81 Dates

It’s not that nothing interesting happens in the game. Lots of interesting things are happening, and will continue to happen, but I am distracted. It’s Season Ticket Members’ Appreciation Week, and tonight’s treat was ice cream on the club level; there’s a little patio behind third base with a bar and tables with stools. It’s still nice and sunny, so Megan and I have a good half-hour to sit out there and eat free ice cream and catch up. We both chose the chocolate-chip cookie vanilla ice cream sandwich, but I am reminded – as I always am – that I should have chosen something fruity and light. I resolve to have some lemon sorbet when I get home, but it’s going to be a while. Have I mentioned Javier? Javier is my season ticket rep, and he goes above and beyond. I lagged on answering the invitation for the ice cream party, and by the time I got to responding, it was sold out, but he got me in anyway.

Megan is not a baseball girl, not what the radio guys call a gamer babe, but she knows how to ask a question. The one she asks today – well, one of the ones – is something that no-one has thought of asking before. She does not phrase it quite this way, but it amounts to: “I hear you complaining endlessly about the new rules, but, given the idea that games should be speeded up a little, what would you do instead?” I don’t immediately know what I would do; it takes me a while, but I do eventually come up with some answers. Those are for a different post – maybe in the middle of next week, when there aren’t any games – but at least now I have some. I am no longer just a curmudgeon shouting into the void; I am now a curmudgeon with slightly more to talk about shouting into the void.

Another distraction, one directly related to Season Ticket Members’ Appreciation Week, is brisket. I know I have mentioned brisket before, but it has not, for various reasons, been a big part of my season so far. One of those reasons is that the only good brisket place is on the club level, to which I do not have regular access; however, tonight, since the ice cream social was on the club level, I do. This turns out to be both a good and a bad thing, because although we get up to the club level and eat a pile of delicious brisket (technically, we got brisket sandwiches, but I ate all the meat and saved the bread for later; I forgot to take a picture of my sandwich, but I did take one of the bread in the ninth inning), we also do that during the fifth inning, which turns out to be the action inning for the evening. It is the only inning in which the Giants score, and the one in which the Giants mount a replay challenge that results in four runs instead of two and gets the Padres manager thrown out of the game. We see none of that, because we are in the club level, and we can barely even see the DiamondVision screen. On the other hand, as I have noted before, we would have been utterly baffled as to what was going on wherever we were, because the stadium announcers never ever explain confusing situations. I do eventually learn what happened, but only because I watch it on TV later.

By the time we get back to our seats, most of the exciting stuff is over; there will be a couple more Padres runs and another confusing review, but the game ends with a 4-2 San Francisco win. it’s the tenth in a row, and if it’s not exactly routine, it’s at least one of the first games in a while that isn’t kind of stressful. What is stressful in a minor way is two foul balls in rapid succession that come very close to section 152 – I think it might be time to put the glove on, but JD Davis, who puts one in the arcade and one over it, strikes out and the inning and the danger are over.

The only other thing of note was an enormous container ship out in the roads, piled high with cargo boxes. You know how I love a big boat. MSC Teresa, 365 meters long, might be one of the biggest I’ve seen in person. I know – that doesn’t have anything to do with baseball, but I do have other interests.

• 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

Tonight’s game makes me aware of a weird lacuna in my baseball experience. it’s the first time I can remember arriving at the ballpark expecting to see the Giants win. In the first years of my season tickets., the Giants were almost historically woeful – there have only been a couple of worse three-year stretches in their history, and for one of those you have to go all the way back to 1900, which doesn’t even count as modern baseball. From 2017 to 2019, there was really not much reason to come into the park feeling like we were going to see the win flag. The stadium sound crew used to play “Don’t Stop Believin’” when the Giants were behind in the middle of the eighth, but sometime in late 2017, they quietly replaced it with “Hip to Be Square.” They were tacitly acknowledging that if any of us were still Believin’, it was acceptable if we wanted to Stop. There wasn’t a lot of believin’ to be done over the next three years, and then there was the pandemic season. In ’21, there was plenty of reason to believe again, but I was in Sacramento with my mom, and when I came back in ’22, the Giants had the year we expected them to have had the year before, coming in at .500 and demonstrating early on that they weren’t going to be the same streaking fireball we’d seen in Buster Posey’s last year. Now, though, something different is in the air.

Tonight, the Giants gave up two runs in the top of the third, and we all just shrugged our shoulders and said some version of “No big deal; we don’t start hitting until the fifth inning.” It definitely has notes of “We win in the even years,” and we know how that worked out once we got complacent about it. There is a kind of magical thinking with which we bind and capture hope, circumscribe and try to make manifest our desire for things to go our way. It is believing in streaks and clutch hitting; it’s wearing the lucky socks and not going to the bathroom until the inning is over, and sometimes it’s “Belt is 3 for 15, so he’s due” and “Lincecum will be back on top soon.” Tonight it was “47 of the 55 runs we’ve scored in the last 7 games have come after the fifth inning, so we’ve got plenty of time.” And we did have plenty of time, and we won 4-3. Our faith was rewarded, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that we were feeling that certainty, that inevitability, and it’s the first time I can remember feeling it in the ballpark in a long while. We felt like we deserved this one.

