81 Dates

If you think you’re right about something – like, if you’re totally convinced of it and have been for a long time, to the extent that it’s something you don’t even think about any more – you should talk to Fiona. Not because she’ll convince you that you’re wrong (although she might) but becasue she’ll make you think about it more than you have before, and she’ll do it in a way that gives you a lot of room to maneuver your way to your own conclusions, rather than bullying you over to where she thinks you should be. Also, when you realize you might be wrong, Fiona will be kind of apologetic about it, like maybe she was misguided once too – not about this, but maybe some other stuff – and understands where you might have gone off track.

An evening with Fiona is an exercise in aimless but not desultory conversation, and in the kind of debate that never results in acrimony. For instance, Fiona asserts that Texas Hold ’em is the Cadillac of poker games and presents an elegant and cogent argument in support, but I don’t know that I think Cadillacs are appropriate in poker, unless they’re the kind with a blaring wish-I-was-in-Dixie horn and a cow skull on the front driven by, essentially, Boss Hogg, which takes away from the essential Cadillacness of the vehicle. I think a reliable old Ford or, in some parts of the country, a Chevy, is much more in the spirit of poker. I like five-card draw and seven card stud, and and maybe every five or six hands a weird game where half the cards are wild.

She gets to explain Texas Hold ’em to me, or at least why she thinks Texas Hold ’em is a good game, and I get to explain the infield fly rule to her. I have a little bit of practice at this; one of the great triumphs of my life as a person who talks was explaining the infield fly rule to an Icelandic physicist who started off the day asking me where on the field the wingers played. Also, I was present at the ballpark a few years ago for a great game whose story requires explaining the infield fly rule, so I have had to refine my skill there. Fiona also espouses the view that we, as citizens of the United States, should refer to ourselves as USians, or at least not as Americans, on the grounds that we do not represent all of the Americas. I disagree, but I haven’t yet figured out how to argue my position, and I am also – because it is Fiona – way in the background entertaining the possibility that she might be right. I’m fighting hard against that, and I’ll get back to everyone later.

There is also more Giants/As baseball, a good game that starts off routine, tightens up for a worrying couple of innings, and then sees the Giants play like a team that didn’t get outscored 34-9 last week, finishing up with an 8-3 win that’s a lot more of what we expect from the current Giants vs. the current As than what we saw last night. The chants of “SELL THE TEAM” are fewer and farther between, and the crowd smaller, but Oakland fans are still very much present, including a couple of kids, maybe ten or so, who perpetrate a two-man wave right in front of us. With this win, the Giants move into sole possession of second place in the NL West, just three games behind what my dad and Gerry Garner refer to as the HFD, the D standing for Dodgers. HF Dodgers, I now realize, sounds like a truly terrible theme restaurant that you’d find in a mall.

What did you think of the evening, Fiona?

“I had a fun time! It was great to watch one of the last Battles by the Bay, should the A’s leave. And, as Van Morrison might say, the crack is always good with Justin.

craic*! not crack

nah, crack is fine.”

• 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 have a lot of talented friends. Some of those talents are less useful than others – my old college roommate Jason could make a noise with his nose that defied description but was endlessly entertaining – but some are really world-class. Gary has been making his living as an artist for most of his life, working in comics and fine art, both as a creator and a teacher. Most of the time when he comes to a game with me, he brings a sketchbook (to be fair, he takes it everywhere) and spends a lot of the game drawing some aspect of the park. Tonight, he opted to just enjoy the game without having to focus on drawing, which was nice. Still, he sent along a couple of previous pieces, so I can show you those.

Gary picked up tonight’s ticket after a last-minute cancellation, which was a nice surprise. This is Gary’s first game this year, but he’s come with me at least once every other year. I’ve been friends with Gary longer than almost anyone else whose company I wasn’t born into – children of my parents’ friends and such – and although neither of us had much interest in sports when we met, a Giants game once a year has become something of a tradition.

I don’t think tonight’s attendance was exactly a record, even for this year, but there were a little over forty thousand fans in the park. A lot of them – a very vocal group – were As fans who felt like this was the venue to let Major League Baseball know that they’re not happy with the team leaving Oakland. The media kind of makes a big deal about the “cross-bay rivalry” but rivalry is a really strong word to apply to what’s really going on. I think if you asked a population of Mets fans or Cubs fans if they’d like to see their American League teams banished to Las Vegas, most of them would love the idea, but I don’t think many Giants fans are happy to see the As leaving. The chants of “SELL THE TEAM’ were overpowering at times, and a lot of Giants fans joined in. It was a very supportive night.

After I’d had these tickets for a couple of years, I realized that one of the things I wanted out of the long-term experience was to be a fixture at the park, which has a lot to do with why I appointed myself Mayor. Originally I had hoped that my section would be filled with other enthusiastic regular attendees. On the bright side, I got Christine, but she was the only one. To be fair, it was a bad couple of years, but I still expected at least some die-hards to be there most of the time. I wanted a group of people I’d be able to bond with and see every day. I wanted to be Norm from Cheers – to walk in every day and have a half-dozen people yell my name, but it didn’t happen that way. Instead, I have had to fashion for myself a position as the opposite of Norm – an Abnorm, if you will – where people have to come to me to greet me joyously.

