81 Dates

Pretty much everybody who gets involved in a conversation with me on the arcade asks, at some point, if I get a lot of foul balls; I do not. In some ways, this is tragic, because when I picked the seats, I hoped I would – I had dreams of a collection of carefully labeled balls in UV-resistant boxes – but it turns out that it is even harder to get a ball to my section than it is to hit one over the wall in fair territory (there have been 47 home runs into the Cove since 2017, as opposed to seven catchable balls in 152 since I took office). On the other hand, since I spend most of my time looking to my immediate right, where whoever I have taken to the game is sitting, statistically I am more likely to catch a ball with my face than my glove. If I were really sitting in the foul ball Mecca I was hoping for, I would have to pay much, much closer attention than I do, and my experience would suffer for it. In the first year, I wore my glove every day and told every visitor to the section that it was my sworn duty to protect them all from foul balls. Now I still have my glove with me, but it mostly stays in my bag. I have honestly abdicated my responsibilities. Having come very close to taking a batted ball in the face once when I was playing pitch-and-catch with some friends a few years ago, I’m pretty sure that my reflexes will put my hands in front of my face if I see a ball coming, but I am also perfectly happy to hear, as I did today, a dad tell his kids “If a ball comes this way, jump in front of me with your glove.”

Speaking of that dad and those kids, I don’t think I’ve ever had that big a group in my section that was as well-behaved as these guys. There were four dads (actually, I think two or three dads and what I think were maybe one or two honorary uncles) and six kids, and I have to say, these kids were great. In my experience, if you get more than three or four kids out to a ballgame, at least one of them is going to be a pill of some stripe; there are a lot of ways for kids to be intolerable when you make them sit in one place in the sun for three hours, but these guys were the best bunch I’ve ever seen. Every one of them was some combination of inquisitive, attentive, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and cheerful. Over the course of two and a half hours, I didn’t hear one negative sound from the entire row – not one whine, not one mope, not one pout.

Today was my first solo trip to the park this year. I’m hustling all the time to get people to come out with me, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Last year the Giants started a program where season ticket holders can trade in unused tickets for credit that can be put toward other events, and I took advantage of it four or five times (which is how I ended up with all four Harry Potter-themed hats). Today I exchanged one but decided to come by myself. I think I had a vague feeling that, it being Memorial Day, I owed it to Uncle Kevin to come out. I have a complicated relationship with the US military these days – with the US in general, to be honest, as you may recall from my post about national anthems – so I was sort of expecting this Memorial Day to be a thoughtful, reflective one. It turned out there was a lot of baseball to think about instead, though – it was a good game to be solo at, with a lot of action in the early going, and plenty of excitement – triples, home runs, tragic baserunning, twenty-seven hits, eighteen runs, a spectacular three-pitch inning, a baffling and possibly imaginary pitch clock violation that left the radio and TV broadcast crews scratching their heads*, and an eventual 14-4 Giants win. When you add in the perfect weather, it couldn’t have been a better day, unless I’d had someone with me.

Speaking of perfect days, there was a fancy-people party with free hot dogs in Triples Alley. I bet now you wish you’d come. I got there after a lot of people had left, but before the staff had stopped putting out new hot dogs. I’m not going to lie; I wound up with more hot dogs in my possession at the end of the day than I ate during the party. There is a very real possibility that I will find out in the coming days if I can, in fact, get tired of eating one kind of food for several days in a row. It hasn’t happened yet, but then I haven’t tried it with hot dogs. I will let you know as the weeks wear on. In addition to the hot dogs, we happy few were allowed to get to our seats by walking along the warning track to gate in the right field stands. I never get tired of being on the field, even for the briefest of moments.

In addition, today was something of a triumph for me because I was able to answer a lot of questions that were not in my usual line, which is to say questions involving baseball facts that people want to know: “How many of those Splash Hits were Barry Bonds’?” “Does a batter get an RBI if he walks with the bases loaded?” “Who just scored a run?” (35, yes, and Bryce Johnson, respectively). It felt like I was demonstrating some of the knowledge that the kind of sports guy that my non-sports friends who think I am a sports guy think I can demonstrate.

*I have not mentioned yet my opinion on the pitch clock in particular and speeding up the game in general. That time may be coming, but I have a lot of vitriol to gather.

• 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

Rose arrives at the park having started the day with some yogurt, but not recently enough that we could wait to get food. I myself didn’t start with anything, so I’m ready to go too. “What is there to eat?” she asks, and I feel like the radio announcers telling the audience who’s in the field. From right to left, starting behind the scoreboard, crab sandwiches, clam chowder, shrimp bowls, tri-tip, barbecue, vegetarian sandwiches and flatbread pizza, and then getting back onto the promenade, ice cream, burgers, organic chicken, burritos and tacos, brisket, lumpia, poke bowls, different barbecue, porchetta sandwiches, cheesesteak sandwiches, complicated nachos, fancy hot dogs, and pizza. and sprinkled in there are a half dozen places with the ballpark standards – hot dogs, chicken tenders, garlic fries, simple nachos, and various Impossible meat items. She opts for brisket, which is both wise because it is the best food in the park but unlucky because it turns out that the Carvery, which appears to have had a curse placed on it sometime during the pandemic, is closed. This whole brisket imbroglio deserves its own post, and it will get one, but for now we pass the forlorn, blank-faced hole where the brisket was supposed to be and head to Rose’s second choice (tri-tip!), but are happily distracted by the Organic Coup, which has organic chicken sandwiches, tenders, and tater tots. The decision is made; I’m almost glad that we didn’t get brisket because Rose is so happy at the thought of tater tots. Luckily the lines are short, and we have tater tots and a sandwich in hand in a matter of moments. “Tater Tots, ” says Rose, “are my guilty pleasure,” and I think that given all the dangerous, forbidden pleasures this world has to offer, surely tater tots are among the most innocent.