Christian texted me a couple of hours before the game: Giants are starting to look legit and I replied the number of ways they are finding to come from behind is astonishing. I was joking a little, downplaying, warding off the evil eye – three of the last seven wins were last-chance miracles, and you can neither start depending on that nor risk jinxing it – but they found yet another way to come from behind tonight, with a run each in the seventh and eighth and then a bases-loaded walk in the ninth to end it. We were just as happy with the walk as we would have been with a single or a home run. We knew what we were owed, and we didn’t care how we got it.

Another thing we got tonight – and by we I mean me and my guest Miller – was a free taco. It’s season ticket member appreciation week – yesterday there were photos with Lou Seal and tomorrow there will be ice cream, but today we get a taco at Underdogs, the sports cantina across the street from the park. The tacos we get are, while delicious, the smallest tacos I’ve ever seen. maybe the size of a silver dollar. Miller and I linger over them and make them last for several teeny bites before we head over to the park. We’ll have bigger food later.

Miller came to me from Facebook, a friend of a friend; he used to go to Giants games pretty frequently, but hasn’t been in a while. For one, he appears to go skiing about as often as I go to ballgames. Also, he’s been more into basketball lately, but admits that that’s more because the Warriors have been hot for the last few years then because he likes the sport better. As a person with a mom who was interested in anything whose finals were on TV, as a person who was perfectly willing to become a fan of curling when that was featured in coverage of the winter Olympics, I understand completely. As he says, and I concur, it’s just great to watch a sport played well, and the Warriors have been playing it very well for a while now. He also cops to being a regionalist – he’s willing to root for pretty much any team from the South, where he’s from.

I want to say Miller’s name over and over; I have a deep love for people whose first names are last names. Baseball is a great place for that, especially when you look at the classics: Rogers Hornsby, Ford Frick, Brooks Robinson, Ferguson Jenkins, Carlton Fisk. He says he’s only known four other Millers in his life, so I introduce him to a fifth – Yankee Hall-of-Famer Miller Huggins, another all-time best baseball name.

Even though he’s not as into baseball as he used to be, this is a great game for Miller – I doubt it’s going to drag him back into the fold, but it sure is exciting. A walkoff win – even one predicated on a lot of bases-on-balls – is a hard thing not to get wrapped up in, and Miller does just as much high-fiving as anyone else in the end. We (sort of) end up on TV twice – once off to the right of a foul ball to section 151 and once over the shoulder of an umpire at the beginning of the ninth, when Juan Soto is late to get on the field – rumor has it he was in the bathroom – and Gabe Kapler is arguing for a clock violation. He doesn’t get the call, but he does talk to the plate ump long enough for me to pick out Miller’s pink hat on the arcade. I very much with I’d worn my own pink hat, but I’m trying to wear a different cap every day and I used that up a couple of weeks ago. Better luck next time.

• 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 strange to me to be doing something with Quinne that’s my idea. In our nearly fifteen years as friends, nearly everything we’ve done has come as a result of her relentless and irresistible urge to Do Stuff and my uncontrollable compulsion to Say Yes to Quinne. Because of her, I’ve been on two cruises, I own a terrycloth bathrobe, a Santoku knife and a Salvador Dali print, I have lied to a stranger about being a marine biologist, and I have been involved in a fake engagement. There is also a universe very nearly the same as ours in which I never met Quinne and thus never started writing this blog; she is the only person still alive whose expectations of me mattered enough to play a part in making it happen. She doesn’t care about baseball, but her boyfriend’s daughter, who joins us later in the game, has a lot of good questions, almost all of which I know the answers to (the only one I fail on is “What exactly are tenterhooks?” although to be fair I did identify ‘tender hooks’ as incorrect).

You have to be very, very careful with Quinne, because if you make an offhand joke, there is about a ninety-five percent chance that the next thing you know you will find yourself complicit in planning the best place to fake your heart attack, or getting back in line so Quinne can have her picture taken with the mascot but this time with her arms tucked up in her shirt so she looks like a cartoon. As Shriekback said, “every shout becomes a ziggurat/and every prayer becomes a citadel or car-park.” Tonight, only fast footwork on my part allows me to avoid making a credible attempt to steal a truck or allowing Ken to throw me off the arcade wall, and the only reason I don’t write a bespoke Mad Lib is that Quinne doesn’t have any paper. In some ways, keeping up with Quinne is like being Gromit laying track in front of the speeding train, but that might just be my relationship with her.

It is possible to feel like there is a guiding hand somewhere that is constructing a narrative in which the struggling Giants find their groove and become a team of destiny. It’s especially tempting to look at it as a sequel to 2021, in which – you may recall – a patched-together team of veterans and unknowns came off the first pandemic year to win more games than any other team in Giants history. Yes, with the season not even half-over, entertaining it is a folly of the grandest sort but we are enjoined by Ted Lasso and Journey to Believe and to Not Stop Believin’. After tonight’s game and the last two weeks, what else can we do? I remember in the middle of the ’21 season, when nearly everyone was saying the Giants couldn’t possibly maintain their pace against the loaded Dodgers and the extremely expensive Padres, coming to the conclusion that maybe they were what their record said they were. it made 2021 – a very difficult year for a lot of people – marginally more tolerable.