Tonight was a high-water mark in that regard – I got visits from Alice and Rich, and Michelle’s friend Susan made a special trip from Napa to see the game – she bought a ticket in a different section but came to sit with me and Gary. I think she might have come as much to see the tribute to Tony Bennett as much as for me, but she got stuck in hideous traffic, couldn’t find decent parking, and ended up finally making it into the park in the sixth inning. She missed almost all of the Tony Bennett stuff but had a good time anyway, especially because the Giants won.

It was a tighter game than it should have been, given that the As aggressively pursuing their worst season since 1919, but the Giants have been spotty lately too, coming into tonight’s game at the end of a season-worst six-game skid. They’ve been outscored 34-9 in the last week, with only Wilmer Flores shining over the whole road trip. Just before the game, when Gary and I were talking about ways that teams can build or alter the architecture and conditions of their stadiums to boost their odds of winning, Gary asked what I would do to the field to give the Giants a win tonight, and I said “Well, to start, I’d put the As on it,” which was clever and funny but also a little bit of whistling past the graveyard. It worked out okay, though – the Giants squeaked home with a 2-1 win.

In addition to my visitors, I met Dan and Monica, who also showed up in my section in the sixth, and who I told that they could always find me here. Monica was a very vocal As fan, so I didn’t hear much from Dan, who was wearing a Giants jersey and an As hat, but he said he was pretty sure he’d seen me here before. He was probably right. They were a cheerful addition to the 152 population, which was definitely up from previous games. There are thirty seats on my part of the section, and all of them were taken except for the one that Susan eventually got into. Although they live in the South Bay, Dan said he’d be back for more games, so maybe I have more Norm moments to look forward to soon.

It would be irresponsible not to mention that last night was both Italian Heritage Night at the park and the night on which the Giants paid tribute to Tony Bennett, who died a few days ago. I’m sure Tony didn’t plan his exit so that his tribute could come on this particular evening, but it was a particularly pleasing piece of symmetry, especially since the Giants won and we got to hear “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” twice – once when they played it during the seventh inning singalong and once after the game when the win flag went up. Best of luck, Tony.

PS: I know I said I wasn’t going to criticize national anthems, but I feel like I would be a bad blogger if I didn’t mention that the woman who sang it tonight sang that the broad stripes and bright stars “were…gallantly spleening.”

• 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

This one took me a long time to write, even though I had plenty of time and no other responsibilities to keep me from it. Quite the opposite, in fact: the time between this 1-0 win over the Rockies and the next game wis well over two weeks – the longest break I’ll have all year. The Giants leave for the All-Star break and then go on a road trip that starts off as a triumph and ends in, if not disaster, at least disappointment – a five-win streak turns into a six-loss skid, and the Giants come home in disarray, tired, bruised, and baffled. And the whole time, I’ve been promising to put down the story of the last home game before all of that and putting it off instead.

It was a good game, a tight duel for a win that came at the right time, when the Giants had lost a couple of games to a Rockies team they should have been pummeling, but the truth is I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Not because it wasn’t worth the time or the regard, not even because Mike and I spent a lot of the time wandering around the park, although we did. It was because I was just having too good a time with Mike to pay attention to what I should write about later. I made no notes and maybe thought no thoughts. I took a couple of pictures, and even though they are unremarkable, I will show you a couple of them, just to break up the blocks of text. I sat down and wrote this about an hour after I got home from the game:

“Mike’s wife told him before he left the house that he wasn’t allowed to talk about Ted Lasso during the game. Mike is a good and dedicated husband and I’m not an enabler – mostly – so we didn’t talk about Ted Lasso at the game. We talked about it in the car, though. Mike thinks Ted and Michelle end up getting back together. I think he’s wrong, but I have a soft spot for people who believe in romance – or maybe just people who Believe – so I’m not going to argue the point with him too much.”

And that was all. About once a day over the next two weeks, I had an idea bout how to continue, but none of them turned into anything useful or clever or funny or informative, and now it is the 25th of July and I have to write up the Athletics game and I can’t do it until I finish this, because I told myself I wouldn’t miss any games or post them, out of sequence, and now it’s midnight and I’m up against it – I have to finish the game from the 25th before I see the one on the 26th, and I have nothing to say about the game from the 9th.

I do have some things to say about having friends, though. This post is maybe just a shout-out to Mike – we’ve known each other for about four years now, and somewhere in the pandemic, we got to being friends and not just acquaintances. I guess that happens when you stop just running into each other in the same places and start going to places just so you can hang out with each other. That doesn’t happen a lot after a certain age, or at least it hasn’t happened a lot to me, although this project of taking people to ballgames was in some ways a method of trying to make it happen. Still, it’s rare and it’s precious when it does happen. I have a lot of friends from earlier years – some from high school, more from college, some from the Renaissance Fair, fewer from my job history, and I treasure them all, but the ones who have come in the last five years or so are special because they’ve been intentional and not just the result of right-time-right-place luck.

