Dodgers, the evening was a gift. Every time I looked over at her, she was smiling and taking everything in. She was the first person I’ve taken this year that I hadn’t already met, and it was the perfect start to the year.

She hadn’t been to a ballgame since she was a kid; her childhood was considerably more recent than mine, though, so she mostly remembers times here when her parents were in charge. It’s a really different experience, she says, and not just because of the ball delivery. Her parents used to hurry them out of the park before the game had ended – I like to sit around and watch the park empty out, sometimes to the point where the ushers have to chivvy me olut, although these days they mostly know me and trust me to leave on my own just before they’d have to start nagging.

I got to give her my first tour of the year – the cable car, around the back to the 415, the slide, the kids’ park and the aquarium, the good views at the back corner and the third deck, then to the Lego statues and down to the Promenade to the secret bathroom and then back around to my seats, with a last stop for garlic fries. She said later that it was like being with someone who knew all the secret places at Disneyland. which just makes me want to know more secret places at the park.

After the game I stopped at a bar to have a martini on the twelfth anniversary of Dad’s death; sometimes it falls on an off day or a road trip game and I can get a bunch of people together and have a little absent-friends celebration, but in years where the Giants are at home, I improvise, hitch up at a bar on the way home and ask the bartender for whatever his most classic martini is and raise a toast to the old man. This year, my friend Nicole joined me – she was already in a bar and waited for me to show up, had a martini waiting. We just talked for a couple of hours until it was time to get BART home.

On the way to the station, a guy who had all the hallmarks of a San Francisco homelsss guy buttonholed me on the sidewalk and said “Did we win?”

“No, it was a disaster – 9-1 to the Dodgers,” I told him, and he scowled.

“Is it going to be a terrible year?”

“Too soon to tell,” I said, “but the Dodgers are beastly again this year. They’re always going to be a problem.”

“What do we need to fix?” he asked “And don’t say ‘everything’.”

“We need hitting. Pitching’s okay, fielding’s okay, team chemistry is good, we just need bats.”

“Shoot!” He brightened up. “I can hit.”

So I told him Gabe Kapler’s email address and said “Go ahead and send him a message, ask him for a tryout. If you make it, I’m on the arcade, come visit me.”

I really hope it works out for that guy. The Giants could really use a spark in the lineup.

*He does not. The starting pitcher does.

• 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

On the way out of the MUNI train to meet Paul, I overhear a woman say to her companion “And then it turned out he had a human arm!” On reflection, she was probably describing a dream, but I kind of prefer to think she’d been pleasantly surprised by a robot.

Paul looks like what you’d get if you crossed Hagrid with Santa Claus. He’s big and jovial, but calm and present without being overbearing. One of my favorite things about him – a trait I hope I also present – is that, as much as anyone I have ever met, he is interested in people. He is willing to have, on zero acquaintance, a conversation with anyone about anything; he gets plenty of chances, as he has showed up to the game in a Savannah Bananas jersey (if you don’t know about the Savannah Bananas, go to Tiktok or Youtube or Instagram or wherever you get your short comedy videos; it’s worth your time).

Paul is that most wonderful item, a Dodger fan whose girlfriend is a Giants fan; he’s so used to his trash talking coming from a place of love that his entire attitude toward the rivalry is easygoing and lighthearted. Paul has been to a few games with me back in 2019, when he had one of the ballpark passes and could stop in on a moment’s notice. One of my favorite things about being a regular at the ballpark is that people always know where I’m going to be, and every few games I get a hand on my shoulder and turn around to see a friendly face come to visit; Paul’s was always especially welcome.

Aside from just being a great conversationalist and a good companion, Paul and I used to work together, and he gave me the job I had from 2005 until 2020 – the longest-lasting and most enjoyable position I ever had. I got to sit at a desk and write, and it happened because Paul was the kind of guy who was interested in the people he worked with. We talked at the game about that company, the people who worked there, and what it had done for us in our lives. I have, by and large, better memories of it than he does, but I was less important than he was and he had a lot more responsibility, so it’s not surprising that my days were more carefree than his.

Paul remembered to put on sunscreen today, but I didn’t, and after the game I have a kind of raccoony look going on, burnt red on the western side of my face with pale lines where the earpieces of my glasses protected me. Paul mentions that the worst thing about sunburns for him is taking a shower later and feeling the water burn, and I tell him that’s my equivalent of scourging myself the way a medieval monk might – feeling the burn on my neck and shoulders so I can cringe with penitence and regret; my mom,* I think, was disappointed that Catholic shame wasn’t a bigger influence on me in my life – if your ghost is around paying attention, mom, at least know I have some aptitude for doing penance. (On second thought, please don’t watch me in the shower.)

Oh, the game? Finally, a late rally pays off – although the game is mostly uneventful, a close play at the plate as Bryce Johnson scores on a Wilmer Flores double, followed by a homer from Michael Conforto to make it 3-1 in the eighth, which score holds up for the win, sealed by a double play to finish up the top of the ninth. As my sister said. when I told her about it, “Go Mets!”

* Speaking of mom, today would have been her 85th birthday. This year is the first that I’ve paid for my own tickets for the season, but I doubt I would have been here if it hadn’t been for her extending Kevin’s gift. Happy birthday, mom.

• 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

It’s Opening Day today – the fifth I will attend in person, but there have been so many more. They have been special and full of hope, dreary and full of foreboding, and everything in between since I started paying attention to them. I don’t remember exactly when that was, only that it’s been around thirty years.