There comes a point in the ninth inning when I and everyone around me starts to feel like something unstoppable is developing. We’re down 4-2, but it seems our faith is doubles with each batter. I have to say that while I think that the extra runner on second base in extra innings is an ugly piece of graffiti on the elegant structure that is baseball, it has been working out well for the Giants. I hate it and would applaud its demise, but the Giants have been winning some games behind it. In the aftermath of today’s game, I got involved in a brief discussion with a guy who felt the same way. “I want to go to eighteen-inning games,” I said; “I want to be here till two in the morning.” He agreed, and we bumped fists, but we were also willing to take this win. Subtract that runner and we probably still take the game, but Yaz is probably happy about the extra RBI.

The ninth and tenth innings, taken together, are a thing of beauty: a lot of tactical walks, bunting, pitching changes, good baserunning, and a total of five runs scored (although we only needed three, we count all the RBIs now), with the winner coming on a three-run splash hit that leaves us all delirious; there is very little in this world more pure than high-fiving strangers after an unlikely win. Every pitch ratchets up the tension and the excitement, until nobody needs the scoreboard to tell us to GET LOUD. We are loud and can’t get much louder; the magic of a tying inning and then a winning one makes everything organic, spontaneous, self-sustaining. I think this is the first extra-inning game I’ve been to this year, and it’s a perfect one.

We’ve stopped booing Manny Machado now, which is nice, but now we’re booing Fernando Tatís Jr., which is not – a guy behind me says he’s booing Tatis because he’s so good, but he has, at least, the good grace to look like he knows that’s stupid while he’s saying it.

Bonus Baseball Fact: Fernando Tatís Sr. is the only MLB player ever to hit two grand slams in one inning. He did it against the Dodgers. Junior has a much better chance to end up in the Hall of Fame, but I bet even if he does this will still come up at Tatís family holiday dinners.

• 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

Of all the Cubs fans who have come with me this year, I think Pheast is the one who deserves a win the most, but he’s the only one who doesn’t get it; what he gets instead is pretty rough treatment at the hands – or the bats – of the Giants, who wake up as they have occasionally this year and deal out a thorough shellacking. After a sweep in Colorado comprised of one 10-4 beatdown and two improbable and astonishing come-from-behind wins, the Giants have come back to SF with light hearts and high hopes, but the Cubs took care of that quickly, winning the first two games pretty handily. Today, the Giants play a game that makes you think they should be winning the World Series. The final score is 13-3, and it’s not as close as it sounds.

Pheast also gets a trucker hat, the last Pride weekend giveaway. Generously, he sells his hat for far below market value to a Giants fan who didn’t get one at the gate. Pheast is wearing his Cubs pride, with a hat and a jersey, which is good to see – I take a particular delight in being able to welcome fans of the visiting teams; it makes me feel like I’m part of a sister city program or something. Somewhat surprisingly, he knows his stuff. I don’t know why I find that surprising, except that most people who come to the games with me have some family history that makes them want to see a particular team rather than a keen interest in their current fortunes. Pheast, on the other hand, doesn’t approve of David Ross, the Cubs’ manager. It takes a real fan to have legitimate criticisms of a manager – most people just grumble about generalities, but Pheast could make a case. He’s not all that happy about Nick Madrigal either, which is another sign of someone who knows stuff. Madrigal has played well the last couple of days, but Pheast isn’t swayed. He knows the game, the history, and what’s going on right now, which puts him at least one up on me.

He hasn’t been to this ballpark before, in spite of having been in the Bay Area for a while, so I get to give the full tour before the game. It’s the usual, from around the 415, up across the left field attractions, then up to the third deck and back down, then around to 152. Pheast isn’t a big talker, but not because he isn’t interested; he just seems like a self-contained guy. (I don’t know why, but it took me nearly a week to get this post up. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to say about him, but none of it seems to fold together into a coherent narrative. I could write twenty bullet points about him, but it would just be a random list of facts. What I remember most is quiet conversation and introspection).

The hitting, of course, seems like it’s going to be the story of the day. I was going to say that it’s not every day you see the bats really exploding like this, but given the last two weeks, during which the Giants have scored ten or more runs in four different games and have won ten of twelve, including a six-game road win streak with two series sweeps, it seems like maybe that’s just the way things are now. So, yes, the hitting was spectacular, but the real surprise is the announcement, at the top of the ninth, that Brandon Crawford will now be pitching for the Giants. The only reason that this isn’t an absolutely stunning bolt from the heavens is that I still remember a similar announcement being made about Pablo Sandoval in May of 2019. I remember at the time thinking “Wait…what? That’s not right, is it?” It was, though, and because it was, I am psychically prepared to see Brandon Crawford, who has started as a shortstop in more than 1600 games, step up and throw. It’s not as weird as it was to see Sandoval pitch, but it’s still one of those very rare and very precious moments when everyone in the park is delighted, except for maybe the people in the bathroom who didn’t hear about it. Position players pretty much only pitch when one team has a huge and insurmountable lead, which means somebody is way behind and probably not happy about it, but when it happens, every player on both teams is up at the rail in the dugout watching and laughing. If you ever want to see fifty professional ballplayers having the most fun they’ve had since they were in little league, find and watch the Giants/Braves game from May 16, 2022, when Luis Gonzalez and Albert Pujols pitched the last couple of innings. The Braves won it 15-6, but every single player on both teams walked away feeling like they’d just had a vacation day.