Mike makes an effort. He calls up and says “What are you up to?” and we hang out, and it’s not because we’ve been doing it since high school or we lived near each other. I’m given to understand, because I read stuff, that men have trouble forming emotional bonds with other men after a certain age, and I can’t say that’s wrong, but I can say it’s not impossible. I can also say that when it goes right, you get yourself a Mike.

Here’s to you, my friend.

• 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 don’t think there’s been a better, more beautiful day this year. The sky is a perfect blue when I get to the park – very early, in order to secure today’s gate giveaway. Often before a day game, the sky is overcast or uncertain, and the clouds part at 1.04, just before the first pitch; today, though, it’s not even pretending. Eric arrives very shortly after I do. It’s been a while since I saw him – he was scheduled to come to a game a few weeks ago, but had an emergency that has kept him away from the park for a distressingly long time. I’ve been worried. He has been, too, as it turns out, but we are both very happy that he made it out today. It’s a welcome reunion, and the day just keeps getting better.

An early Rockies run is briefly worrisome, but things settle down and we end up with a 5-3 win (5-2, according to a guy on the street later who has apparently appointed himself the unofficial scorer; speaking as a person who decided he was the Mayor of section 152, I can only appreciate his gumption). Aside from game stuff, of which there is a lot to like, it’s Hello Kitty Day. I have absolutely no connection with, nor love of, Hello Kitty for its own sake, but I have to confess that I dearly love having Giants gear with Hello Kitty stuff on it. I can’t really explain why, except to say that I get very much the same satisfaction from wearing it as I did in the times when I showed up in a different onesie every Christmas morning to confound my nieces, back when i could still confound them. It makes me feel surprising. People don’t expect baseball and Hello Kitty at the same time.

Eric is good enough to turn over his Hello Kitty shirt so I can give it to a friend at the ballpark who does me favors sometimes; it’s a sacrifice, because his girlfriend would dearly love it, as she loved – if I remember correctly – the Hello Kitty bucket hat last year. I would dearly love her to love this one, but I have debts to pay, nd miles to go before I sleep.

Another place I get to go before I sleep is Field Club 121; my friend Julie (faithful readers will remember her from the 16th of May, when the balk was the Opposite of Pornography) lucked into some tickets down where the rich people sit, and she invites us to come join her for a couple of innings. I’ve been here twice before, once when Kevin Mark offered me Larry Baer’s seats for a day. Baer is there today, in the seats that I felt were too close to the field and too temptingly close to the dugout. There are lots of good reasons for Larry Baer to be able to lean over the dugout wall and pester Bruce Bochy, but none of them applied to me. I like being close to the plate as a change, and these seats are great, but the truth is I still think my seats are perfect and wouldn’t trade them. Also, I’ve invested a lot in being the Mayor of 152, and I don’t really want to have to start over.

One of my favorite games to play is imagining what the players’ expressions in their official photographs, as displayed on the scoreboard. would be saying if they were candid snaps. Wilmer Flores, for instance, has looked for the last four years like a fifteen-year-old boy who can’t sleep because his grandfather’s ghost won’t let him; Lamonte Wade Jr. looks like a man who was not told that the party was clothing-optional, and Brett Wisely looks like a grown-up Harry Potter who is a little drunk, an assessment that the two women sitting in front of us in FC121 heartily agree with.

What Did You Think of the Day, Eric?

“Spending time together with you on a glorious, sunny July afternoon brightened my spirits. From indulging in garlic fries to visiting with Julie, I viewed different perspectives… not only the sightlines of multiple sections, but also, my life’s perspective was enhanced and optimism was increased. In addition, I enjoyed learning facts about Hello Kitty that were displayed on the videoboard in between innings. For someone who didn’t grow up with Hello Kitty, it is always amazing to observe the diehard HK fans of every age.“

• 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

Jeff is the kind of guy who remembers specific at-bats and what they meant to a game or a series or a season; as you may recall, I am the kind of guy who remembers that we probably won some games that year, if I remember what year it was. At one point we get involved in a conversation with a guy in the 415 – he’s a Cubs fan – who talks in very specific detail about some postseason games with Jeff, and my main contribution to the discussion is to have asked where he got that hat (he got it for having tickets in the 415). I can’t say I’m actually insecure about the difference in our knowledge bases, because I can fall back on knowing which two Yankee pitchers traded lives, including wives, children, and dogs in 1973 (Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich), which Jeff probably doesn’t. He is also the kind of guy who has a pregame ritual, which involves going into the Public House to get a beer before the game. I guess mine is trying to be in my seats in time to watch the guy who hoses down the field finish hosing down the field.