I don’t think I’ve ever missed so much of the action in a game as I did today, but as I said to Rose today and have said many times in the last couple of years, I’m honestly not really here for the baseball qua baseball any more. I mean, yes, I love it, and I love seeing whatever crazy new thing happens every day on the field (in this case, a rookie’s first home run and a truly lovely comical inning-ending pickle in the fifth, but it has really been all about talking to the people I bring; about two-thirds of the time, I’m looking at the person to my right instead of the field. Today, though, we leave my seats in the middle of the second inning while the score is 1-0 Marlins, and by the time we get three-quarters of the way around to the 415, it’s 4-3 Giants.

The 415, a section behind the deepest part of the outfield fence, is a really interesting place to be but a terrible place to try and pay attention to a game – you’re more or less at field level but also pretty much as far away from home as you can be and still have that angle, so if there’s a close play at any of the corners, it’s just a two-dimensional melee, and if you look at the scoreboard to see the replay, you’re basically looking directly up a cliff face. Our time in the 415 is livened up immeasurably by 1) a guy mistaking Rose for someone who caught a home run ball there last year (he says she was Rose’s exact twin) and 2) a very friendly woman named Wren who is 2a) maybe a little bit drunk and 2b) maybe hitting on Rose. At first I thought she was maybe under the impression that we were a couple and hitting on both of us, but it becomes apparent almost immediately that whatever her plans are for the near future, I am definitely not part of them. When I ask Rose to take a picture with me, we invite Wren to participate, but she declines in a way that makes it clear that she is not interested in any activity involving me. She does, however, trade info with Rose, who isn’t sure what was going on there either, but assures me that she’ll keep me posted.

By the time we get out of the 415, the score is 6-4 Giants; I watch the game later on MLB.tv, and it turns out to have been very exciting. The Giants and Marlins each manage to push another run across in the last inning for a final score of 7-5, which we see from the 152 as the game winds up. A good result, and one of the nicest days yet at the park. Yesterday was freezing, but today the weather was what baseball weather is supposed to be. It was so nice, in fact, that Rose arrived with a ladybug in her hair that she brought from her garden. Usually, even the wind outside the park would dislodge a passenger like that, but not today.

• 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

Any trip anywhere with Michelle is going to be an exercise in figuring out what you’re going to eat and how you’re going to transport the leftovers afterward. One time she tried to take a bowl of soup into a Broadway musical but was not allowed to, and the only other time I’ve ever seen her so outraged was when a crazy person threw a rock at my car and cracked the windshield on the first day I had it. She wasn’t even that upset when someone stole the whole car. Anyway, the journey began today a half hour before first pitch, when she wanted a crab sandwich (which I knew exactly where to find thanks to Jess Jess) but decided the line was way too long (it definitely was). We passed on the crab sandwiches, but sitting in my seats, she started agitating for some food now to tide her over until we could get some food. I recommended waiting until the second inning, when the lines would die down, and she agreed, under protest. Shortly thereafter, I found some peanuts in my bag and offered them to her to keep her occupied, which was when I discovered yet another unsavory aspect of her character: she chews up roasted peanut shells. I said to her “You’re a monster,” and I just meant that chewing up peanut shells to suck the salt out was a deviant act that only a savage would perpetrate, but then I remembered the salt succubus from Star Trek that can take on the form of much more attractive creatures to lure in their prey.

The second nut-related malfeasance of the day occurred in the eighth inning (which also saw the Giants give up the only run of the game for either team). Michelle, who is usually a good girlfriend, went off to buy a sundae from the Ghirardelli stand, and came back with one containing almonds. I am very much in favor of almonds on their own, or in a very limited selection of candy bars, but I draw the line at sundaes. Because I am a great boyfriend, though, I accepted her occasional spoonsful of delicious sundae, which she had carefully curated, until I discovered not one, not two, but eleven pieces of almond concealed in a bolus of chocolate fudge and ice cream. She had gotten lazy and was no longer catering to my whims. She pointed out, cruelly, that I looked like I had broken teeth when I was showing her how many almonds I had found.

On the plus side, we saw this kid, who really went above and beyond in the outfit department. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, that represents Lou Seal, the Giants mascot. I feel like if my own personal nieces were inclined, they could come up with something as great as this, but unfortunately the older one is at college learning important stuff and the younger one is way better at playing baseball than she is at making a big deal about it. Still, I can look forward to the day when this kid is a professional mascot and my younger niece is a famous baseball player and my older niece is the hidden power behind the President of the United States.

