Giants 5, Fathers 7: The Comeback That Wasn't.

On Tuesday while I was at work, I got an unexpected but very welcome invitation from my friend David.  He was the generous recipient of his boss's two Field Club level tickets to that night's Giants game, and he wanted me to join him.  I was coy at first.  I reminded David that I had just sat in Field Club a few weeks ago with my wife, and I didn't think it was wise to spend that much on tickets more than once in a month.  He told me the tickets were free.  I actually suspected as much, but I didn't want to be presumptuous.  Free baseball in primo seats is difficult to pass up, even on short notice.  Once I got Duckie's buy-in, I told David I would come along.

You might recall that my last trip to Field Club seating at AT&T Park was a mixed bag.  This trip was no different.  I didn't get to go home with a nice memento like last time, but the game was a lot better even if the outcome was similarly disappointing.

The Set-up:
We got a late start on the night.  David's wife, Suzannah (Ooooooo, shout-out to you, girl!), had to work until 7 pm, so David had to stick around the house to take care of his daughter, Noa, until he could make the hand-off to Suzannah.  Noa is seven months old, so she's not quite to the point where you can plop her in front of the TV with some Mac 'n Cheese, kiss her on the forehead and walk out the door for a little baseball.  Maybe next year.  Fortunately, David's tickets came with a parking pass,  so we drove to the game instead of making the long, slow trip on MUNI.  In the end, we only missed the first inning and a half, and as it turned out, we didn't really want to see that part of the game anyway.

The club portion of the Field Club seating is really just a big food court, and you walk right into it when you use the super convenient, super exclusive Field Club entrance (which, of course, we did).  Once you're in the massive cavern of beer and fattening foods, it doesn't make much sense to go to seats without your hands full of dinner and drink.  So that's what we did.   Field Club doesn't offer Cha-Cha Bowls (a serious oversight, in my opinion), so I went with a Polish sausage.  David's eyes went all kaleidoscope-y with all the exciting options, and he decided to break with tradition.  He went for a meatball sub.  Later in the game I stopped back for some made-to-order caramel corn (they serve it to you in a Chinese take-out container.  Mmmmmm....buttery sugar).  It was all good.

The Game:
By the time we got to our seats, the Giants were already down 3-0.  If you've followed the Giants at all over the past month, you know that 3 runs is generally considered to be an insurmountable deficit for their horrible offense to overcome.  Needless to say David and I were not encouraged.

Now, I don't generally do game summaries in my baseball blog posts, but since this game turned out to be pretty exciting, I'll be mixing in a little more detail from the game into this post.

As I was saying...the Giants were already down when David and I sat down, and the Padres threw another run on the board in the fourth to make the situation feel particularly hopeless.  We were left to find ways to amuse ourselves as we waited for the Giants' bats to wake up...or not.

One of my favorite games to play at any ballpark is the "Make Entertaining and Occasionally Cruel Observations About The Teams" game.  David was totally on board for this.  Here's what we came up with:

Ugly Nick Hundley
 

1.) The picture of Padres catcher Nick Hundley shown on the scoreboard for his plate appearances was awful.  He looked kind of like a sneering hick who might have been part of Kiefer Sutherland's pack of hoodlums in 'Stand By Me'.  The picture was bad enough that David and I just started calling him "Ugly Nick".  (The following night, David and I watched the second game of the series from our respective homes.  After a Hundley strikeout, David texted me, "Hit the pine, Ugly Nick.")
2.) Padres third baseman Logan Forsythe officially earned his place among the Worst Names in Baseball.  I'm sure Trevor Plouffe will welcome him with open arms.
3.) Padres outfielder Kyle Blanks is huge.  Seeing the true size of the gigantic baseball players is one of the benefits of sitting in Field Club.  And by the way, Kyle Blanks is huge.
4.) At some point, Giants shortstop Orlando Cabrera ended up on second base (I know!  I was as surprised as you are.)  When he got there, he had a nice little jovial chat with the Padres second baseman.  It wasn't until later that I realized that person was Orlando Hudson.  It was an all Orlando summit.  If only we could recreate the event at the foot of the Orlando Cepeda statue outside the park...and everyone could eat a Cha-Cha Bowl....awesomeness.