Jeff seems to have his ducks in a row, with a wife who sounds like maybe a bigger Giants fan than both of us; he also tells of having been a pretty successful little Leaguer, until he got to the level where pitchers start to acquire real power but haven’t developed much control, which reminds me of my own baseball career and the time I got hit by a pitch, which was probably traveling about twenty miles an hour but was still very traumatic. I’ve been hit by a lot of things since then, but none of them left quite the same impression on my psyche – possibly because about two minutes after I got taken out, I told the coach I felt okay and was ready to go back in and was told that when you come out of a game, you’re out for good, which left me feeling both slightly bruised and kind of dumb. Later in the 415, Jeff declines the opportunity to stand right behind the bullpen catcher and watch the fastballs come in. We both have our emotional scars.

I am reminded again, as I was when Myla came to a game back in the beginning of May, that my connection to my ancestors is…anemic. It’s Native American Heritage Night at the park, and there’s a troupe of dancers in front of the Public House before the game. I wonder if the ancestors, if they could see what the current generation is doing with the traditional dances, would approve – would they be happy that the kids were carrying their heritage into the future? Or would they snipe about the music these days and about how that one woman is wearing sunglasses and how the littlest kid is all over the place? I wonder about my own ancestors – my poetic Irish ones are probably disappointed with the lack of discipline and sorrow in my writing, and the Danes are most likely glooming around Valhalla bemoaning my drinking habits. I imagine the troupe of dancers is probably getting a lot more love from the hallowed forebears than I am.

Jeff thinks Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame; I don’t, and I get the sense his wife doesn’t either, but I could be wrong. We agree on a lot of other things, though – we are both traditionalists, or at least people who don’t like change. We don’t like the pitch clock, we don’t like the new schedule of interleague play, we’re not happy about the DH in both leagues, and I feel safe in guessing that we have similar feelings about the automatic runner on second base in extra innings. I love bringing new people to the ball park, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to talk to someone about how cranky I am without having to explain why. When I admit that a lot of my objections amount to “You kids get off my lawn,” he points out – comfortingly – that there is some validity in wanting the kids off your lawn. I feel seen.

I’ve kind of buried the lede here, but Jeff wants to do some recording, as a prelude to getting the podcast underway. It probably won’t come out till after the season, but we did get a few minutes of conversation at a table in the club level, where Jeff was kind enough to buy me a brisket sandwich. You can read most of what I told him in the first few posts of this blog, but with luck you’ll be able to hear it sometime relatively soon too.

Speaking of documenting things, I forgot to take a picture of two maraschino cherries I saw on the steps on the way up to the club level; I don’t know what I would have said about them if I had, but at least I did remember to take one of the can of beer on the baby-changing table in the men’s room near the Garden. I’m not sure what I have to say about that either, but maybe it kind of speaks for itself (I don’t know what it’s saying either).

Also, even though I didn’t see it while I was in the park, and how in the world did I not, there was a really big boat out in the roads. I honestly think this might be the biggest pink thing I have ever seen.

New feature in the blog: What Did You Think of the Evening, Jeff?

“Fun baseball talk with someone who clearly shares a love/obsession with the game. It was cold, sure, but not as cold as I expected as recently as 3:30 p.m. today. Left my flannel and Giants beanie cap at home in favor of a 2012 World Series hoodie that did just fine. Cool to circle the ballpark via Club Level, where I opted for food you can get on virtually any level (Tony’s) because I’m a sucker. Best part is shooting the shit with you, your buddy Ken who works for the Giants, and that random Cubs fan who lives here now.“

Thanks, Jeff!

• 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

Emily has some questions about baseball – what’s the deal with tagging up on a fly ball, what’s up with a check-swing strike, don’t the visiting players get walk-on music, did that guy just break a bat – but her real concern with sport lies in other fields. Courts, really. Among other endeavours, she teaches acrobatics, and she has travelled with circuses, performing with Jaleen, who you may remember from a few weeks ago, or just because most of you have probably met her at one some point. Given that she is a performer of physical feats, I can’t just wave away her opinions about athletic matters, so when she opines that basketball players who can’t make free throws should just practice more, and that the entire NBA is lazy, I have a lot of arguments that tend in the opposite direction, the main one being that if she thinks the NBA free throw average is lower than it should be, maybe that’s because free throws are harder than they look. She is unshaken, though – her feeling is that if throwing a ball through a hoop when nobody is allowed to try to stop you is your job, you should be making those throws all the time. It turns out that I will have to go home and do some internet research before I can wave away her opinions. So, Emily, this next paragraph is for you:

The league-wide free throw percentage in the NBA so far this year appears to be about 78%, with the lowest team average at about 72% and the highest at around 83%. That’s considerably higher than you thought it was, and even the league’s worst free-throw shooter so far this year – Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks with 64.5% – is doing better than your estimate. The best – Tyler Herro of Miami – is shooting 93.4%, which seems pretty acceptable. I mention all this not to chastise you for being too harsh on us lazy people or to preen about being right, but instead to tell you that I think the NBA in general is living up to your standards. I hope when you read this, you will be prouder of them, and that if I ever become a famous writer and this blog post surfaces, the retired NBA players from the 2023 season can sleep easy in your good graces. (If you really just want a reason to argue that the NBA should be working harder, the field goal average across the league is only 46%.)

