heart given to a good cause
I don't remember my first Giants game.
I remember Candlestick Park. I think I've told this story before. Parkas and puffy gloves and scratchy afghans in the middle of the summertime, and whole empty sections of orange seats for me and my brothers to colonize when we got bored with the game (happened invariably up until we learned how to keep score). I remember that woman yelling "J.T. cutie!" from the second row, and the Jerry Garcia-looking dude with the amazing sparkly pin-covered hat. I remember popcorn in red and white boxes, being small in a big crowd with my dad's hand swallowing up my own, the soft cheer of the crowd when they shut off the stadium lights and started playing Journey, just before the fireworks shot into the sky.
We moved to California when I was six years old. Almost everything important happened after I had this team.
Little kid me, taping up pictures of Will Clark (my heart!) and Matt Williams (my younger brother, five years old and inquiring earnestly, "Does his hat make him bald?" and it has been a family punchline ever since) and Rod Beck because he was my dad's favorite, that glorious hair, that most excellent pirate's mustache. Peeling the paint off the walls, sleeping with a mitt under my mattress to break it in, throwing at the strikezone we'd chalked onto the back fence. Going down to the high school fields and hitting golf balls with aluminum baseball bats. Standing astride my bike outside the sports bar that used to be on El Camino Real, watching the game through the windows like an urchin out of Dickens, nose pressed to the glass. Pitching to the neighbors in the front yard, one is a fastball, two is a curve, over the power lines is a home run and the cherry tree counts as fan interference.
We believe in baseball in my family. We don't go to church, we go to the ballpark. We were brought up this way.
When I was ten years old, the Giants won 103 games and didn't make the playoffs (goddamn motherfucking Braves), and I wore black to school for a week. When I was nineteen, the Giants lost Game 7 after they'd lost Game 6 (oh Game 6 in 2002, I can finally speak of it again), and I went to sleep for about sixteen hours straight, mourned as if hope were a dear lost friend of mine, someone I'd never see again. When I was twenty-one, my last year on the East Coast, I was in Philadelphia for the last weekend of the season and I watched the Giants get knocked out of the chase on the out-of-town scoreboard. Everywhere I've been in this world, never felt quite so far from home.
When I was twenty-seven, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series.
What can you say, really? This is the feeling I've been chasing my whole life. When we chant, "Let's go Giants," this is what we mean--this is where we want them to go.
Game 2, the last major league baseball game played in San Francisco this year, we went down to the ballpark and sat on the strip of lawn across the kayak-plagued Cove, where you can see the Jumbotron and the whole left field side of the stands, high fly balls that rose just above the line of the stadium, radios everywhere so Duane Kuiper was broadcasting in stereo. Hundreds of us down there, lawn chairs and holey blankets and guys with guitars who sang profane songs about the Rangers. And we wore our colors, we waved our flags. Orange and black means you are a friend of mine, and that was everybody down there, everybody. We won the game 9-0 and that was the moment, right there. It stopped being we might and became resolutely we're gonna.
Blind faith all year, standard baseball-fan loyalty: as long as they are in it, I'm in it with them. Underdogs from the start and that never let up, not even after we'd beaten Derek Lowe and Tim Hudson and Roy Halladay and Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels and Cliff Lee and everyone else they threw at us, everyone. Nobody gave us much of a shot, and that only seemed to help. At some point we became convinced that this team could do absolutely anything. And they did this time, it worked at last. Went the distance, oh man.
Game 5 we went to Civic Center with thousands of others to watch it on the big screen, to be there. Find the biggest crowd possible, the greatest number of people who are praying for the same thing. The moment when Edgar hit that home run; the moment when Brian Wilson closed it out. Chaos, jumping up and down in the semi-dark, screaming with joy, with my arms around my boys and everyone else.
"We won the World Series, we won the World Series!" Never said that particular phrase before, never once. Two nights ago I lost my voice, I think you can probably tell.
We stayed on the streets for half the night, walking around trading hugs and high fives with strangers and urging the cars to honk their horns, fists beating at the air. Everyone in orange and black, in felt beards and long-haired wigs and panda hats, everyone with a wild grin on their face. Hearing hollering and cheers from streets over, whipping by from people hanging out car windows. Hollering back. Eight hundred thousand people in this city and every single one of them is kin to me now.
Came back home and learned that there were cars set on fire a couple blocks from my house, a bunch of kids dancing on top of abandoned city buses in the Mission. A milder riot, and somewhat surprising, as we're usually a peaceful and stoned populace, but winning the World Series, there's no room for that feeling inside of you, it's gotta come out somehow. It's halfway understandable.
Anyway. Using a lot of words to say that the night was generally indescribable. Some things you can take as a given.
Now I have returned from the victory parade. San Francisco Giants Day, as proclaimed by the brand-spanking-new lieutenant governor of the state, also our mayor. Ticker-tape, actual honest-to-god ticker-tape carpeting Market Street. The whole world came.
More people smashing into Civic Center Plaza than I have ever seen in one place, actually. People climbing up telephone poles and trees and utility boxes, climbing up exterior gates to get a hand on the fire escape, little kids clinging to their dads' heads. Huge packs of people all around, as far as the eye could see and all of us sweating in the merciless sun, the perfect blue sky with torn-up clouds, cheers coming and going tidally on the breeze. Chanting "Co-dy!" one last time, and "MVP!" for Edgar, and "U-ribe!" for Juan. All year long, these guys, my team. Pat the Bat, local boy and found gold. Freddy Sanchez, Freddy from Hollywood with the magic glove, the history-maker. Aubrey Huff and Bruce Bochy smiling, honest-to-god grinning and it was like they had to chip the rust off first. Tim Lincecum, savior of the city. Buster Posey, the boy more beloved by God than any other. Every one of them, honestly.
Making friends in the crush, discounted Halloween candy and a foreign jay passed into our midst. The only thing that coulda made today better is if we'd legalized it yesterday. Timmy coulda blazed on his cable car and all the people wearing 'Let Tim Smoke!' shirts woulda been so psyched! But hey. I'll take one lifelong dream coming true at a time.
The end of the season is strange now, the feeling different than it ever has been. Happy and grateful beyond belief and vaguely scared that it won't happen for another fifty-six years, but you can't let that kind of thing ruin the moment. This is why you follow baseball and all.
Also, the better part of the pitching staff is coming back next year to pick up right where they left off. So.
After the parade, me and my friends went to the courtyard across the street from City Hall and played catch on the grass, in the slanted pieces of shade. Tonight I'll cut the team's pictures out of the newspaper and tape them to my bedroom walls. The season started for me eight months ago in Phoenix, twenty-one years ago in Candlestick Park, and it has ended in a place more lovely than I knew it could.
Three and a half months until pitchers and catchers. Still counting the days.