The other compelling entertainment available to us as we suffered through the first five innings of the game was provided by our neighbors in the stands.  Early on we were introduced to the cheers of a guy a few rows behind us who sounded like he might have been Aaron Rowand's little league coach.  "Watch the ball come all the way in!  Good job there, kid!"   All game long, he was hopelessly upbeat though in a condescending and pointless way that might be appropriate at a slow-pitch softball game, but not at a professional baseball game.

Sharing Row M with us were a bunch of guys in business casual attire who kept getting up for alternating beer runs and trips to the bathroom.  Since we had the two seats closest to the aisle, they kept walking in front of us.  At least they apologized for it.  The weren't actually all that entertaining.  Mostly, they were annoying.

A few rows ahead of us and across the aisle were a couple more colorful fans.  First there was a guy dubbed "House of Pain" by the people behind us.  The moniker fit.  He was a tall, skinny white guy, shaved bald and heavily tattooed.  He was wearing a black knit cap all askew as if he were trying to express some sort of mid 90s hip-hop sentiment....you know...like House of Pain.  He emoted convincingly throughout the game.  He really cared.  And he wasn't so bad.  His buddy, on the other hand, I didn't care for.  I'll call him Asshole Guy.   Despite being decked out in full Giants regalia, he decided in the late innings of the game he was going to heckle Brian Wilson, the Giants closer.  He would yell things like "Hey Wilson!  Does your butt hurt?" or "Brian why don't you stop shaving yourself?"  Do those sound like reasonable taunts to you?  Of course not.  They're idiotic.  And why was he dong that, anyway?

This is Lou Seal holding a little girl in the aisle near our seats.

The guy in the black knit cap on the aisle is House of Pain, and

the guy two seats to HoP's left is Asshole Guy.

Behind House of Pain and Asshole Guy was a woman with her three year-old daughter.  There aren't generally a lot of kids in Field Club, and this little girl was a trooper.  She made it all the way to the end of the game without conking out.  In the eighth inning, or so, David pointed her out to me and said "That girl is a plate."  I didn't understand.  I made him say it four more times before I realized he was really saying, "That girl is up late," which makes a lot more sense.  I'm getting stupid in my old age. 

Back to the game.

In the sixth inning, the Giants finally scored some runs.  Pablo Sandoval and Aubrey Huff were on 3rd and 2nd, respectively.  Brandon Belt grounded to Padres first baseman Jesus Guzman, and I think we all felt impending disaster because Pablo was way too far off third.  Guzman felt it, too.  He wanted to get the lead runner, and he got greedy.  Instead of stepping on first to get the out, he airmailed an ugly, ugly throw to third that was way out of Logan Forsythe's reach.  Both Sandoval and Huff scored, and we were all ecstatic.  High fives all around.  At the end of the inning it was 4-2.

The Padres scored again in the seventh thanks to an error by Jeff Keppinger.  The Giants failed to score in the bottom of the inning, and the Padres returned the favor in the top of the eighth.

In the bottom of the eight, things got interesting.  Brandon Belt singled.  One out later, Cody Ross doubled allowing Belt to score.  Then Aaron Rowand got on due to an error which also moved Ross to third.  And then something crazy happened. 