Aside from the free-throw issue, Emily can only be described as charmingly positive. She’s cheerful about almost everything, from hitting to pitching, from the music and the temperature in the park to the – let’s say – Callipygian proportions on Matt Festa while we watch him in the bullpen. She is even delighted – twice – with an admittedly well-executed Mariners double play in the fourth. When she realizes she’s cheering for the wrong team, she’s momentarily contrite, but I assure her that the 152 is a safe space for all fans, even the casual ones (she realized while getting ready that she doesn’t have any orange clothes, but she was able to scrape up a warm hat repping the state of Washington). Emily isn’t sure about the groundskeepers raking down the infield dirt every three innings, but even that isn’t outright disapproval – more just dubious about whether it’s necessary.

Also charming is her announcement very early on that she is going to get some cotton candy when the cotton candy guy comes by. I don’t know why i find it endearing, except that maybe I am just happy to see someone who teaches acrobatics eating something made of pure sugar. It makes me feel better about the likelihood that when I get home I am going to consume at least one giant Otter Pop after eleven pm. She has french fries, too, and a little piece of my heart.

Tonight’s game is not an ideal game, but it is the game we need. People talk about ugly wins – this isn’t one of them, but it isn’t especially pretty either. It feels like one of those situations where you keep thinking traffic is about to clear up and you can put your foot down and get moving, but then you come around a curve or over a hill and see another half-mile of taillights. Eventually you get where you’re going, but it’s not as much fun as it might have been. The Giants eventually get where they’re going, but it’s neither easy nor graceful, and, unlike a lot of games over the last few weeks, it never really feels like they have the pedal down. Still, as they say, a win is a win – ultimately one run in the third and one in the fifth are enough to do the trick. We can hope it is enough to bring some order to the skidding Giants, with the tragic Rockies coming to town. Not Oakland tragic, but tragic.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that we both, without consulting about it, thought that the guy sitting in the row in front of us looked like a discount Trent Crimm. I said seventy-year-old Trent, she said Trent Crimm’s cousin, but we were both on the same page.

• 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 only took two pictures today, even though I mentioned to Katie that I wanted to get one with her. I forgot about doing it almost immediately after I told her that, though, and it never happened. When we were arranging to meet, she told me she’s de sitting on the Embarcadero reading a book with her back to a palm tree, which felt very spy-thriller to me, so not having a photograph of our time together feels appropriate, like there’s a mystery going on. We took our time walking down the embarcadero to the game, which was not super-mysterious or spy-like, but it did give us a little time to get to know each other. I did take one halfhearted picture of a sign made by a kid in 152, but I didn’t get to ask him any questions about it, like “which Giant is that?” or “Why a partial map of the field?”

Katie isn’t especially interested in baseball, although she did grow up watching minor-league games in Rochester, New York with her dad. It doesn’t seem to have taken, though, not even to the extent that she might maintain a vestigial fondness for one team or another (the Rochester Red Wings were, when she was growing up, the AAA affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, although well after she left, they were acquired by the Minnesota Twins and more recently the Washington Nationals). She is interested in women’s soccer, which of course brings up Ted Lasso, but only to the extent that I find out she hasn’t finished the third season yet because a recent breakup robbed her of access to an Apple TV subscription. My heart breaks a little.

There’s a lot of flag-waving at today’s game, partly because they handed out flags at the gate; I take one by reflex but put it away immediately. Enough people are wearing, waving or representing flags that I feel like that aspect of the day is covered. One woman is sporting a Stars and Stripes T-shirt on which the red stripes are replaced with long guns, and I’m overcome with a kind of weariness. I don’t know what kind of person you have to be to wear that in San Francisco, let alone to a Giants game. There is also a trio of beer-bellied meatheads who keep appearing in parts of the ballpark and shouting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” while (mostly) lining up so that their painted guts spell it out. Honestly, after the third time we saw them, I couldn’t tell if they were actually those idiots or if they were making fun of those idiots. If you can’t tell, I think it doesn’t matter.

The game starts with a decent National Anthem and then a very close flyover by an Air Force helicopter. I have to confess to a lot of disillusionment with the US and the military, but I still really love helicopters, and this one is really close; it makes a really tight circle over the park and then heads off to the south. The mix of thrill and disdain is unsettling. I don’t want to participate in the toxic rah-rah jingoism, but I also want to watch that helicopter until it’s a dot in the distance. It’s kind of like seeing someone attractive on the BART train – during the limited window of opportunity I want to look, but I also don’t want to be the dude who’s staring at someone who’s just trying to go home from work without being harassed or objectified.

