81 Dates

Myla’s been to a few games with me over the last few years, not so many since she moved away from San Francisco. She’s about to head out for New Orleans for a few months, so it will be a while before we see each other again. Last time I saw her she had just sold a walk-in closet in San Francisco and used the proceeds to buy a mansion with a twelve-car garage and a polo field in the Central Valley; flush with cash, she asked if there was anything I wanted, and I said I could use a new car. “I can’t quite afford that,” she mused, “but I could get you a set of speakers after you buy a car.” This time around, money is tighter, I guess, because she points out that the injustice of the fact that although her last name is Ablog and I am writing a blog, it isn’t going to benefit her financially. “I’m not making any money off of that, you know.” Secretly, I suspect this is not the first time this joke has been made. I’ll get to hear it once more today, and when Myla tells me that her family comes from a village in the Philippines that seems to have been the source of most of the US Ablogs, I imagine it’s a pretty popular joke, or at least it was when blogs ruled the earth (I’ve been made aware that podcasts are where it’s at now). If it’s any consolation, I’m not making any money off of this blog either.

I chose to wear the Captain’s hat today – the Giants gave them away at the beginning of the 2022 season to commemorate Brandon Belt’s stint as self-proclaimed captain. I think Belt’s campaign was arguably one of the reasons the Giants did so well in the stretch that year – a sign of and a spur to the extraordinary spirit that team displayed, but there are other reasons I like wearing it to the park. They gave away 20,000 of them at the gate, and you still see them at every game; it’s one of the few hats that’s truly unique and instantly recognizable, and when you wear it and throw a salute to anybody else you see in one and say “Captain!”, you get a delighted little grin and, almost always, a salute in return.

The Captain’s hat is especially appropriate today, for a couple of other reasons. For one, an actual Captain shows up – my friend and sometimes father Greg, with his daughters Colleen and Katie. Greg was the owner, operator, and master before God of the Cardiff Rose, the Renaissance Fair fencing booth I worked at for fourteen years; it was modeled after a pirate ship, and we were all intensely nautical.

There’s also a Brandon Belt connection, in that he’s Colleen’s favorite player, and last year when she came to a game with me, I procured and almost delivered a signed ball for her. I say ‘almost’ because after I showed her the ball but before I handed it over, it fell out of my bag, bounced off my foot, rolled off the back of the seat row, and shot directly off the backside of the arcade, rolling untouched through a crowd of people like it had been programmed to avoid shoes. It was so immediately gone that there was nothing to do but sit back down and say “Oh well!” Eventually I got hold of another one, but today was the first chance I had to deliver it. This time I carefully swaddled it in bubble wrap – I guess so we could hear it as it rolled away if I dropped it again. Well, she has it now, and if it gets lost again, that’s not on me. She seems like a very responsible young woman, though.

Myla starts off wanting a Dole Whip from the lumpia place behind home plate, but when I remind her that last year, at a much less crowded game, we waited about an hour for Dole Whips because the means of production were drastically unequal to the demand from the crowd, she decides that probably a soda would be okay instead. We don’t do a lot of walking around this time, but staying in the seats is nice some days. Myla has brought along a custom Muppet friend, Dr. Gabby the Cryptozoologist, who has accompanied Myla, (who acts as her lab assistant) on what I am assured have been many adventures. I guess if you want to see some of those, you can go look at @DrGabbyCryptozoologist on something called Instagram. This is my frst attempt at synergy with the blog, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right, but I guess it’s appropriate that this is the Ablog blog. I have no idea if she’s making any money off of Dr. Gabby, but apparently there’s a Youtube channel coming, so maybe soon?