On a different plus side, today was Lou Seal Splash Hits Counter Bobblehead Day at the park, which is a lot. For those of you who don’t know what that could possibly mean, there’s this wall at the ballpark which is so hard to hit baseballs over that it has only happened 99 times since the ballpark opened in 2000 (by which it is meant that it has only happened 99 times for Giants batters; we do not acknowledge the 59 times it has happened for non-Giants). So if you hit a ball over that wall, it’s called a Splash Hit, and there is also a guy named McCovey Cove Dave who kayaks in the Cove and picks up home runs – close to 50 of them at time of press. So today, the Giants gave away this bobblehead showing Lou Seal (remember the kid in the costume? Yes, that seal) sitting in a kayak with a manual counter that you can change as the numbers go up. The counter will go up to 999, which means that at the current pace it will be obsolete after the 2253 season, although it is possible that by then ocean levels will have risen to the point where any ball hit in the Park will be a Splash Hit. That, however, will be an issue for my nieces’ great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to rule on, since I am counting on that branch of the family to pass my Lou Seal Splash Hits Counter Bobblehead down as a treasured heirloom.

In conclusion, McCovey Cove Dave was on the arcade this afternoon, and he signed my bobblehead, and I invited him to come to a ballgame with me sometime when he isn’t in a kayak. Stay tuned!

• 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

So it turns out it was this kid’s birthday! There were some other birthdays, of varying validity, in the 152 today, but this kid’s was the most exciting. To be fair, his seat was actually in 151, but he spent some quality time with us early on. He was here for the national anthem and for the first inning or so, although we didn’t find out it was his 10th birthday till after the game, when he was posing with his sign in front of the fireworks show. More about the fireworks show later. I don’t know if it was his first game, but there were some indications that he hadn’t seen too much baseball. I have a nephew(ish) who’s about the same age, but he’s a New Yorker and he’s got a lot of baseball experience; I can’t imagine him having the same reaction to a routine popup (and again shortly thereafter to a called fourth ball), which was to shout “OH MY FUDGE!” in a way that sounded like he knew what was going on and objected to it. My mom. who was bearish on salty language, would probably have approved.

I forgot, going into the game, that it was Star Wars Day. If I had remembered in time, while I was selecting my hat for the day, I would have taken the Star Trek hat I got a few years ago on Star Trek Day. Partly because the hat I did wear – a luxurious SF Sea Lions cap – had a wonky brim that made me feel all night like I was listing to starboard, but mostly because the kind of people who love to dress up for Star Wars Day absolutely go bananas about that kind of open disrespect. I think of it as a conversation starter, for certain nonstandard values of conversation.

Antoinette loved that it was Star Wars Day even more than she loved that it was Fireworks Night. She told a little lightsaber-wielding girl about how she and her brother took up their own sabers and swore to defend the streets from evil when she was herself a little girl, and she regretted that she had not put her hair up in space buns. I told her I would like to have seen that, and maybe I will get a chance to, if she comes to the second Star Wars Day in September. Even if she doesn’t, though. she really got her money’s worth out of the Day, because around the end of the third inning, a pair of Mandalorians took up station behind my seats. They were definitely the most popular SRO transients I’ve ever had, with people asking to take pictures with them all game long. I myself took some:

When they first arrived, I took a couple without asking, but then Antoinette asked if she could have one with them, anticipating the rush.

You may be thinking that I am making some gender assumptions here, but they took off their helmets a couple of times, which I am given to understand is Not The Way. I called her on it the first time, and she started to look sheepish, but I assured her I was only joking and I was not, in fact, from the (I’m guessing) Mandalorian Helmet Police. I’m not going to show you the picture I took of her with her helmet off, just in case the Mandalorian Helmet Police are reading this blog. I will say, though, that both of them were very good-looking people when unhelmeted.

Eventually, they realized they didn’t have any photos of themselves at the park with their helmets on, so they asked me to take some, which I did. I like to think they recognized in me a natural authority in my position as Mayor of the section, and that I was the person most likely to be hiring mercenaries if the need arose.

Remember when I said there were other birthdays going on? This guy, for whatever reason – I didn’t ask him, and I couldn’t guess – bought this birthday sign for five dollars from someone in 101, right below us. Was it his birthday too? I don’t know, and neither did anyone else. When he’d taken a couple of pictures, he gave the sign back to whoever he bought it from. I guess he rented it, really.

I’ve gotten better at taking pictures, but no phone I’ve ever had has been equal to the task of capturing fireworks. I don’t know if it’s that fireworks just don’t seem impressive on a phone, or if it’s an Android vs. iPhone deal or what; I’d attribute it to the fog in San Francisco, but I’ve tried it in other cities with equally disappointing results. I want to do better , because my sister loves fireworks and I want to send her pictures of them (although I can’t get good shots of the fireworks themselves, one of my favorite pictures of her was taken when she was watching some). Anyway, I tried again tonight, and some combination of factors rendered my pictures truly terrifying. I got one that looks like a living evil brain squid with demonic eyes…

…one that looks like a different evil brain with demonic eyes but more of a nervous system attached…

…and one that just looks like a good old-fashioned mushroom cloud.