In one of the between-innings scoreboard entertainment videos, various Giants players are asked whether fireworks are overrated or underrated. The count comes in at eight for underrated and none dissenting, which makes me wonder if any of them knows what underrated means. Given that as a country we apparently spend well over two billion dollars on explosives on the 4th of July every year, I have to wonder what it would take for any of them to feel like an appropriate amount of attention was being paid to pyrotechnics. Katie, who is far less vocal about her opinions than a lot of people I take to games, mostly seems to agree, but doesn’t have a lot to say about it.

That’s not to say she’s quiet or untalkative, but most of what we talk about is either personal or can’t really be summed up easily (although she does tell me that her parents’ wedding anniversary is July 4th, which we agree is a weird day to plan your wedding). She is a fun companion, though, and we actually spend a lot of time away from my seats, first getting food and then heading down to the 415 to have a look at the Mariners’ relievers, who it turns out are unnecessary because the starter throws a complete game 6-0 shutout. Although our June as great, we are definitely in the throes of a distressingly unrhymeable July swoon. The Giants have lost three in a row and seven of the last ten, which sometimes happens, but on the heels of a ten-game winning streak feels especially punishing. That’s why you play the whole season, though.

At the very end, when we’re leaving our seats, a guy in the SRO sections says “You wouldn’t happen to have any marijuana, would you?” Of course I do not, and even if I did, I don’t think I would give it to a guy who asked for it that way. It feels like I’m in the middle of a sting operation from the Simpsons, where the bumbling cops wouldn’t know to ask for weed. As I disappear in the distance, I hear him calling after me “What about just five dollars worth?” I feel like I have made the right decision, not getting involved in drugs for the last 56 years.

• 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 haven’t seen Michael in at least twenty-five years, which means that he and I are both not far off twice as old as we were the last time we were in the same place. There is a lot to reminisce about, but we pretty much manage to skip it entirely – only at the very end of the evening do I bring up the place where we met – Comic Relief, where I worked and he shopped in the mid-1990s. Even that is a brief coda to the night; there is even more catching up to do, but we don’t do that either. Instead, we spend at least an hour and a half of the ballgame – an almost offensively quick 2:34 affair that ends on whatever one note short of a high note is – talking about Ted Lasso.

I had planned to say to Michael something along the lines of “So, tell me about the last 25 years of your life,” but he hamstrings the whole deal by asking, in the second inning, “Have you watched Ted Lasso?” He couldn’t have known what he was unleashing. An hour and a half later, he says he doesn’t regret it, and I can’t say that I do either. You can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks of Ted Lasso. Michael, for instance, expresses a belief that Rupert was maybe bound for some kind of redemption. Michael is a nice person and he wants to believe that Rupert could be redeemed, and that is a good quality to find in a person who has spent a fair part of the last twenty years as a pastor. I knew about the pastor situation because occasionally I see Michael’s posts on Facebook, but he does tell me a lot more about it once we get past Ted Lasso.

Once we’re past Ted Lasso, baseball interferes some – a 2-2 tie gets turbulent when the Giants allow four runs in the top of the ninth (arguably due at least in part to an egregiously bad hit-batsman call) and then score three in the bottom, which is unfortunately two shy of what they needed to win. After a spectacular June, they’ve been slipping some, but we knew the pace wasn’t going to hold up forever. WE can only hope things will even out. I hurry Michael through his accounting of his adventures in the 21st century, which include some downs but more ups. We get sidetracked by some theology, which then becomes the main track. At one point, I ask him something that elicits the reply “Well, there are a few answers to that, and I will start with the complex theological one,” which is just what I like to hear. Just as this not the place to spend too much time discussing anyone’s beliefs about Ted Lasso, it is also not the place for too much theological debate (not that we actually debated anything), so I will only say that Michael is very tolerant of what I am sure a less genial pastor would have felt were frivolous questions. He is also very willing to be sidetracked, which always makes for good conversation.

The national anthem tonight was performed by the United States Air Force Band of the Golden West, which consists of a flute, a French horn, an oboe, a clarinet, and I am not kidding a bassoon, which I honestly thought was an imaginary instrument made up by Peter Schickele until I was maybe twelve, in spite of having grown up with musicians. Michael says this is a woodwind quintet, and I have to believe him because he owns and plays a sousaphone, which I incorrectly identified as a tuba a few weeks ago (I believed that mistakenly calling a sousaphone a tuba was probably a less grievous error than mistakenly calling a tuba a sousaphone, although I can’t explain why). It was lovely and might be my favorite good anthem so far this year, although partly because they made some choices that in spots made it hard to recognize as the national anthem. I guess that’s what you get when a bassoon and a French horn have forty percent of the vote.