• 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

Going to every game has its costs. It definitely affects your social life, and it has affected my baseball life too. When I went to three or four games a year and listened to the rest on the radio, I knew a lot more about baseball than I do now – all the information you get from the broadcasters goes a long way, even if you don’t think you’re soaking it up. I knew more about the players, the stories from off the field, and even what was happening during games. Today, in what I think was the fifth inning, Christine and I were about to get up and go find something to eat when a commotion broke out on the field. And that is almost the only thing I can tell you about it. MLB.tv is down, and the Giants website has nothing to say about it. It looked like Cobb made a pickoff throw to first and got assessed with a balk, and the next thing we knew, Craig Counsell was out on the field raising Cain with the officials. He got thrown out but kept hassling the umpires, and there was about two minutes of him stalking around and refusing to leave the field. I had the presence of mind to turn on a portable radio, but only in time to hear the announcer say “Maybe they should put some information about this up on the scoreboard,” and I can’t help but agree. This happens pretty often – some kerfuffle breaks out, and the only way to find out what’s going is to go home and listen to the encore broadcast at midnight.

Christine and I met through the local poly community a few years back. She has come with me to at least one game a year since 2018, and she is one of my go-tos for Opening Days and last days of the season – she came to Bruce Bochy’s retirement game with me in 2019. She’s what Kruk and Kuip call a gamer babe, and when, in the no-crowd 2020 season when they populated the stands with cutouts, which the Giants offered free to season ticket holders, she was the one I picked to sit next to me in effigy. She sent me a photo, I submitted it to the Giants, and in due course two years later surprised her with the cutout when she joined me for a Cubs game in July. She took it home on the ferry and entertained the entire baffled boat. This year I don’t have a cutout for her, which is okay, because apparently having it around her house got creepy and she had to put it in the closet. Christine is, in my opinion, the best kind of fan – she loves the team and wants them to win but doesn’t have a constant stream of complaints when they don’t. One of her boyfriends is a Dodger fan, which I find admirably multicultural. We’ve spent a fair amount of each game today talking about the ins and outs of relationships; although we haven’t really talked about the criteria she uses to determine who is a boyfriend and who is just an occasional date, the way she uses the word makes me feel like taking her to two or three games a year might put me in the running. Fortunately, Michelle wouldn’t mind.

At the beginning of last year I had to miss a game and gave her and her Dodger boyfriend both my tickets, and I asked Kenny Mac to show up at the seats and pretend “Mr. Berthelsen” had asked him to “come by and make sure they were having a good time at the game.” He did, and he brought them a ball from batting practice, which he signed: it was one of the first times I felt like arbitrarily declaring myself the Mayor of Section 152 was really paying comedy dividends.

In addition to being Willie Mays’ 92d birthday, today wis Kentucky Derby Day at the park (and also in Kentucky), and not only do we get free hats at the gate – my favorite kind of giveaway – but we get to watch the race on the DiamondVision screen. This is only the second time in my life I’ve watched the Kentucky Derby, and the first time in an appropriate hat. I’ve never really cared about it, but horse races are exciting, and I’ve been looking forward to watching this one ever since I found out about it an hour before the game, even though I don’t know the names of any of the horses. Two seconds before it starts, Christine says “Who are we rooting for? Quick, pick a number!” I panic and say 12 – I have no idea why, since 8 is my favorite number – and Christine chooses 22 and the horses are off. 12 is a horse called Jace’s Road, and Christine’s 22 is named Mandarin Hero. They place, respectively, 15th and 17th. The winner, Mage, is number 8. Later, in the kiddie park out past left field left, they have a Kidtucky Derby with three kids racing around the baselines. Kenna gallops her way to victory, lapping the other two, who the announcer describes accurately as moving at parade speed. They look like caisson horses next to Kenna (actually, far behind Kenna).

The end of the game is a little bit of a nailbiter, with John Brebbia walking a couple of batters in the ninth and giving up a run, and the kid in front of us shrieks with every new development, including panicky calls of “No No NO!” for fly balls that drop near second base, and I secretly kind of envy the ability worry about that kind of thing, instead of feeling blasé about flies that get caught a foot inside the wall. The Giants win 4-1 after Camilo Doval comes in to finish out the ninth.

Also, we saw this practice catcher in the Milwaukee bullpen with a really colorful mitt. I tried to get his attention to ask what was going on with the rainbow, but couldn’t really catch his eye. It will remain a mystery, unless I can catch his attention tomorrow. We’ll see.

