A Dog Day at the Park

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”  ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, April 1^st 1989 – September 1^st 1989. 

It’s been a season nobody saw coming. Like that line shot foul ball into the stands that finds your skull when you turn away for just an instant, we glanced away for a moment in June and looked up just in time to be struck by 2013.  After a 2012 World Series Championship the Giants have found themselves in last place in their division, playing baseball that is often sloppy, passionless and sometimes downright unwatchable.

11 strikeouts in the better days of 2012

Nonetheless, Cora and I took in our last game of the year as the home nine hosted the Pirates on a sunny August Sunday afternoon.  I bought the tickets before the season started, in the dank winter when the days were still short and gloomy and spring was still another page on the calendar.  We were all hope and anticipation and nobody dreamed that the team and the fans would be looking forward to a merciful end as early as August.

Arriving with anticipation

As game day approached I’d mulled over just not even going but, when it comes to baseball it isn't about the scoreboard, it isn't about wins and losses and it isn't about a game.  It's about The Game; America's pastime that transcends its parts; that's remained essentially the same since Mays, Mantle and Snider roamed the center fields of New York, Babe Ruth spanked 60 home runs and Christy Mathewson took the mound for the first time at the turn of the 20th century. No other sport has remained so transcendent.

Tradition on display at AT&T

We parked and then walked the few long blocks down the Embarcadero, the broad picturesque avenue that runs along the bay side, with the throngs dressed in black and orange; happy, smiling, jovial and not betraying any indication that the campaign is all but mathematically over.  It’s baseball after all; the sport in which expectation is eternal even when the season is standing on the threshold of hell. 

The game was billed as The Dog Days of Summer, even though in baseball terms the dog days actually ended a couple of weeks ago on the 11th of August (Baseball’s dog days are traditionally  the period between July 3rd and August 11th, when the sun broils and the humidity weighs as heavily as a drenched blanket).  This dog day was of the canine variety when you could bring your dog to the ball park and sit with your best friend in the bleachers.  Before the game, dogs in various costumes paraded around the field delighting a crowd that was less than capacity.  In the 8th inning it would be announced that the game was another sellout which was technically true.  Every game at AT&T is sold out (they count tickets sold, not butts in seats) but on this day many had decided that since their boys are cellar dwellers this particular Sunday could be better spent sampling the Tater Tot casserole at Aunt Martha’s 40th birthday party or some other grand event. 
  

On deck and at the plate; timing the pitcher

Baseball is a notorious game of ritual and I was determined to keep mine, especially since this was our last game.  And so I brought my worn out, faded glove, kept it on my hand and popped a fist into it every now and then.  My other ritual involves the second best reason to go to the ball park besides the game and that’s the food.  When I was a kid, ball park food was mostly a tasteless joke but nowadays it’s a culinary masterpiece that, when savored on a sunny day and accompanied by the crack of the bat, easily eclipses a meal at a Michelin starred hifalutin snoot joint.  My game tradition is a Sheboygan brat, a 1/3 pound sausage bulging with calories and fat and served with grilled onions and sauerkraut followed in the later innings by a Ghirardelli hot fudge sundae with the works.  Knowing that this would be my last opportunity to gorge myself on these delights and well aware that by the 4th inning the Ghirardelli line could be two innings long I decided to beat the crowd and got my sundae before the first note of the National Anthem was struck.  I went for the brat in the 5th inning.  Look, when you’re eating what the kitchen police basically classifies as a heart stopping, death dealing toxin does it really matter that you’re having dessert first?

The Sheboygan brat

We took our seats and looking over the stadium it was clear that autumn is near, 49er football is looming and Giants baseball is fading in the lengthening shadows.  The game developed into a pitchers’ duel with the Giants clinging to the 1 run Buster Posey drove in, in the 3rd inning.  In our hearts we were hoping for the Giants to cling to their lead and claw out the win like they’d done in the two championship seasons but in our minds we were waiting for the conga line of opposing batters crossing the plate that’s marked the season.  Every time that Pirate’s superstar Andrew McCutchen came to the plate I expected him to launch a rocket into the bleachers inciting a stampede of dog day canines trying to fetch the offending ball.   But McCutchen and the rest of the Pirates continued to go down quietly, inning after inning. 

Pouncing on a bunt

And inning after inning, the lost season was nowhere to be found; lost in the joy of one glorious afternoon.  The fans lustily cheered and encouraged batters who've endured slumps that have seemed to last an entire season. Two young Asian women next to Cora discussed the nuances of the contest and screamed enthusiastically when Buster Posey snatched a bunt and started an unlikely double play.  Cora was back to doing her little voodoo gesture of waving a fist towards the field as if to give a Giant batter or pitcher some mystical mojo.  And on this day maybe it worked. 

Breaking for 2nd base

The Giants seemed to break the game open in their 3 run 8th inning.  At the very least it looked like pitcher Ryan Vogelsong’s shutout gem would be safe and even if  pulled at some point, he wouldn't get hung with an undeserved loss.  Pablo Sandoval whacked a triple driving in 2 of the runs and the crowd erupted as if the home 9 was in the thick of a pennant race and not fighting to climb out of the cellar. 

On this August afternoon the baseball gods resurrected the Giants and their fans from the purgatory of a lost season.  They anointed Vogelsong with a mesmerizing arm, blessed the fielders with crisp, flawlessness and graced the hitters with just the right measure of timely hitting.  For one afternoon those deities of the diamond sprinkled some 2012 championship spirit on a 2013 afternoon.

Twilight at the ball park 

At game’s end Cora and I began walking out to the concourse to leave while, as happens at the end of every win, the sounds of Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco began to fill the park.  Instead of continuing on as we usually do we stopped, wrapped our arms around each other’s waists and took in the last of our 2013 season.  As we held on to each other and swayed to our city’s classic anthem I was filled with Giamatti’s words and a poignant sadness; struck at that moment with an understanding of just what Giamatti was trying to convey.  Autumn is coming and much too soon summer's leaves will crumble into the bleak puddles of winter and the reporting of pitchers and catchers to spring training will seem a dark icy eternity away.  We took in the scenes of San Francisco on the scoreboard screen, the emerald green of the outfield, the orange and black of the receding crowd, the dwindling smells of the ball park and the fog pouring over the stadium.  At the end of it all we held hands and silently left.

Giamatti;s words enshrined at AT&T Park