There are fireworks after the game tonight, and I would love to thrill you with photos of them, but photos of fireworks are mostly pointless, especially with my skills. I wish I could have documented these in particular – I feel like you don’t often see new fireworks, but this show involves some that look like spiky balls and some that look like a smug cartoon cat with too many whiskers. I get bored quickly with fireworks shows, and I often end up thinking at some point something like “That show represents several times the amount of money I paid for my tickets this year.” I always think they go on way too long, and the only way I can take anything positive away is to remember how much my sister loves fireworks and imagine the joy on her face when she sees them.

There was a truck sponsored by Topps, the baseball card company, outside the park when I get there at five; they’re giving away little knickknacks and packs of cards and stuff, and I stopped in to take a picture in the baseball card frame and play a pachinko-type game that nets me a little wooden baseball bat keychain trinket. Michael takes a picture in the frame too, although the shadows are not quite right and the photos don’t look great, but I’m used to that.

At the end of the evening I feel like I haven’t changed nearly as much from the guy who worked at the comic book shop in the 90s as Michael has changed from the guy who shopped there. I’m okay with where we both are, though.

There is a shadow economy going on at Giants games, a steady low-level barter system that consists of goods on one end and goodwill on the other. The quality and frequency of the gate giveaways is such that on several occasions, I’ve come to understand that one or another of the people who work at the park would like – for instance – one of the Hawaiian shirts, or the comic book, or a T-shirt; as a person with two tickets, I am often in a position to grant wishes, and I love being able to do a good thing for someone I get to see and banter with at every game. Today is not one of those days, though – the Hawaiian Foodie shirt, depicting various culinary options around the park, is both visually appealing and slinkily comfortable, and I am unwilling to give mine up, even though I have it on good authority that Ray wants one. Ray deserves one, but he’s not getting mine. I’ll tell you more about Ray later. For now, I’m just letting you know that today I’m being a little selfish.

Kat wants to keep her shirt too. She already has some Giants gear on, but she is up for more. Kat is the absolute acme of what Kruk and Kuip like to call the gamer babe – blonde and tanned, wearing a visor, carrying a scorebook, decked out in orange and black, including, now, today’s Hawaiian shirt. I asked her before the game if she was going to want the shirt, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Of course she wants the shirt. It’s nice to have an extra layer, actually – the sun is peeking through the clouds occasionally, but this isn’t going to be one of those games where the overcast magically clears away for the first pitch. It’s uncanny how that happens sometimes, like the sun is as aware as the seagulls are of when the games start and end. It’s not cold, but it’s not warm enough to get into the short sleeves yet either.

Kat has brought her scorebook. I am always impressed by people with scorebooks; I think that the way I feel about people with scorebooks is about the same way that illiterate people in works of fiction feel about people who can read – they are holders of an ancient arcana, and I feel slightly ashamed that I don’t entirely know how to decode their glyphs. Fortunately for my ego, Kat puts away her scorebook in about the middle of the fourth inning, saying that she likes keeping score but also gets distracted thinking about food pretty quickly. There are a lot of distracting things going on in this game, some on the field and some off. There’s a lot of scoring to start things off, but weird baserunning and pickoff throws, too, plays that one team or another might review but then don’t.

Jeff shows up after the first inning, so we are a threesome for a while; I’ve only mentioned Jeff in passing so far, but you’ll hear more about him, and from him, in weeks to come. I have started referring to him as my biographer, but he is really just a guy who has offered to have me on his podcast; he’s a mutual friend of mine and Myla’s (Myla was the guest who brought Doctor Gabby the Muppet a few weeks back). With luck, he’ll be writing a guest edition of the blog. He sits with us for three or four innings, after which we go down to check out the 415 and look for some food. Kat gets the very last of the bacon-wrapped hot dogs – we’d been talking about them all day and I wanted one, but I can get one outside. Back in our seats, we have time to pay attention to the game, which turns out to be very exciting. It’s kind of a back-and-forth affair, with the Giants surging ahead and then barely holding on in a nailbiter of a ninth to win 7-6.

Sometimes people ask me questions I know the answers to, and sometimes they ask me questions I don’t know the answers to, but I almost always have a guess or an opinion. My guesses and opinions might be wrong, but I’m not shy about offering them up anyway. I like to think I’m open to correction, though. It’s not often, however, that someone asks me a question I can’t rustle up any feelings about, or one that I can’t even begin to guess on. Kat manages both in one game. The first is “How do you feel about Birkenstocks?” I takes me along time to say “I have no opinion on Birkenstocks,” because I have to reach really deep to discover that I have never once thought about Birkenstocks and can’t muster up any feelings about them or people who wear them, which is weird for me. I’m not used to not being able to pontificate, even if it’s completely off the cuff. I feel like I might have failed a test. It turns out, though, that Kat has never run into anyone who doesn’t have an opinion on Birkenstocks, so we’re both in open water here.