• 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 Martin’s first time at a baseball game, but he’s not new to sports. In fact, I think he is more of a sport guy than I am. He’s been in the US for about two months, although it’s not his first time here. He has spent a while working as a sportswriter and occasional broadcaster covering the NBA for German outlets, which is very intimidating given that I have been writing down stories for a month now with an audience of mostly family, people I have dated, and robots that subscribe to every blog on WordPress. Once or twice he refers to the two of us as ‘journalists,’ which is true in the same sense that Katrina Lehis and I are both fencers. He says right at the beginning of the game that I should feel free to load him up with information about baseball, that he’d love to hear anything about strategy and tactics that I have to offer, which is even more intimidation, since my idea of good information about baseball tactics is that stealing first base after you’ve already reached second wasn’t officially outlawed until 1919. I decide to let him ask questions, and he immediately stumps me by asking why there is a crescent-shaped cutout instead of a corner. At the end of the night, I still haven’t come up with a good explanation, and just before we part ways on the BART ride home, he urges me – as one journalist to another – to find the answer to the most important question.

We spend about equal amounts of time talking about basketball and baseball, with some added comparisons to soccer, football, and a little bit of hockey. Also, I find out that in Germany, handball is a pretty big thing; Martin assures me that it’s not like it is here, which I would have assumed, because what I know as handball is barely interesting enough to keep the players interested, let alone a crowd of 20,000. When I look up ‘german handball highlights’ later on Youtube, the results are startling – it looks like a multiplayer version of college-level tag mixed with dodgeball if the object of dodgeball were to frighten your opponents instead of hit them, but run at double speed. I can see, if this version of handball is what he grew up with, how basketball was the American sport he gravitated to – it’s constant action and what looks like insane athleticism. His basketball team is the Dallas Mavericks, at least partially due to fellow German Dirk Nowitzki’s tenure there, which – as a member of a family that latched onto whatever Danish or Irish public figure that came along – I can get behind.

Martin is a wellspring of fascinating conversation; we do eventually get into some baseball questions I can answer, about the ways to get runners out on the basepaths – tagging as opposed to force-outs – and sacrifice flies, and situations where a pitcher might walk a hitter on purpose, but the most interesting part of the conversation for me is about how sports – and how people appreciate and participate in fandom – are different in Europe. For one thing, he points out that the longest season he can think of is the Bundesliga soccer season, which lasts for 34 games. Each of the 18 teams plays 17 home and away games, and they all take place on the weekends, which means that fans can focus in a way that we just don’t here. At least baseball and basketball fans can’t, given the sheer number of games and the constant every-day schedule. NFL fans might be able to, but they don’t; we don’t have the kind of coordinated crowd efforts – songs and cheers and traditions that involve entire venues full of people all working together. I kind of wish we did, if only to do away with our anemic waves and “What’s the matter with (nearest available outfielder’s name here)/He’s a bum” and so on.

At the end of the evening, on the way out, I mention to Martin my feelings about the ballpark as an oasis of peace and calm when the sun has gone down, and ask if there’s anything about the particular dynamic of a basketball arena that speaks to him; he has similar feelings about an empty gym, but talks more about the difference between the constant hustle of an NBA game, with points on the board very twenty seconds, and the slower pace of baseball or soccer, where a game might have two or three crucial turning points – runs scored or a timely double play (both of which the Giants manage tonight, ending up with an exciting 6-4 win over the Brewers). On the walk out of the park, he asks if I’d be interested in a basketball game sometime. We’re at the point right now where any basketball game we could get to this season would involve several hundred dollars, several hundred miles of travel, or both, but yeah – I would definitely go to a basketball game with Martin.