For the record, Crawford kind of half-asses the first few pitches, walking the first batter and giving up a hit before getting three quick outs, preserving the 13-3 victory that would be the first of seven consecutive wins. Way to be the spark plug, Craw.

• 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

Jess Jess is not the queerest person I have ever taken to a baseball game, but she is probably the proudest, if you measure by rainbows per square inch. We’re not even on the BART train into SF before she gets the first compliment on her outfit; it will not be the last. The tally at the end of the day is nine, although one of them carries greater weight because it comes from a photographer who promises that she will be featured in a thing (photoshoot, spread, article, blog post? we do not exactly know) in the San Francisco Bay Times. JJ, the journalist, gives Jess Jess a business card. I have to get a business card. Jess might not have been the proudest (as measured by rainbows per square inch) person in the ballpark, but if she wasn’t, I didn’t see who was. Unfortunately, although the woman from the SF Bay Times took a lot of pictures of Jess Jess’s outfit, I did not, so you’re mostly going to have to imagine it until you read her piece.

To add to Jess Jess’s fabulousness, there’s a Pride-themed jersey giveaway at the gate. On top of the Latino heritage jersey from last week, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. Special event giveaways over the last couple of years have been, if no less generous or frequent, not quite so inventive or creative as in previous years. Whither the Hunter Pence scooters, the Death Star baseballs, the Bochy-on-the-Iron-Thrones? The last couple of years – and I admit that the pandemic has been hard on all of us – have been mostly T-shirts with different colored versions of the Giants logo. The tide, though, may have turned with these jerseys. I can hope.

The jersey is the full-spectrum pride model, with eleven colors instead of the standard ROYGBIV rainbow, and it’s a handsome item; about twenty thousand people are wearing them, which makes for a good-looking crowd, except for one guy in a Dodger hat declaiming that you’re not going to catch him wearing one. To be fair to him – although I don’t want to – he does say “First of all, it’s a Giants jersey.” We pass out of hearing range before he can get to second of all, but I doubt it was going to redeem him. I mean, first of all, he was wearing a Dodger hat. As with last week’s jersey, the number on the back is 23, which confirms my suspicion that it refers to the year, and not to players who wore the number. A lot of great Latin players wore #23, but I can’t think of any queer 23s.

Ahead of the seventh-inning stretch, we step over to the little kids’ park, where my friend Mike, anchoring the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band with his tuba, will be playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. I haven’t seen Mike in probably twenty-five years, I think – he used to shop at Comic Relief when I worked there in the mid-90s, but we have been Facebook friends for a long time; he invited me to carry a banner with them today if they needed banner-carriers, but it turns out they didn’t. Our time together is brief, as he has to get away immediately after the show, but with luck he’ll come to a game with me a little later in the season and I’ll have more to say about him then.

I took this bad picture deliberately, because I think his beat-up tuba is more interesting-looking than I am.

Another delight of the game is Brian, who lives in Southern California but comes north a lot; his cannabis-related business – we don’t get too deep into that, but he has my number now and I might hear more about it someday – lets him drive all over, he says, with his dog. He is, in fact, on his second dog and third car. He is having an absolute blast at the game, having been given, among other things, a pack of baseball cards, a pin, and access to a season-ticket holder’s discount. Brian, like many people in 152 today, is a Cubs fan, and he and some of the others – including a couple who work as ushers at Wrigley Field (and have worn their work uniforms) – agree with last night’s crowd that White Sox fans are the worst, adding to my fund of information that if you Google baseball fan fights all the top results will feature White Sox fans. I will canvass the crowd tomorrow, but I honestly can’t wait till next year when we get White Sox fans and I get to ask them what they think of Cubs people. I could also go to the Oakland Coliseum on July 1 or 2 and ask the White Sox fans there what they think. I can choose between Military Appreciation Day and Pit Viper Sunglasses Giveaway Day. I’ll keep you posted.

• 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

The statue of Juan Marichal, at the O’Doul Gate, is always a busy place before a game, but it’s not nearly as busy as the main gate at Willie Mays Plaza. It’s where I usually direct people when we’re looking to met before the game, especially if we haven’t met before. Today there’s a guy there who asks me, very politely, if I need him to move his duffel bag, which I don’t. He is clearly not taking that thing into the park, and it looks like it has a significant portion of his possessions in it, and I have no need to roust a man who seems down on his luck. He asks, again very politely, if I might be able to spare some money for food, and I look in my wallet, but there’s empty space where I thought I’d had a $20, and I have to say no. He says “Well, at least you looked,” and I’m about to offer to buy him a hot dog using a credit card when he launches into a monologue that lasts a solid five minutes without a break, covers his journey here from St. Louis, touches on his high school golfing career (including a lengthy description of a match that lost him a scholarship), veers into a digression on the Freemasons, the Army and organized religion, features prominently the sentence “I’m not very intelligent that way – I’m intelligent the other way” and ends with “Wait a minute – are you related to Whitey Herzog?” I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Scoby, my guest for the evening, shows up at just that moment. Scoby’s enthusiasm for being there, though, is so genuine and bright that it’s impossible not to lean toward relieved, or at least delighted to have the next chapter of the evening be so happy.