When I finally did get a halfway decent shot during the finale, I also captured this guy who had no interest in them at all and was leaving to beat the crowd:

Honestly, I should have taken a picture of Antoinette, who was enraptured. 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

There is a certain stage of drunkiness that people get to at baseball games, where people are allowed, within certain very broad parameters, to say whatever they want and are also given access to as much alcohol as they can pay for, which results in a level of artistic endeavour that you don’t see in a lot of other places. Years ago, I was at a Giants/Reds game when the bullpen mounds were still on the field. I was sitting about five rows back from the pitcher warming up, and a drunk guy a couple of rows behind me was waxing lyric about how much that pitcher sucked. Like a lot of poetry, it was both overwrought and laden with metaphor, and the theme the heckler had chosen was ‘personal hygiene.’ Specifically, he spent an inning and a half repeating the phrase “Your feet REEK!” with slight variations in the same hoarse voice and at the same volume, until I felt compelled to take action. What I did about it is a story for another time. Fortunately, these people often get restless and move on – whatever it was that drove them from the seats they paid for usually drives them from mine. That was the case with the woman yesterday who yelled at one point “Come on, let’s see a home run, right over our heads!” I don’t mind calls for homers, but 152 is about forty yards into foul ground. I’m mostly tolerant of drunk, but obnoxious and ill-informed is too much. Also annoying but much more quotable was the guy who, when things got tense in the late innings, came up with the bizarrely comprehensible “Shut it down! Shut it down like a bad Ferris Wheel!” which has the virtue of being good advice about Ferris wheels, but still utterly out of left field.

Lest you think the obnoxious drunks were the focus of the day, let me reassure you. It was a gorgeous day, blue skies and gentle breezes, and my guest was, in more than one literal way, one of my oldest friends. Gerry was a college friend of my dad’s and at one point the drummer in Dad’s jazz band. Since my dad died, we have gotten together to watch baseball and football games and occasionally just for lunch; this is the second time he’s joined me at the park, and this last year, I stopped referring to him as my dad’s friend and just started calling him mine. Gerry walks the very delicate line of always being curmudgeonly but never ill-tempered. We disagree on some things – notably tattoos and music these days – but agree on many more: politics, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, pitcher and batter clocks, and the proper way to perform the national anthem.

Sitting with him is an exercise in listening to stories, which is my second favorite thing to do with stories, Gerry was at the Marichal/Spahn game in 1962, the Greatest Game Ever Pitched; he played little league ball in Oakland in the forties, and grew up watching the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. I get to hear about facing “King” Leel of Leel’s Paper Stand when Gerry was batting for Peterson’s Hot Dogs, and we talk about my dad, who I never really thought to ask about his love of sports when he was alive. Dad really loved the 49ers, but I think of him much more as a Giants man, maybe because that’s where my own spirit lies. That’s where we really connected, anyway. Gerry and Joe, two of my dad’s best friends when I was a kid, were some of the strongest influences on my sense of humor; if you think I’m funny now, they probably had a lot to do with it.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures today. It happens, when the person I’m with is so engaging. However, I did bushwhack this couple – Dennis and Cara – while they were buying food on the Promenade. I couldn’t let them go by without remarking on her rockabilly League of Their Own outfit; it made me want to renew my commitment to wearing suits to the ballpark on occasion. I had so much fun in the Gotham Club with my orange tie that I’m thinking of pitching dress-up days to potential guests to spice up the invitation. Even though Dennis is not fancied up to the degree that his companion is, he is still looking exactly the way that he should.

It is a banner day for meeting people – on the train on the way in, I was accosted by a couple from Birmingham, England who were in town for a week. They were coming to the game and wanted some ballpark info, and I gave them about three times as much as they probably wanted (what they wanted to know was actually “Is this the right train?”). I knew I wasn’t going to be walking around enough to give a tour today, so I directed them to the aquarium and the Lego statues and the good food and the views and sent them on their way. We didn’t reconnect, but I hope they had a good time, and that they eventually make it to Paxton Gate, the Musée Mécanique, and 826 Valencia.

• 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

About once a week or so, there’s a play on the field that’s just absolutely incomprehensible to the people in the stands. At least, to me, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m the model for the person who should be able to figure things out. I know most of the rules and I’ve seen a lot of quirky plays, but I still end up baffled unsettlingly frequently when I’m at the park. One thing I just can’t figure out, though, is the balk, which is maddening because it’s pretty clearly defined in the rules, but deciding when one has happened seems to be a very subjective activity. So, in the top of the fourth, when Alex Cobb is called for a balk, I have no real answer when we’re watching him stalk around the infield yelling at umpires and Julie says “What’s happening?” This is mostly because there’s no announcement anywhere in the park when a balk is called; strikes, balls, outs, errors, launch angles, exit velocity – there is an enormous amount of information of varying usefulness available on the scoreboard, but one of the hardest things to recognize has no presence in all that data. You have to wait until the word balk percolates around the ballpark, starting with people who were sitting near enough to the field to hear it or have been listening to the radio. After the word ‘balk’ reaches the arcade – well after it happened and accompanied by no replay – I tell Julie that the balk is the opposite of Potter Stewart’s pornography: It’s easy to define, but you mostly don’t know it when you see it.

