Take me out to the ballgame with the San Francisco Giants!
I am not a baseball fan. I don't play and if I tried to watch it on TV, I'd fall asleep. I did see a live game once while on a class trip to Washington DC in eighth grade. I remember very little about it, save that at least one and possibly both of the teams were the Sox.
One of my old coworkers from SFMOMA organized a group outing to see a San Francisco Giants game, and I thought that perhaps it was time to give baseball another try. Mostly I just wanted to see my friends, and a baseball game seemed like just as good an excuse as any other, but there was a small possibility that the sport was more interesting than I'd previously suspected.
The Giants' colors are black and orange. You'd think a girl like me, obsessed with Halloween and all its attendant decor, would have clothing in this color combination, but there was very little in my wardrobe that was appropriate. Finally, it came down to an orange-and-black skull-printed scarf, and a Longhorns t-shirt my father picked up on a business trip in Texas. The scarf was too obviously Halloween, so I went with the shirt, wondering idly if it was bad luck to wear a different team's shirt to a game, shrugging it off as irrelevant since the Longhorns were a college team, and anyway I don't even know if they have a baseball team.
As I was weaving my way through crowds of Giants fans, people would make the devil hand sign at me. I took me a minute or two to figure out that I was not being cursed with a satanic gesture but men were showing solidarity with the longhorn hand signal. This even led to a couple of awkward conversations as strangers asked if I'd gone to the University of Texas, and I was forced to admit that until that afternoon, I could not have told you what college claimed the Longhorns as their mascot.
Lesson learned: next time, go with the Halloween scarf.
Sartorially, I made better choices than my husband. Seanie had rushed out of the house that morning, grabbing a hoodie as he fled out the door, and it was only when he arrived at the ballpark that he realized his choice of purple, the color of the opposing Colorado Rockies, had been a poor one.
I ignored the first two thirds of the game. The Giants scored an early lead, and with the score 4-2 nothing much seemed to be happening. I chatted with my coworkers and stuffed my face with garlic fries, admired the city skyline to my left and the Bay Bridge and open water to my right. As the great big full moon rose up from the horizon, it glowed an appropriate orange hue. All seemed right with the world.
Then the final inning arrived, and the Rockies sent man after man scurrying across the plate as the Giants missed catches and fumbled the ball all over the field. By the beginning of the bottom of the ninth, the score was now 7-4 in favor of Colorado. The Giants never recovered from their shock, and ended up losing the game.
But even if the game was lost, the evening ended on a high note because after the last inning the Giants had a fantastic fireworks show. I've seen a lot of fireworks at Disney, but the quality of these ones was so much higher! There was more variety than the standard Disney selection, more colors, and more intricate configurations. Color-changing bursts of stars, trailing golden streaks, spinning wheels of sparkles, and brilliant starbursts filled the clear night sky. Across the bay, another fireworks show could be seen exploding - perhaps the A's game?
So maybe baseball can be fun, as long as you see it with the right people.