Scoby (I find out later in the evening that Scoby stands for symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast) has been to the ballpark before, but not for a while and the last time she was here did not get a tour; her first need once we’re in the park is for some gluten free food, which is readily available at the Garden under the scoreboard. I don’t usually spend a lot of time in the Garden – it is, it seems to me, the windiest place in the park, and being here, even on the warmest of days, always makes me sing “the wind goes right through you/it’s no place for the old” in my head. I could safely have sung it out loud and given Scoby a chance to sing, too – something she warns people about in her profile on the social media site where I met her (she also mentions there that she hosts cuddle parties, and when I ask her what she does for a living, she redirects me to cuddle parties, saying “I prefer to maintain an air of mystery.”) Gluten-free flatbread pizza achieved, we take the quick tour – slide, mini-park, third deck views, Lego statues, trophies, water fountain – and head toward 152 on schedule for the first pitch, but get delayed when she spots a charity her parents do work for in a prime spot on the Promenade. Canine Companions for Independence has a dozen delightfully good dogs at the park, out meeting the people. We stop to say hello to some folks who know her parents and then head off to the arcade, where we arrive shortly after the game start. Fortunately nothing has happened yet.

Something happens almost immediately, though, a play so weird that both the radio and TV announcers are baffled about what is going on, and Kruk and Kuip say they’ve never even seen anything like it. I’m not sure I could explain it even if I didn’t have anything else to talk about, but it somehow involves Nick Madrigal of the Cubs stealing second on the fourth ball of a walk and being thrown out, at which point the Giants appeal the out call, win the appeal, and then immediately throw out Seiya Suzuki trying to steal the same base to end the inning. In addition to the thing being bizarre in the first place, they don’t show any replays on the big screen. It’s confusing to me – I won’t figure it out until I’ve watched it four times at home – and must be even more so to Scoby, who, when I asked her earlier what she knew about the game, said “A guy hits the ball and then runs around the bases,” which is absolutely correct but doesn’t give you a lot of runway for understanding whatever the hell this business is.

The rest of the game is much less opaque, and very exciting in its way. There’s not a lot of scoring – a Giants run in the third, three Cubs runs in an unfortunate seventh where DeSclefani, the Giants starter, gets taken out either two batters too late or three batters too early, depending on how you look at things. The Giants pick up a run in the bottom of the seventh, but that’s it, in spite of some credible threats in the eighth and ninth. At this point, most of the fun in the game is provided by a family in front of us – it appears the women are Cubs fans and the men are Giants fans – who have a battle of rally caps going on. Unfortunately for both the Giants and the rule of law, it looks like the Cubs rally caps carry the day even though they put theirs on in the seventh inning; it’s a situation that I feel makes mock of the rules of rally cappery (which are nebulous, but about which I have strong opinions. Of course). It’s all good-natured, as is the custom in 152, but the Giants come up short.

We end up talking a little to the matriarch of the family, Shea, and I explain that I just can’t find it in my heart to be too upset about the Cubs winning – they’re not a team I feel like I can drum up any hate for. She has some harsh words about White Sox fans, who she says “wear jorts” and “are like Raiders fans.” There’s more, but I feel like that’s enough. At about this time, Scoby starts singing, regaling me with a selection about hot water from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” a TV show I have not invested a lot of time in. She does make it sound appealing. The responsibility is mine – I asked her what she was passionate about, and it turns out that it’s musical theatre. I have some background there myself, but mostly as an observer. It turns out it’s singing time anyway – we’re behind in the eighth, and the whole stadium belts out “Don’t Stop Believin’.” We have been given permission to believe again.

• 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

The game gets away from the Giants early, and it gets far enough away that they never really look like catching up, which on the one hand is not good for the Giants – they briefly had their heads above water after a solid May, but today’s 7-3 loss puts them under .500 again. On the other hand, though, it frees me up to give a good tour. With a six-run deficit at the end of three innings, I feel like I can leave my seat, and if it looks like there’s a real comeback brewing, I can get back in time to see where it goes.

The crowd coming into the park today is stupendous. The line for the Willie Mays Gate doubles and triples all the way down Third Street to the O’Doul Bridge and back, and back again, snaking up and down the block in a surprisingly orderly fashion given that the line isn’t regulated or marked out in any way, and the Marina and O’Doul Gates aren’t even open yet. Maybe that’s why the lines are shorter there – I briefly worry that we might not get our giveaway Gigantes jerseys when we get in, but we do, and in the right sizes. We stop in to say hi to Kenny at the Giants bullpen, take a quick look at the pitching mound – long enough for Tom to decide he doesn’t want to see how fast he can’t pitch (“It would probably be more convenient for the ball to take an Uber past the radar gun,” says he) – and then head up and around the Promenade to look at all the usual suspects – the organ and organist, the slide, the aquarium, the miniature park, the tragic blank space where the brisket stand should be, and the trophies and rings, and then to 152 to show the flag for a couple of innings before we eat and essay the third deck.