For the first time this year, and the second time ever, I’ve taken the ferry over from Jack London Square. It’s a nice trip – I ask Julie if she wants to watch Oakland disappear as we leave or San Francisco grow as we approach, and she chooses the latter, so we sit facing the bow. It’s a much more pleasant ride than BART – quieter, more scenic, and less…fragrant, and although it takes a little longer, that just means there’s more time to talk. Julie tells me that she has a Mustang in her garage that she and her sons built – a replica of the one from “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which I haven’t seen but understand is about cars – and when I ask her if she’s a car girl, she says no and then says a really car person thing about what kind of engine it has in it, which I think has liters and maybe a block? and definitely some numbers. I like hearing about sexy car stuff like that, but as is the case when I read about meals with tomatoes and wild onions, I think “That sounds great, but it’s probably not something I should get involved in.” I like being involved with the ferry, though – Oracle Park is really impressive when you approach from the seaward side.

Julie lives in Piedmont, where I guess there are some people who are famous and some people who are rich and, I would guess, some people who are both. I’m not a lot better at famous people than I am at car stuff, though, and I briefly worry that I might not be interesting enough for Julie, but we’ve known each other for about a year now and this is her second ballgame with me, so I guess I’m doing okay. At least I know some stuff about baseball, although whn she asks “Who’s our star this year?” I can only think of Thairo Estrada, which is the right answer, but it worries me that I can’t call any other name to mind offhand except for Casey Schmitt, who just got here and is pretty much on fire but doesn’t have enough history yet to be calling him our star. Then some other names pop into my head and I review, but decide for now that Thairo is as good an answer as any and better than most.

As a brief followup to yesterday’s paragraph about us booing Bryce Harper: a lot of us still are, but late in the game, we have mostly autopiloted that, and one guy passing behind us, when Harper’s name is announced, just says “Boooo,” in a conversational tone and not loud enough for anyone more than ten feet away to hear, which kind of cracks me up because it’s such a pro forma thing – “Oh, Harper? Right; boo! What are we having for dinner?”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are some guys – about fifteen of them – in 151, one township to the east, who are keeping up a steady stream of mostly drunk chatter that is so constant that it’s hard to tell who they’re rooting for or against, when both Taylor and then Tyler Rogers are pitching, they just keep yelling, as a group, “Rooooogeeeeeers…Rooooogeeeeeers…” in such a steady monotone that it’s hard to tell if they’re truing to distract them or cheer them on. They’re turning the Ks on the wall, though, and I figure they wouldn’t be allowed to do that if they were too pro-Phillies.

It’s a busy night in Section 152. So far this year there’s been a brisk trade in nobody sitting near me – most games I have one or two other people in my township, and even they come and go. It’s a popular place to stop in for a bit. Sometimes that’s great, and I get to welcome travellers from faroff lands, and sometimes it’s drunk people who are past the fun drunk stage and well into the obnoxious loud stage where they think they’re funny. I’ve done my time as an obnoxious loud (but not drunk) person who thinks he’s funny, so I am comfortable judging them. Tonight, though, it seems to be mostly people who actually bought tickets for these seats – two couples right on front of me and Julie. It’s hard to tell what the exact relationships are, but it seems like one couple has been together for awhile and one is maybe just starting out. It’s easy to eavesdrop on them, because they are not being quiet with their conversation, which is OK by me for now, because I am always looking for quotes for the title of the blog. Anyway, tonight’s foursome (three of whom came dressed for the weather) are a surprising nerdy bunch. I am used to being the nerdiest, least sports-oriented person in my section, but these four spend a lot of time talking about celebrity scandals, science-fiction TV shows, and the eating habits of the one who is filling the Seth Rogen slot in the group. The whole thing comes to a head when that guy says “When I was into Pokémon Go, I spent a lot of money on it,” and I have to say that although I don’t care about Pokémon Go, I’m glad those people are at the ballpark. I’ve always felt like I was more nerd-adjacent than pure nerd, but I’m glad my people are winning the cultural battle.

The Giants are winning too. They score twice early, suffer a (balk-assisted) surge that ties the game in the fourth, but then score two more behind some comical Keystone Kops fielding and hold on for a 4-3 win in spite of a last-minute homer by Kyle Schwarber. We’re briefly worried, but Camilo Doval does his job and we walk away from the Giants’ second win in a row.

• 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 so many questions – so many that all I can say is “I have so many questions!” So many that I can’t articulate any of them, can’t even start to formulate one, and Eric has to take up the slack. Fortunately, Eric can ask the hell out of a question, so I have a minute to get my thoughts in order, during which time Eric establishes that the Falters – Darwin and Rebecca, as we eventually learn – are up from Southern California to see their kid play ball. Eventually I manage to ask “What’s been your favorite moment of his whole career – not necessarily on the field, just your favorite memory?” Not a moment of hesitation from Darwin, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard any dad outside of a movie say anything better: “When he first came into a game to pitch, in Colorado – Colorado!* – the gate opened up and he ran out to take the mound, and watching him run I could see him when he was ten, twelve, fourteen years old…” We get interrupted, and he doesn’t get to finish the thought, but he doesn’t really need to. I’m not a dad, but I am a sentimentalist.