The second question is even more baffling, because it is a deeply personal one, and I am absolutely taken aback by not knowing the answer to it. “before you take a drink of that soda,” she says, “are you going to inhale or hold your breath when you drink?” And I have absolutely no idea. Like, none at all. I take drinks, or one thing or another, like several hundred times a day, and I honestly don’t know if I do either of those things at all, let alone which one. Do you? Am I just criminally ignorant of my own body functions? When she asks, I try to think about what I do, and after about fifteen seconds of considering it, I’m not even sure I know how to drink anymore. Everything is up in the air now.

• 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

Mari has come from Australia to see today’s game with me. Well, she has come from Pleasanton. She came from Australia to visit friends and maintain ties, but she’s finishing up her visit by spending Friday evening with me. She brought a backpack, which for no real reason we are no longer allowed to bring into the ballpark, and in the course of trying to explain that she came from Australia and could we please relax the rules for just a minute, we end up accidentally gaining admittance to the special Friends party in Triples Alley.

I can’t explain the process by which this happens, except to say that I feel like a character in a movie who gets mistaken for a spy and has to bumble through an adventure. We didn’t take any of the swag on offer – a Giants-themed Friends t-shirt and a bobblehead – but we did eat free chili-dogs. There was a raffle too – I was conflicted about what I’d do if I won, considering that I didn’t pay the fee I was supposed to have paid to get into the party, but I didn’t win and was spared enduring the moral failure I surely would have suffered if my number had come up for the Mike Krukow signed baseball.

We did have our picture taken pretending to share a chocolate shake, which I assume has some relevance to Friends but can’t remember what it might be, in spite of having watched the entire show. We did also have the opportunity to take a picture on a couch, but we declined, opting instead to go out on the field to watch batting practice and then walk around the warning track to head to our seats just before game time. It was unexpected fun, in spite of the fact thaat neither of us really cares about Friends. Honestly I’d probably go to a Proud Boys-themed party in Triples Alley if I didn’t have to pay for it and got free hot dogs.

Before the game starts, Mari and I talk a lot about stuff we’ve had in storage. She downsized pretty drastically when she moved to Australia a few years ago, and I have done the same several times recently. Almost all my stuff is in a storage unit in Richmond right now, waiting on my next move. It feels strange to be divorced from my baseball stuff – hundreds of books and all the paraphernalia I’ve acquired since 2017. I have a stack of signed balls in my current place, but very little in the way of bobbleheads and the like.

I want my stuff back, but for now I will have to be content with this year’s junk – the Splash Hit counter bobblehead, a few hats, the Pride and Gigantes jerseys, and the Indiana Jones Night bobblehead that Javier brought by 152 in the first inning. It’s Indiana Jones running away from a giant baseball rolling down on him, and pretty clever, as a lot of these things are.

Mari contributes to my stash by giving me two enormous Giants-patterned fleece scarves – you could use them as blankets for a python – that I end up being very grateful for later in the cold evening (it’s not the coldest this year, but I’m deeply glad for the scarves).

It’s an exciting game, although it doesn’t really start off great for the Giants. Then again, quite a few games lately have not started off great for the Giants but ended up just fine. Evan Longoria parks a homer in the garden in the second inning, but the Giants answer pretty quickly with three of their own; it goes that way – a run here, a run there – but the Giants manage five in the fifth, and that pretty much puts a hat on it. The final is 8-5, and although the Giants lost yesterday, they’re still nine for the last ten and rolling steady.

I told Mari a while back, as I have over the years told many of my friends who have no interest in sports, that if they want a pathway to finding something to like about baseball (they don’t have to, by any means, but if they want to), one good way to do it is to pick a boyfriend on the team and follow his fortunes. My advice is almost always to pick the catcher, but tastes vary. Mari, who has been in Australia since about 2016, has chosen Bailey and Crawford this year. They do good work today – mostly defensively for Craw, but two RBIs for Bailey isn’t nothing. This approach can backfire – my friend Sunny picked Tim Lincecum in 2011, which was a good choice at the time but became a painful but necessary lesson in how faith, no matter how deep or sincere, is not always enough. Mari is a very pragmatic woman, and I expect she will survive Crawford’s coming retirement with aplomb.

The Diamondbacks are strangers to me. I only know two names – Christian Walker and Ketel Marte – and it’s weird to be rooting so hard against a team that has meant so little for so long. I feel like the last time the Diamondbacks mattered was in 2001, when they beat the Yankees to win the World Series. That’s not true – they’ve won the division three times since then, and finished ahead of the Giants a handful of other times, but I don’t ever remember feeling like the Diamondbacks were something to be actively rooted against. The Dodgers, yes. The last couple of years, the Padres, yes. But the Diamondbacks and the Rockies have mostly seemed like they’re just around to fill the division. Now they’re a definite obstacle, and part of why it’s strange is that they are, like the Giants, not loaded down with superstars and hired guns. Their payroll is, in fact, a little less than two-thirds of the Giants’, which is in turn about three-quarters of the Padres’, but the D=Backs are on top of the division. I heard a radio commentator the other day talking about calling them the D-Bags, which seems to me both sophomoric and unnecessary. More as the year develops, I guess.

• 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