It’s a very busy day at the park and in my section. The attendance is listed at 35,571, and it feels like it. It’s a gloriously packed house, especially compared to the anemic crowds for most of the season so far; I doubt it’s the Orioles and it’s probably only partly due to the lovely Sunday weather; I’m going to guess it has more to do with the celebration of Latino players and the Giants’ history with them, and the free – and exceedingly handsome – jersey, a slinky black number with ‘Gigantes’ on the front and a 23 on the back. Felipe Alou, Tito Fuentes and Jose Uribe wore #23 for the Giants, so I hope that had something to do with the choice on this Gigantes day, but it is also possible that it’s because of the year we’re currently in.

Pretty much every time I bring someone to the ballpark, I get a question I don’t know the answer to. Today Tom wants to know if the Orioles mascot has a name, like Lou Seal or Mr. Met. Tom’s guesses – ‘Chico’ and ‘Pepe’ – don’t seem to ring true, and I suspect he is being influenced by the Latin flavor of the day. We have to go to Google to help out, and discover that it does not, in fact, have a name to call its own, and is known only as The Oriole Bird. Once we find that out, and that the Oriole is the state bird of Maryland, he offers up ‘Big O’ and honestly I can’t imagine why that isn’t The Oriole Bird’s name. It makes me remember how, for a good twelve years, people around here were trying to come up with a nickname for Barry Bonds that would match his stature – a Yankee Clipper, a Hammerin’ Hank, even a Charlie Hustle – but nothing ever stuck. Maybe there was a Big O just sitting there waiting for us to stick it on Bonds, and nobody ever found it.

Model railroading is Tom’s baseball, although as far as I know, he doesn’t pester people relentlessly to enjoy it with him. I’ve known him for almost forty years now, and while I can say that while his mid-1980s predictions for his future never included actual details about model railroading, they carried the dire potential for it within their basic structure. I suspect there is a genetic component to this part of his destiny. He always said he saw a life of quiet desperation laid out in front of him, and most of what he said was going to happen has happened, but in the best possible way. Instead of desperation, he ended up with a placid contentment, the kind where managing the new carpeting in two computer labs at once is a crisis, and figuring out how to build a one-square-foot model of the Capitol Bridge is the way you recover from it. We talk about Ted Lasso, as I seem to with everyone, and I realize that while these days I aspire to the compassion and kindness that Ted displays, when it comes to the trajectories of our lives, it seems like I am the Beard to his Lasso. Metaphorically speaking, of the two of us, I am the one who is going to show up in a random kitchen wearing a red thong.

I have a lot of questions about model railroading, which is good because the baseball that is going on is, while not boring, at least not very satisfying from a Giants fan’s point of view. Do model railroaders mostly do historical stuff, or do they occasionally indulge in flights of fancy? (Rarely, but there is one guy who does goofy stuff.) I just finished reading On the Beach on the train over, and I am in a post-apocalyptic mood and want to see a tableau with a forlorn, wrecked train that’s gone off the tracks and represents the tragedy of humanity’s ambitions come adrift, but it sounds like I might have to make it myself. Do model railroaders ever network with other kinds of model craftspeople? (Not really, although his tone suggests he finds that regrettable.) There are a few ballparks with train lines integrated into the design or baked into the history of the place, and I don’t know if there are people who build model ballparks, but there should be. Are there any major schisms in the world of model railroading that create rival factions? (Yes, his own club suffered a fractious split when the time came to make a choice between digital command control and direct control. What happened to the guys who stuck with direct control and seceded from the club? We don’t know, they just kind of faded away.) Like the dinosaurs they are (my words, not Tom’s). This is the first time I’ve ever heard of digital command control vs direct control, but picking DCC (we call it DCC for short) makes sense to me. If you want to know the difference or why there would be a fight over it, leave a message in the comments and I’ll see if I can get Tom to explain it later.

We appear on TV twice, once in the background when the camera is on the agonies of a player who got hit on the wrist by a pitch, and once when a foul ball crosses our airspace twice – once on the way out of the park and once on the way back in, when it rebounds off the rail. on neither arc is it within my reach, and it bounces off another guy and falls into the field club section below us. So close.

Today’s baseball fact: Of the five men in Wilmer Flores’ family, four are named Wilmer.

I think I am as cold as I have ever been at a baseball game. I am shivering, my fingers aren’t taking reliable notes, and I don’t have anyone with me to cuddle up to or at least distract me. If I were the kind of person who left ballgames early, I think I might leave this one. In my season ticket career, I have only left two games before the last out, and both of those were extra-innings games that went so late that I had to leave to catch BART or I would have spent the night on the streets in SF. Still, I’m glad I came, not least because tonight Lamonte Wade Jr. put the 100th Splash Hit into the Cove, and although I am skeptical of the import of this record, I wouldn’t want to have missed it. It gives me license, in some ways, to skip tomorrow’s game, for which I also don’t have a date.