The game started off rough for the Giants – they loaded up the bases in the first but couldn’t push anything across, and then the Phillies scored twice in the bottom of the second; Eric and I made the kinds of noises you make when your team falls behind early, and we settled in for one of those games. It is, however, one of a completely different kind of game. It turns out to be rougher for the Phillies, who immediately give up six runs of their own. In the middle of the fourth, Eric hears some Phillies fans behind us and turns around to ask them if they’re SF-based or if they’ve come in from somewhere else. As the mayor of Section 152, I’m happy to hear Eric welcoming people to our domain, and even happier when one of them says they’re in from Southern California to watch their son pitch. Their son, as it happens, is on the mound right this second, continuing to pitch. They left their (obviously unlucky) seats in the middle of that disastrous six-run inning and ended up behind us; he’s been doing well since then, so obviously 152 is a better place. Once we find out who they are, I invite them to sit with us, but the evidence is strongly in favor of standing being the lucky thing to do, so I spend about two-thirds of the rest of the game turned halfway around so I can talk to them.

Rebecca says at one point that Bailey was the last pitcher to come to bat for the Phillies before the DH was instituted in the National League; I didn’t do any research on it, but I am totally willing to believe her; there’s a kind of last-stand-against-the-barbarians romance to it that I really like, on top of which is the appeal of a truly devilish trivia question. It is a thing I will know for the rest of my life in spite of the near certainty that no-one will ever ask me about it, like the fact that the 1999 Texas Rangers had more guys on the roster whose last names started with Z than any other team in history.

Darwin tells a great story about how Bailey was once in a parking lot at a hotel and Bryce Harper called out to him from his car – Hey, Bailey, whatcha up to, or something like it – and a fan said “Whoa, you know Bryce Harper?” and Bailey said, “Yeah, he’s a coworker of mine.” Solid answer, Bailey!

Speaking of Bryce Harper – if I can take us away from the Falters for a moment – we are still booing Bryce Harper. There are some players I agree that we should boo forever – mostly, honestly, because of their let us say unsavory affiliations** – but Bryce Harper isn’t one of them. There are a lot of reasons to, especially if you’re a National League East fan, but our reason as Giants fans is that he charged the mound when Hunter Strickland, acting on a grudge he’d been holding onto for longer than it takes Twinkies to expire, hit him with a pitch. The thing, and I am not going to go too deep into this here, is that Hunter Strickland deserved to get charged. Harper did the right thing, if we define the right thing by certain values of traditional baseball. I’m not going to boo him for that.

“But didn’t Darwin tell you any more good Bailey Falter stories?” I hear you ask. Why, yes, in fact he did; I’m glad you mentioned it. Right here in this park in June of 2021, Falter gave up a right-field home run to Brandon Belt, and after the game he came over to his father and said “Dad, please tell me it didn’t go in the water.” (It hadn’t.)

It was a hard night for Bailey, and even though I’m obviously rooting for the Giants, I feel bad for him (a lot of what happened tonight wasn’t his fault, and if it hadn’t been for two egregious fielding errors he would have gotten out of the second inning without any damage at all). We get to meet him briefly after the game and shake his hand, and his dad talks with him a little and reports that he’s kind of down, understandably. I want to tell him that even if he were the worst pitcher in the major leagues – and he is definitely not – he is still a pitcher in the major leagues, which is something that is statistically very rare and he should be very proud of, and to hang in there. That’s a thing he’ll appreciate hearing from his teammates and his coaches and his dad, but probably not from some random Giants fan after a beastly loss. I hope he hears it, though.

On a more historical note, the Giants won their 11,500th game tonight. They continue to lead the major leagues in all-time wins; a lot of teams – twenty-two of them, to be exact, are more or less out of the running when it comes to contending for this record by virtue of not having existed until the twentieth century. Presumably, the Giants will continue to lead in this category with their 11,501st, 11,502d, 11,503d and so on victories, but those numbers aren’t quite as excitingly round. In a few years – six or seven, probably – they’ll get to 12,000. If I’m still reporting then, I’ll let you know.

*Colorado is a terrible place to pitch, because the air is so thin, so imagine that being your first game in the majors.

**Talking to you, Yasiel Puig.

• 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

Thaddeus Ward is warming up in the Nationals bullpen in the bottom of the seventh, but he doesn’t need to. Honestly, I could go in to pitch for Washington, and the Giants would not win this game. The score is 10-2, and Ward’s first couple of throws are a little lackadaisical – you can tell he’s just loosening up the arm, not really aiming. Still, the ball is moving pretty fast, and Fred and I have positioned ourselves right behind the practice catcher; when the place is crowded it’s a hard spot to get, but today, although the official count is 21,283, there aren’t more than maybe 12,000 in the park. We’re alone at the rail, so when Ward’s first real hard throw arrives, we’re the only ones who see it. We see it really close, though, because it’s very high – a right-handed hitter would have had to hit the deck – and the catcher leaps to pull it in. The second pitch is in exactly the same place, and we laugh and clap and wave to Ward, who puts the third one right where the last two went, except this time, the catcher doesn’t stop it and with a mighty bang it leaves a mark on the clear plastic a foot in front of my face. I don’t flinch; I was half expecting it – the last two were so precise – and I yell “Now you’re doing it on purpose!” and I think I get a grin out of him. He doesn’t aim for my face any more, though. When he was wild, I was thinking “Put this guy in now – he’ll give up ten runs!” but on reflection, if he actually was aiming for my head, holy cow is he good.

