Once, long before the season tickets, I was blessed with the opportunity to explain the infield fly rule to an Icelandic physicist; It was grueling and glorious, and we ended up on a city park softball field with me explaining that wingers play in a different sport. I feel like it prepared me for everything that happened during the 2019 season.
In mid-September of 2018, a rep from the Giants contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in working with an organization called SportsHosts. A couple of Australians had started a business that connected people who were travelling with sports fans who like to talk to strangers. The idea was that if you showed up in San Francisco and were looking for something San Franciscoish to do, Google would lead you to SportsHosts and SportsHosts would lead you to me (or to whoever was on deck, but this is my story).
It was like someone had started a business specifically to help me take people to ballgames. I have no idea what their business model was, or how they expected to make money, but since I wasn’t interested in making money, it just didn’t matter. It occurs to me just now that I haven’t mentioned yet that I never let anyone pay for the tickets – my position was (is) that since I hadn’t paid for them, I wasn’t going to look for a profit. So by then I had given away somewhere on the order of a hundred and fifty tickets, give or take a few. And SportsHosts was going to help me give away more.
Another thing that was special about 2019 was that the Giants had introduced a new thing called the Ballpark Pass. The idea was that you paid about $25 a month, for which you got to come into the park for pretty much any game and walk around. You didn’t get a seat, but you could watch the game from the Standing Room Only areas, or yoink a seat for a while if nobody was sitting there. Nobody usually was. During the World Series years and after, the park had a five-hundred-plus game sellout streak, which had ended in July of 2017, so there was often a lot of room at the park. The upshot was that with two seats and a ballpark pass, I was able to host two people every night.
That was the glory year.
Because I am disorganized and often short-sighted, I have lost the spreadsheet I kept track of 2019’s guests on, but I still have phone numbers, Facebook friends, and texts. In that year, I took something like a hundred and fifty people to eighty games. I was no longer limited to chivvying friends, co-workers and strangers from the BART system (I’m not saying I gave up on that, but I wasn’t limited any more). I took a Brazilian soccer player, a couple from Colorado on their second honeymoon, a South African au pair, an Australian boat-supply salesperson, a Japanese photography student. Kiki, Ismail, Bilkher, Jessica, Jonah, Anja.
Some were dedicated fans of other teams, some were avid enthusiasts of other sports, and some had basically never seen a ball before. Some wanted to know everything, had questions I couldn’t answer, and asked about things I had never even thought about, and some had just accepted the invitation because they had nothing better to do (Michael, one of the SH staff, told me he would just go down to youth hostels and ask random people what they were doing that night).
Almost all the guests were amazing; some didn’t speak a lot of English, but that made for its own entertainment in some ways. “There are balls and strikes, and the ball is always a ball, but sometimes when you throw the ball it’s a strike if the batter swings and misses and sometimes it’s a strike when he swings and hits it but it goes foul and sometime he swings and hits it foul but it’s not a strike unless the catcher catches it” is already confusing even you’re a native English speaker.
It was a year of paradise for a man who likes to talk and for a man who likes to listen (both of those are me).
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