Fortunately, my friend Daizy happens to be at the game, and her enthusiasm is delightful, especially since she’s not well-versed in the intricacies of baseball. She occasionally claps at great Orioles plays – excusable, given that their colors are the same as the Giants’, black and orange. She also believes, at one point, that the the umpire has hustled out to pick up a slow infield roller and throw out the Orioles leadoff batter at first. It was, obviously, the catcher, but I don’t correct her; she’s so happy about it that it seems churlish to spoil it for her.

The first inning is uneventful until the splash hit, which goes to a guy called Mark the Shark instead of McCovey Cove Dave, who was not quite in the right spot. If Mark’s kayak had been two feet forward and to his left, he would have taken it directly on the bow. It makes me wonder – has any kayaker been hit by a ball? It seems like, with a hundred-fifty plus fair balls in the Cove, that must have happened. Shortly afterward, Mark the Shark is kayaking away as fast as his little fins can carry him, presumably to secure that ball somewhere. After the game, we find out that he offered the ball to Wade Jr in exchange for a signed bat, two signed balls, and a photo, even later, we find out that Wade’s plan for the ball is to give it to his mom, and I don’t think you can offer any argument that anything else should happen to it. As a denizen of the arcade, I am entitled to a T-shirt commemorating the event, and because she was sitting next to me when the ushers came to hand out the vouchers, Daizy gets one too, even though her ticket was in 324 and she was in the bathroom at the time (she gets a great deal of joy out of making Splash jokes based on that situation).

Daizy and I head over to the @cafe (otherwise known as Peet’s) to pick up or T-shirts; they’ve blocked out a line maze that would accommodate fifty people, but it’sa Friday night game and attendance is low, so we don’t have to wait at all. All they have is extra-larges, which is fine by me. By the time we get back to our seats, all the kayakers are back, waiting for the next one. An Orioles fan in the row ahead of us keeps yelling for one of them to hit #101; I don’t have the heart to tell him. As the Orioles finish up a 3-2 win, he starts to become a little bit of a jerk about it, crowing to random Giants fans as they pass on their way out, but I let it go. it’s too cold to make a fuss.

Daizy leaves by the top of the ninth, after huddling under cover on the Promenade for a while, but I stay to the end. I forget to take a selfie with her, but I meet her on the train on the way out and rectify the error. All in all, I’m glad I came to this one, but I’m also happy to be granting myself permission to stay home tomorrow, and looking forward to staying warm.

• 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

Back in 2007, a friend and I had bought tickets to a Giants game; he wanted to go to Italian Heritage Night and we got our tickets well in advance – in March, in fact. The tickets were for August 7th. on August 6th, my friend called me to tell me he couldn’t get out of jury duty and wasn’t going tomake the game. I scrambled to find someone to take the ticket; I started with friends who liked baseball, ran through those pretty quickly, and then started offering the seat to co-workers. Everyone who might have wanted to go either already had tickets or couldn’t make it, and I ended up giving it to someone who was about thirtieth on my list – someone I would never have expected to come to game with me. In the event, that turned out to be the day that Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run and broke the all-time home run record. Baseball people will high-five everyone within reach for a run-of-the-mill RBI, so you can imagine what it was like. We were jumping up and down, embracing strangers, acting like the war was over and the boys were coming home, and as I shared the moment with a friend who had never bee to a major league sporting event in his life and an ex-girlfriend, I said” You can come to as many games as you want, but I can’t guarantee any of them will be this exciting.” So I understood the emotions of the guy behind me today when he was telling the story of how he was flirting with a dude at a party in October of 2010 and everyone went nuts. Utter pandemonium, but the dude was not a sports person, didn’t even know the World Series was still going on, and had to wonder “Why are all these guys hugging me?”

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with enough stuff to make this blog interesting, although I hope that even the stuff that isn’t obviously fascinating or sufficiently basebally is funny or clever or at least well-written enough to hold someone’s attention for whatever number of words I put down. I’m sure there is a way to check that, but I am really underusing all the options that WordPress offers. I need a manager.* Usually, during a game, I usually send myself little notes to remind me later what I thought was notable or interesting when it was happening. Sometimes these things are obvious choices for the title of the post (mostly i’m just impressed that they own two cars); some seem they would be but don’t make the cut (capris are for ladies), and some are completely baffling by the time I get home (labels since 2000!). Tonight I wrote myself three notes: clouds like a lava lamp, parental mistakes, and strikes and fouls. None of those seems really compelling

Mike is wearing Pittsburgh gear, as he did last year. He’s a California boy, but his sports loyalties somehow like in points east. At least they don’t lie south. Last year, when I brought him to a Pirates game, he managed to get a ball in the 415 while we were watching a reliever warm up, and I also gave his parents the tickets for one of the games I couldn’t go to. We end up talking a lot about parents and their failings. Lest you think the primary topic was how badly our parents failed us, we were actually really saying, mostly, that their worries about having done a bad job were pretty much all wrong. Neither of us is in jail or addicted, and Mike at least is not a feckless layabout with no ambitions. He has children of his own, and he worries about failing them. I don’ t think he has, but he still worries a little. I’m glad I only have nieces – it takes one more source of anxiety off the table (for me, at least; maybe not for my sister and her husband, who are great parents).