You may remember Paul from the 9th of April. I’m with him again three weeks later, this time at the Oakland Coliseum. We have accommodations that bring to mind in equal measures a sportswriter’s desk, a theater box, and a Soviet prison. I’m in this…chamber?…with a dozen people I don’t really know, watching a game I can’t see a lot of and only have an academic interest in, and I am subject to one of the most dangerous conditions a man can endure: I have access to an unlimited amount of food that isn’t very good. Paul, the only person I have met more than once, has taken on a fairly robust quantity of beer and is revealing himself to be (more accurately, confirming my belief that he is) the kind of guy who is exactly the same drunk as sober except happier. At least three times in three hours, he joins the crowd (crowd is a very strong word for the number of people currently in the Coliseum) in expressing our disapproval of one on-field event or another, and then follows up with “Wait, what are we booing about?” Paul is my favorite kind of inebriate: the Friendly Drunk. He’s a big guy and a lot of beer doesn’t take him away as it does with some people, but I am sure that if he got really into it, he’d be an I Love You Man Drunk, like my dad (who was a little guy and could get there on a lot less alcohol).

I made a special trip to a storage unit this morning before the game so I could wear my As hat with Stomper the Elephant, the Oakland mascot. I briefly considered a classic Oakland on-field cap, but the mascot logo is a really good one. These two hats are the only pieces of real As gear I have, aside from a Coco Crisp jersey that was a gate giveaway the last time I was here and a T-shirt that has my number, 8, on the back and the name “Salad,” which I bought a few years back as part of a very complicated joke that got a laugh from two people. Lest you think I am complaining, that is the exact effect I was aiming for.

Paul invited me as a secondhand guest to a friend’s birthday party. Rich is turning 40 (I think), and he is a grown-up in a way that I have both always envied and never had the gumption to become – he has a wife and a kid and an apartment that has a good view and no possums in it, and he has rented out a thing at the Oakland Coliseum for his birthday. I call it a thing because I don’t know how else to describe it. Imagine the ambience of a theater box in a Russian prison, with a view whose aspect ratio is about the same as those big wide windows aboard the Death Star. It’s very, very dark, and the field is dazzling compared to the cavern of the box – if Tolkien’s Dwarves had excavated an underground arena to watch whatever sports Dwarves watch, and had they hewn luxury suites out of the living rock, those boxes would have looked very much like this. It has a dozen seats or so, and they are bolted to the ground in an attitude such that if you (assuming you are a person of my height) lean back you can’t see the game and if you lean forward the edge of the seat cuts off the blood-flow to your thighs. The discomfort is palliated by the fact that we have unlimited free food – hot dogs, pizzas, sodas, nachos, candy – which we can have delivered to us via the use of an only moderately infuriating app. I will not say how much I ate of what, but I will tell you that Paul – generous, thoughtful Paul – insisted on ordering several more hot dogs at last call so I could take them home and have lunch tomorrow and the day after.

There were also unlimited free peanuts. You can say what you want about the crumbling infrastructure and the plumbing problems and the fact that no owner since Charley Finley has really cared about the As, but you can’t fault the peanut delivery system.

Being at the Coliseum is bringing up a lot of emotions for me – none of them strong, all of them weirdly kind of academic. I feel like I’m experiencing nostalgia for a place I should have been, instead of a place I know well or have strong memories of. When I arrive at the stadium, I end up walking in on the second level, and it is utterly deserted – the only people I see in half a circuit of the deck are employees talking to each other, and I can’t help but compare it to Oracle Park, where two hours before the game sees an early crowd bigger than the total crowd here. Yesterday’s game drew around 6400 people, and today’s will come in at 7052. It looks lively from the vantage point of our box, when Stomper is out throwing T-shirts to the crowd, but at least some of that is because we can only see a narrow slice of the park – fly balls vanish and the only way you can track them is to watch the fielders. The acoustics of our bunker are such that the announcements and music are bafflingly muffled, and the crowd noise is somehow both minimal and thunderous, like the ocean when you’re too far away to hear actual waves. Unless we lean way out, we can’t really see most of the empty seats. We also can’t see the scoreboard or any blue sky, but at least we have a good view of the plate.

It’s a good game, exciting and tense, and the As score first and hold a lead until the very end, when Cincinnati mounts a comeback to win 3-2. Embarrassingly – and I blame this on the stadium and the fact that we can’t see an actual scoreboard – I have only a hazy idea of the score through most of the game because it turns out that I have been looking at a display that shows how many mound visits each team has remaining instead of how many runs each team has. Because of this, every half hour or so I find myself thinking something like “3-2? Wait, I thought we had four runs a few minutes ago,” and it is only in the last couple of innings that I realize I have not in fact been missing lots of exciting scoring and have instead been seeing lots of boring mound visits.