We spend a couple of innings in the 415, and when a ball arrives in right center via a Michael Conforto homer in the eighth, the NBC camera catches us looking… let’s say not super involved. That brought the score to 10-4 (the final was 11-6), and it wasn’t as close as it sounds. The Nationals scored eight in the first three innings, and after that it was all conversation and walking around the park. This year I’ve mostly taken people who have already been here, and on the occasions when I’ve had new people, the shortened games have made a 45-minute tour a bad investment. Still, this time, we manage to get by the aquarium, up to the third deck and the views of the bay, over to the Lego statues and back down to the brisket stand, which it turns out is, tragically, closed. We end up with a perfectly serviceable plate of default chicken tenders instead.

Now that I am remembering to take photos at the ballpark, it’s probably time to start working on how to take good ones. I got three of me and Fred, all of which were inferior to the one that he took, but I may have to begin grappling with the concept that I’m just not very photogenic.

Fred is an engaging companion, and I feel like we have a lot of the same ideas about things – relationships, our responsibilities and duties as men, the way we label ourselves in various communities, and board games. He is, in fact, so engaging that I basically forgot to make notes about anything we were talking about because I was so busy enjoying talking about it. We get all over the place, and most of what I remember involves Fred saying something that I think is reasonable and smart and then me saying “Yeah, me too!”

Speaking of photos, this is the one I took to show Fred what I looked like when he was on his way to the park, and it represents a new era in pictures this year, because I finally opened up one of the boxes of Giants hats that have been in storage for the last six months, so you will be seeing a lot of new (to you) headgear. This one is a Mothers’ Day hat that came out four or five years ago.

• 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

In the BART station on the way home after a very satisfying Giants win over the Nationals, Leslie and I hear the mournful sounds of a harmonica echoing down the platform; it’s sad and incongruous – the mood in the station is pretty cheerful except for what we can only assume is a hobo riding the rails. It turns out to be a guy ambling around with a harmonica in his mouth but his hands in his pockets; he’s doing a pretty good job of producing more than just random sounds without using his hands to move the harmonica around, and the sound makes me think of cowboy movies, and nights on the trail. “That’s Lonesome Joe,” I tell Leslie. “He’s the Lonesomest Guy I Know.” Lonesome Joe wanders by us a little later, an unsteady list to his gait, and we think he notices us enjoying the story we’re making up about him, because he sees Leslie laughing and his orbit tightens. He passes in front of us three or four times before slowing, taking the harmonica out of his mouth and saying with a sad smile, “I’m sorry to be doing this to you, but she left and I don’t…I need to go to Concord?” I assure him that he’s not bothering us and all he needs to do is catch the next train, and he wanders off, still dolefully, sweetly harmonicaing. When the train comes, he gets on the same car we’re on, and the music drifts down the noisy tunnel with us, mixing with the discordant screech of the rails and making me think of campfires and cans of beans; there’s a couple right next to us sharing a pair of headphones and happily moving to the beat of what must be a very different song. I can’t help but feel like Lonesome Joe owns this car, though, and I say to Leslie “I don’t know what we’re gonna do about these two; they’re not bean people.” A minute later Lonesome Joe’s phone rings, and although we can’t hear what he’s saying, we hope it’s whoever left him, calling to guide him home.

I might have a new favorite anthem; unfortunately I can’t give you a link to it, but if I ever find a way, you may rest assured I will. MLB.tv is criminally lax about including the anthem in the archive – often the recording starts just after the performer finishes up. Today’s was performed by the first graders of a local school – which one I cannot say – and it was absolutely fantastic. You know how when you get enough people singing, the voices all come together and average out to the right pitch or key or timbre or whatever? Well, that didn’t happen here. Imagine what it would be like to listen to maybe forty kids singing the national anthem but none of them is paying any attention to any of the others, or to anyone trying to coordinate them, and you will have an exact picture of what happened here. It was glorious. Look at that kid in the middle: you can tell he’s just concentrating on being as loud as he can, and the two guys to his right aren’t totally sure they’re supposed to be there; the girl to his lower left is making sure she gets all the words right, and her neighbors are just glad to have been invited. It was the loudest, least musical national anthem I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard Metallica do it seven times now*. Every anthem should be performed by a platoon of first graders who learned the words this week.

The Giants won handily tonight; after yesterday’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Bay Area Sports Day, it was a relief to see an exciting game that wasn’t exciting like a car crash. Along the way to a 4-1 win, we get a solid performance from Logan Webb and a home run from Casey Schmitt, making a triumphant major league debut. Usually the radio is my favorite way to experience baseball if I can’t see it live, but watching Schmitt go through is first game on TV is a treat. He comes close to a misstep in the field, and watching his relief over it not mattering and then his home run celebration are heartwarming.