It is not a great day for the Giants; they score first with some smart small ball, but give up eight runs between the third and the sixth innings and a ninth in the ninth. Our men manage four total, but it only serves to give us occasional false hope, Well, me. Mike is delighted with the outcome, but he is gentleman enough not to crow about it to the person who gave him a free ticket. He could, though – we do not discriminate in 152, and as long as you’re not a dick about it – we apologize for the fruity language – you can cheer your team on as lustily as you like and suffer no consequences. Mike is not a dick about it, and in fact his Steelers jersey invites plenty of friendly hellos from passersby, wherever we are in the park. I imagine someone hates Steelers fans, but they’re not here.

Conversation with Mike is wide-ranging and lively. It’s rare, I think, to make a new, good, male friend at my age, and having met him just before the pandemic started and at a time when some others were fading away, I appreciate him all the more. The conversation is, in fact, so engaging that we never leave our seats, and most of what we do is talk about Ted Lasso and quote each other the funny parts, which, of course, takes up a LOT of time. People come by to visit at a rate and in numbers that make me feel really good about being a fixture here.

Important note: this post is short on photos for the same reasons that I didn’t send myself a lot of notes. I was having too much fun with my friend.

* Would you like to be my manager? I can pay you in baseball tickets.

Sometimes you can tell that it’s a kid’s first game. Some of them are a couple of weeks old, and some of them are in their late twenties. Sometimes you can tell because the kid is carrying a big sign that says “IT’S MY FIRST GIANTS GAME!” That’s the case with John, whose happiness at being in the ballpark takes up as much space as he does. Matt and Jennifer have brought him from Modesto to see the Pirates for his first game. I don’t know if he likes pirates – I forgot to ask, but I do know he likes Skittles, having eaten nearly a whole bag on the way to the park. I guess he’s got an average kid sweet tooth, because he’s audibly jonesing for some ice cream, even though it’s a little cold for that. He’s going to end up with hot chocolate, at least.

The.re’s another kid at home, but tonight is John’s night; he and his sign make it onto the big screen in the park at least twice – once before they got to their seats and once when after. I would have been in the shot as well, but I made the mistake of letting Ray know to direct a cameraman toward John’s sign when I was leaving to get food and not when I was on the way back. Ray pretends to be old and creaky, but he gets things done fast. I didn’t even know there was a cameraman nearby, but by the time I get back from a very short trip to the hot dog stand, he’d been and gone.

It’s a very different game from last night’s – a home run for the Pirates in the bottom of the first and a Giants run to tie it in the bottom start us off, and after that, there’s one more Pirates run in the fifth, but the rest of it is a tight pitcher’s game for the other seven innings. It’s not one of those games that feels out of reach, but the Giants also never really get rolling; we end up putting on our rally caps in the ninth inning, to no avail. The game ends in a 2-1 Pirates win.

A tight game without much scoring makes for a curious mix of tense and…well, not exactly boring, but there’s a lot of time to talk about stuff that’s not this specific game. For example, it’s Pixar Night, with Elemental, a new movie, taking center stage. Matt has worked in the industry and knows some of the Pixar people, but even that takes a back seat to kid talk. John, at seven, is the biggest kid on his little league team, and I get to see pictures of him looking as professional as a seven-year-old can in his catcher’s gear; his favorite Giant is Blake Sabol, who also wears glasses behind the plate. I also get to show off a very recent picture of my niece holding the two awards she won today in New York – All-League and MVP, as I was informed by my sister. I figure MVP means she was the star of her team, but All-League, while it sounds impressive, is kind of vague and not super-informative. I feel like I should have heard this news directly from my niece, but I’m guessing she was too busy having champagne sprayed all over her to text. I assume I will hear about it at Christmas.

In other news, the hour or so immediately before the game started was chaos, the worst part being that Eric, my guest for the game, texted thirty minutes before first pitch to say a medical issue was going to keep him away; tonight was thus my second solo game in a row, and I think maybe my third solo game since 2017. Eric’s giant blocks of text were, unsurprisingly given his nature, very heavy one “I apologize for not making it to the game and please forgive me and I will pay you for the ticket that I’m not using” and very light on “There is a possibility that I could perish today.” Fortunately, it looks like he’s going to be okay. He reads the blog sometimes, so please leave a comment encouraging him to get batter and take care of himself. I got lucky this time and had Jennifer and Matt and John to keep me company, but a continued lack of Eric could put a real crimp in the season.

The other thing that complicated the hour before the game was that I spent quite a long time talking to a guy who does a San Francisco-centric podcast and might invite me to be a guest on it. I’ve invited him to be a guest at the park, as I have McCovey Cove Dave and FP Santangelo. Hopefully one day soon all this hucksterism is going to start paying off. Until then, if you want to listen to an apparently very well-thought of SF-centric podcast about things that are not me, you should make this one part of your weekly routine so that when I’m on it, you’ll already be a devoted fan.

• 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