Baseball '09, Volume XIII: The Thursdays of August

Thursday, August 27th.

BALL ONE: A warm night by the bay, clear skies, green grass beneath the lights, good beer, good garlic fries. There is nothing like a good game of baseball on such a night.

STRIKE ONE: And that was nothing like a good game of baseball. At least not for the Giants.

STRIKE TWO: To put it another way, as I commented to Vaughn, I sure do love watching baseball. It would have been nifty if the Giants had felt like playing some.

So, I'm just going to draw a curtain over the (in)action on the field in the Giants' 11-0 burst of generosity to the visiting Arizona Diamondbacks. We'll pretend Fred Lewis never slid down to make a catch, only for the ball to sail over his head, to name one instance of Murphy's Law in action that shall be ignored here.

Instead, there's this:

FOUL BALL: The garlic fries at the club level concourse seemed to be much less soggy than the garlic fries up on the view reserved level. This must irk the people up above, which explains the constant, gentle snowfall of peanut- and sunflower seed shells.

BALL TWO: The hot chocolate was really quite delightful.

BALL THREE: After the game, we walked from AT & T Park along the waterfront to the Embarcadero BART Station, watching the moon hang in the sky behind the skyline of the Financial District, watching the lights of the Bay Bridge arc over the Bay, enjoying the mild summer air at 11 p.m.

STRIKE THREE: The first Giants game of the year was a loss to the Diamondbacks. One of the last games of the year is a loss to the same Arizona Diamondbacks by a much worse margin. There is a pessimistic metaphor for life to be found in that, I think.

But then, just to keep me guessing, just when I figured the Giants didn't have the depth to compete for the playoffs after all, when I thought their frailties had finally been exposed, they turn around and sweep the Rockies, simultaneously tying them in the wild card race.

Baseball is a funny thing that way.