Dad and I only went to one Giants game together, although he did take me to a Sacramento Solons game in the mid-seventies. The Solons were the PCL team in Sacramento (somehow they were the Milwaukee Brewers AAA affiliate, although I had to look that up on Wikipedia just now) and I did not care about them at all, and I suspect Dad didn’t really either. The only thing I remember about the game was that Dad had given me a silver half-dollar – both an enormous amount of money to me and – given my size – also an enormous object – to buy a snack with, and I dropped it and had to listen to it roll away down the slope of the stands. It was a tragedy, as I’m sure the entire game was. The Solons were not a hugely successful team.

Anyway. I wrote this piece the year after Dad died. It was published, much edited, in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 12, 2012, but I think this is a better version.

           When I was a kid, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, my dad was a Giants fan, and I had no idea what that meant; he sat with the lights out in our living room in the summers and listened to the Giants on the radio. He called them “them pesky Giants.” It meant nothing to me; I played with trucks and blocks and heard the words on the radio but didn’t listen. He didn’t live and die with the team’s fortunes; he wasn’t that kind of fan. He loved them, though, and the 49ers, who he watched on television. In the ’80s, his devotion to the Niners paid off, with Montana and Taylor and Craig and Rice and then Young coming through for him in that exuberant decade and a half, but his loyalty to the Giants wouldn’t be so richly rewarded for another fifteen years or so.

            By the mid-eighties, though, I’d moved out, and no longer sat at his feet in the summer shade with the Giants struggling along. In 1989, when the A’s and the earthquake slapped San Francisco around, I was living on my own, seeing my father every couple of weeks or so, and baseball wasn’t part of my world at all. I have no idea how he felt about the sweep – no, I have an idea, but we didn’t talk about it. I didn’t care about the game at all, didn’t know about Roger Craig or Hum Baby, Kevin Mitchell or Will Clark, and he never mentioned any of them; the pesky Giants of my childhood were still a cipher, but only because I didn’t care. I was a teenager and didn’t pay much attention to my dad or his teams.

            In the ’90s, I moved to the Bay Area and discovered, accidentally, that I was a baseball man and a Giants fan. A nighttime driving job with nothing but an AM radio left me with the Giants, Rush Limbaugh, and mariachi music as my only choices for entertainment on the road, and the darkness and the silence and the radio brought back those peaceful days at his feet in the summer dusk of our darkened living room. Behind the wheel of a delivery truck, I was a boy again – the age when baseball is supposed to be woven into your soul – and the seeds my dad had sown flourished and flowered. His pesky Giants became mine, and all of a sudden I knew what he knew.

            For the next twenty years, my dad and I always had something to talk about. I became, much to the surprise of my family and friends, a baseball fan. Lon Simmons and Jon Miller were my companions most summer nights from then on, along with the players and characters they brought so vividly to life, and whenever I went back home, even in winter, they were a bridge between me and my dad. We sat in his new house and watched the Giants play; I asked him questions about strategy and tactics and rules and why didn’t they do this or whether that would work. I was surprised to learn that sometimes he didn’t know things. As a child, I thought he knew everything; in my twenties, I came to respect him the way Mark Twain said I would, and in my thirties I found him to be human and fallible – a man like myself, in a way I had never suspected.

            We had sometimes failed to connect as people, as fathers and sons sometimes fail, but the bridge was there, and we could meet on it and stand there while we learned other things about each other.

            One of the things we learned, in 2004, was that he had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. We talked about it on the way to a ballgame at what was then SBC Park, a game we watched from the Chronicle’s season ticket seats – a gift from my cousin Christian Berthelsen, a Chronicle reporter at the time. Dad told me that he was at peace, happy with his life, that if the cancer killed him right then he would feel that he had lived well. A couple of hours later, a foul ball missed his head by a foot or so. We joked that he didn’t need to worry about cancer if he was going to live so dangerously, and I got the foul ball and gave it to him. The next time I went to his house, it was in a Lucite box hanging in his hallway, under a framed painting of a baseball, and it hangs there still.

            The cancer was more or less a death sentence, and it got him eventually, but a series of treatments, often miraculous, often harrowing, kept him going for seven years. Doctors, family, and will kept him alive until April of 2011, when the cancer took a radical turn for the worse. We joked sometimes that he had simply refused to die until he saw the Giants win a World Series. When they brought the trophy home in 2010, we celebrated together with a joy that reflected all the sweetness and innocence of the bond between a father and his child and all the ready heartiness of a triumph shared by equals. 

            From the first of April, when he walked into a Kaiser Permanente office and told them that he wanted to cease the treatments, until the tenth, when he died, I was with him every day. His decline was rapid, the way he wanted it to be; he was essentially in a coma by the eighth – a win over the Cardinals was the last game he really comprehended – but every day before that, he asked me, with decreasing lucidity, when the game was on. Sometimes, in the last couple of days, he asked two or three times, forgetting that he had asked already, or that there was no game that day. He couldn’t see the TV, but we still put it on, even after his eyes had closed for the last time. On the ninth, I sat by his bed and held his hand while he slept and told him – the nurse said maybe he could hear, even though he couldn’t respond – about another win. The sounds of the Giants, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the voices of his family were the things he heard in the last two days of his life.

            This will be the first Opening Day in close to twenty years that I won’t be talking with him about the Giants and their fortunes, or sitting with him on his couch, in his living room with the lights out, cheating the summer sun in Sacramento. Today, though, and every Opening Day from now until I join him, I’ll have my dad’s shade and the radio and the memory of summers to keep me company while I listen to the Giants. Win or lose, they’re my team, a vital part of my inheritance, and even though my dad is gone, I will always think of turning to him to cheer for a hit, calling him to talk about pitching, and hearing him say, on so many summer days, “How about them pesky Giants?”

• 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