Leslie has some good questions – my favorite kind, in fact. Why can a baserunner overrun first but not second or third? I like a question that makes me think about how the game works and what makes sense. On reflection, I think the logical answer is that if runners had to slow down to stop right on first base, they’d get thrown out every time, and also maybe that it has to do with there being a line to run down, but the answer I give her and the one that I think is probably most true is that that’s how the game evolved to work best. She also asks how they keep the uniforms so white (my guess is regular laundering), how many uniforms (I think five – home cream, the Orange Friday uni, the black jerseys, the City Connect Creamsicle outfits, and the road greys), why some guys on the field have long pants and some guys are wearing capris (each player gets to pick which ones he wants to wear, and also those might technically be capris, but we just refer to that look as the high socks).

Every day I’m on the lookout – the listenout, I guess, really – for the quote that’s going to feature at the top of the blog post, and today on the MUNI ride in I thought I had it before I’d even gotten to the park; a guy with a bottle of gin and a chip on his shoulder snarled “Oooh, I’m rich, I get off at Brannan,” when some people got off at Brannan (I don’t know if they were rich or not). He continued to mumble, yell and growl guy-on-a-train-with-a-mostly-empty-bottle-of-gin-at-five-pm stuff all the way to the park, and it was all pure gold, but Lonesome Joe totally eclipsed him at the last minute, like Mage coming from out of nowhere to win the Kentucky Derby.

*Complaints in the comments, please.

• 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 arrived really early at the park, much earlier than my companion for the day; Lisa had some holdups on public transportation and made it in just after the first pitch, so I had about an hour to myself in my seat. I was watching the grounds crew set up the field – taking up the tarp from the mound, laying down the chalk for baselines, hosing down the infield – and just enjoying the rising chatter in the same way that I enjoy listening to it fading away after the game is over, and a voice behind me, someone talking to his friends, said “…and the bases are three inches bigger? Too many things are changing too fast!” and I wheeled around and said “Right? The pitch clock, and the National League DH, and the free runner in extra innings? Everything sucks now!” The guy, a compact, happy-looking Latino in a Nationals cap, laughed and said “Totally! What happened to the classic game we love, dude?” “What happened to the classic game,” I echoed, and he put out a fist for a bump, and I said “We are old men now, my friend,” which he loved. I am essentially sitting on my porch talking about how the game was so much better in my day, when my day was really just the mid-nineties.

Lisa, who works in Golden Gate Park, sometimes gardening and sometimes supervising, arrives just after the first pitch. That turns out to be the perfect time to show up if you want to see baseball, because a single, another single, a third single, a fourth single, and a fifth single result in two runs. A comical baserunning error involving two runners on second base and a popup to short left result in two outs, so it doesn’t feel like the game is totally out of control, and I say “Well, this isn’t good, but it’s not a disaster.” Later on when I’m reviewing the game on MLB.tv, at exactly the same point, Kuip says on TV “This is still a manageable inning if you can hold it to two,” which makes me feel good about having the same analytical instincts as a veteran ballplayer and TV announcer. A sixth and seventh single put three more runs on the board, and looking back I feel pretty good that Kuip and I were exactly the same amount of wrong at the same time. “Well, now it’s a disaster,” I say to Lisa, who figures maybe it will light a fire under the Giants. The problem with that, I say, is that sometimes when you get a fire lit under you, you just end up on fire.

That is pretty much the extent of the baseball for the evening. Either the Nationals forget how to hit or Anthony DeSclafani remembers how to pitch; he goes six more innings without giving up another run. I forgot to take a picture again, which is astonishing because the next thing that happens aside from a couple of spectacular catches in the outfield, one from each team, is that Joc Pederson hits a home run in the bottom of the ninth, and then the game is over. Except for the first inning, this is one of those games that some people think are boring but others treasure as a brilliant pitching duel.

We have a lot of time to talk during this pitching duel. I strike up a conversation with a pair of paramedics loitering in my section; in spite of the fact that like twelve people read this, I promise them I won’t publish most of the answers to the questions I ask them. All I can say is that 1) mostly they deal with people who have had too much to drink, 2) one of them solved a crime at the park once, and 3) somebody fell down an escalator the other day, which they assure me can be very dangerous, and I tell them I know that because my sister did it once in her first year of college while trying to impress a boy by sliding down the handrail. I imagine it’s worse if you fall down an escalator that’s going up; that could be an endless tragicomedy.

Lisa’s working on a degree in horticulture – I imagine partly for her job with the SF Parks Department, but probably also just because she likes gardening. That leads to talk about schooling and writing – she says she used to think she was good at math and bad at English, but then she took a statistics class and realized she had it the wrong way around. She’s selling herself short – statistics isn’t math – but admits that she likes math because the answers are either right or wrong, which gets us into a discussion about prescriptivism, descriptivism, my mom, and grammar as gatekeeping mechanism which leads to talk of dating profiles where people say they won’t date you if you can’t handle the your/you’re and there/their/they’re issues. I manage to stop short of saying I think apostrophes should be done away with, but mostly because we’re in the ninth inning and I run out of time.

Just before the game ends, a woman standing at the end of my row says loudly “Not with that attitude!” and I am devastated that I was paying attention to Lisa and I can’t tell if it was angry or sarcastic or joking, nor what the attitude was about. That’s the way the ball bounces, 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