• 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

Men’s Wearhouse – as my roommate had predicted – did not have an orange tie. Ross (a little surprisingly) did not have an orange tie. The pimp store on Market Street, however, had a different answer when I asked “Would you happen to have such a thing as an orange tie?” They had one, and only one. “Is there a refund policy on this?” Even as I asked I knew the answer, at the same time knowing I would never ever return this particular tie. “No,” I was told. “It’s like a car: you buy it, you own it.” The tie, magically, was the exact same color as the inside of my Giants jacket. It could not have been a better orange. You can go disastrously wrong with orange, but it was the perfect shade to add to my black slacks, black shirt, and the glitter-infused mostly black yacket that I got from Efrain years ago at the zoot suit store on Mission. I topped it all off with a replica vintage 1915 New York Giants cap.

You don’t get an invitation to the Gotham Club every day – at least I don’t – so I was making this count. Dress for the job you want, we are told. The job I want – and I was well north of fifty when I figured this out – Is “eccentric millionaire who wanders around giving people things the want but haven’t actually asked for but not taking credit,” and I figured the outfit I was putting together to go to the Giants’ (sort-of) secret, fancy (if I had anything to say about it), exclusive (exclusive, no joke) speakeasy club might turn some heads.

It did. No fewer than four people in the hour before the game asked me if I was going to be singing the national anthem (my response to those people, in order: 1) “Ha ha – no!” 2) “I wish!” 3) “Believe me, you don’t want to hear that!” and 4) “Yes I am!”). It does not matter that on reflection, I looked like a cross between a game show host and a team owner trying to look cool in a baseball cap – I felt snappy, and that carried me through the day. I have spent some serious time and energy trying to acquire a wardrobe that a seventy-year-old black man going to a Sunday afternoon church service in Oakland would be proud to choose from, and the number of fist-bumps I got through the course of the afternoon made me feel like I have succeeded in at least one thing, however small, in my life.

There are several sections to the Gotham Club – first and second coolest, a bar and restaurant; second and first coolest, a game room on the suite level with a pool table, a two-lane bowling alley, and a dartboard; and third and third coolest, a section near the home bullpen in left field in which one can get, if one arrives early, a view of the Giants pitchers warming up. The 415, in center field, is where the visiting pitchers warm up, and there is a long bar where you can stand and try to distract them, but the Giants have – probably wisely – severely limited the number of people who can both drink and talk to the pitching staff. I don’t think of myself as a prejudiced person, but I would also have strong objections to letting rich people interact with booze and my rotation at the same time.

I’m glad I was able to spend most of my baseball day exploring the Gotham Club – the game was a disaster, a 6-0 loss to the Cardinals; the only real bright spot on the field was Lars Nootbaar going two-for-five with a pair of singles. Off the field., though, I set the high score on the Galaga machine in the Gotham Club game room. Unlike my fastball, my Galaga skills have not changed in the last thirty years – I am still resolutely unspectacular, and I suspect that I was able to put my initials on the leaderboard only because it is turned off at night and back on in the morning. I didn’t bowl, didn’t play pool, and didn’t buy any fancy people food.

The best part of the Gotham experience was feeling like I was part of a secret; when you walk in, you get to say a code phrase, and the entrance to the game room on the suite level is a door marked with an innocuous label about electrical stuff. It’s very back-street speakeasy. Would I pay the (very high) fee to be a member, if I had the money? Maybe. There was a point where I was sitting in my seat and watching the game, and I knew I should go in and check out the fancy club – when was I going to get this chance again? – but I really didn’t want to leave the game. That’s how much I like being at a ball game, even a tough loss. A half hour inside is a half hour of no baseball, and with the new rules, that time is a significant chunk of the game. Being admitted to the inner sanctum was cool, though, like getting to meet Gabe Kapler for a Q&A in the locker room (December 2019), or taking a few batting practice swings and seeing my name on the scoreboard (October 2017). In spite of the fact that I spent no little time today scoffing at what rich people spend their money on, I think that if I could bring guests in and give them a little taste of that, it might be worth it.

• 1 October: Farewells and Almosts
• 30 September: For the Love of God, Max Muncy
• 29 September: Flower Mary Child Lavender Blossom
• 27 September: Junk Time
• 26 September: Mathematically

On the Promenade level near my seats, there is a kiosk that sells Giants gear (golf tees, octopuses, unicorns – all the baseball standards) and most of the time it is pretty busy, but tonight is very, very slow. Attendance is listed at 20,203, but it feels smaller; maybe most of those people are out in the bleachers, or on the club level. Walking through the concourse in the seventh inning isn’t a matter of dodging people or being stuck behind slow movers, so when i pass by the kiosk I have a clear view of the guys who work there practicing the five quick claps in Wilmer Flores’ walkon music, which is about eight seconds of the theme song from ‘Friends.’ It seems like maybe the older guy is teaching the younger guy how to do it, although they have both been here forever and have to have heard it about nine hundred and ninety times, which is roughly how many at-bats Flores has had at Oracle Park plus how many times the average human seems to have watched ‘Friends.’ It’s hard to tell why they’re doing it, but on my way back from the bathroom, it’s still going on, and as I pass, I join in: clapclapclapclapclap, as fast and sharp as I can, and I get a volley of applause from them, like I did something difficult. I did notice later when I was typing this out that it is a) pretty much impossible to say clapclapclapclapclap as fast as you can clap it and b) humbling to try.

Eric shows up just before the anthem (which is lovely – I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the person who chooses the performers has been replaced) and it’s a joyous little reunion, partly because it’s a joy to see him after half a year of winter, but mostly because Eric is relentlessly joyous. Even when he’s down, his demeanor contains the spirit of his inherent optimism in the same way that you can still see the shapes of whatever you were looking at when the camera flash went off. Eric works in social services in San Francisco – it’s a difficult job anywhere, and almost exponentially more so here, but Eric has been doing it for a while. It’s still not easy, but I don’t think it would be for anyone.

I met Eric in the SportsHosts year, 2019; he was one of the other hosts, and I found out quickly that he is the kind of baseball fan who really knows his stuff, and not just statistics. My friends think of me as their baseball fan friend, but I know things like who started in the game that featured the starting pitchers with the most letters in their last names combined (VanLandingham and Isringhausen) and what the most common first name in baseball was in the 1970s (Dave) and who the most successful pair of pitching siblings were (Phil and Joe Niekro). Eric knows things like who is good at hitting baseballs and who plays for what team and who just hit a three-run homer while I was talking about chicken strips (JD Davis), which are details that often get away from me.

Anyway, Eric is my go-to for a companion when I can’t scare up someone from Facebook or the various other places I trawl for guests. As such, he has come to more games with me over the last few season than anyone since Christine; he was my first choice for the last preseason game against Oakland this year, but he was off helping a friend of his near Salinas who had been flooded out of his house, which was very inconvenient for me but exactly the kind of shenanigans Eric will get up to if you leave him to his own devices. Once I texted him a picture of a quilt my sister made for me, and he replied with a message that essentially said “That’s a nice quilt!” but was a hundred and seven words long and included praise for me, my sister, my family, our library and the floor plan of my mom’s house, and last year he used the buy-one-get-one-free Alaska Airlines coupon the Giants give away every September to fly his parents to Hawaii. I mean, when my mom came to a game with me in 2018, I made her buy her own train ticket.

It has been a rough year for Eric, and I have what I hope is a little wisdom to offer, much of it cribbed from Ted Lasso, Hamlet, and a Facebook meme I remember most of; he does me the grace of nodding along and allowing me to feel like a sage. When we walk out of the park, he adds a hug and a handshake to the five-gallon bag of Cracker Jacks he brought for me. The man knows all the ways to my heart.

PS: Giants win 4-0 over the Cardinals, with a strong complete game from Logan Webb.

• 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