Bruce Bochy decided that this high pressure situation was the perfect time to put in his fourth string catcher (with Posey out for the season and Whiteside out with a concussion, the Giants needed to bring up a back-up to back up the back-up's back-up).  So Boch replaced Chris Stewart with Hector Sanchez.  According to the Giants' scoreboard, Sanchez is from Maracay, Aragua.  That threw us for a loop.  What the hell country is Aragua?  Answer: It's not a country.  It's a state in Venezuela.  I just learned that in the interwebs. I'm deeply flattered that the staff at AT&T Park assumed we were so savvy about geography that we knew that.  Though, they were wrong.  Anyway, Bochy really wanted this guy to bat.  Needless to say, we were concerned.  Rowand's little league coach was concerned.  The beer-swilling pee-boys were concerned.  I'm sure House of Pain was concerned, even if Asshole Guy was too busy being an asshole to care.  We were collective yelling, "Bochy!  What are you?  Crazy?"  Turns out, no.  He wasn't crazy.  Sanchez hit an RBI single. 

The Giants followed that up with one more run on a hit by Orlando Cabrera.  The game was tied!  The Giants were back in it!  The crowd was back in it!  We were all in it!

But we were arrogant, and forgetful.  We forgot that the Giants' most dependable relievers, Brian Wilson and Sergio Romo, were not available.  The Giants would have to rely on the likes of Ramon Ramirez and Steve Edlefson, and they would fail. We would not be leaving on the high of a walk-off victory.  With the help of Ugly Nick Hundley and his compatriots, the Padres scored two runs in the top of the ninth, and we were back out of it.  The Padres still had their lights-out closer, Heath Bell, available, and he did exactly what we knew he would do.  He retired the heart of the Giants line-up in order.  Final score 7-5 favoring the fellows from The Whale's Vagina.

Wrap-up:
Field Club is awesome and convenient, though apparently my presence there is a bad omen for Giants' success.  The Giants are 0-2 when I've sat in that part of the park.  After the game, David and I walked back to his car disappointed, but not broken.  We were able to bolster our spirits by repeating the best name in baseball over and over again in random contexts.  In fact, I recommend you all try it when your team loses a painful game and starts to look like the play-offs may not be attainable.  Say it with me now:  Jair Jurrjens.  Jair Jurrjens.  Jair Jurrjens.  Ahhhhhhhhhh.

PhinisheD

I realized a while back that I have a whole bunch of crap lying around the house that I don't really need or want, but I keep it around for sentimental reasons.  It struck me that this blog would provide me with a perfect opportunity to get rid off some of this junk.  I'd just take a picture, tell a story, and throw the useless sentimental object in the trash.  Sound good?  Here's my first post in that vein.

Back in 2002, my research adviser at Berkeley was kind enough to let me write-up my dissertation and leave with my Ph.D.  Grad school wasn't always a great time, but I really enjoyed the process of writing up.   I'd spend a few hours typing away in my apartment each morning, then I'd go meet friends for lunch and a few games of pool around noon, and I'd wrap up the day with a few more hours of writing in the afternoon.  I never spent more than seven or eight hours typing in a day.  It was the best time I had in grad school and probably one of the most relaxing periods of my life.  But the vengeful gods of academic research had their clipboards out, and they were marking off the karma as I burned it away.  And then one day, the chickens came home to roost.

Nine years ago, the technology behind electronic document management was still beyond the capacity of your average organic chemistry grad student.  As a result, I was left to use the old school cut and paste strategies in order to prepare my NMR spectra.  I actually employed real scissors and glue (or maybe it was scotch tape).  That part was easy.  Unfortunately, dissertations with clumsy hand-cropped spectra taped or glued onto low quality lab printer paper don't exactly fit the University guidelines for thesis approval.  So I had to transfer the NMRs to dissertation-quality paper by photocopying.  Piece o' cake, right?

So one day in mid-May, I had all my writing completed, approved by my committee, and printed out in the correct format on the correct paper.  All I had to do was get those spectra transferred onto the good paper, and I would be all set to submit my thesis.  So I made a plan to do both those things in one day.  But transferring those spectra turned out to be a complete pain in the ass.  That high quality paper is so soft, that creases form really easily when photocopying.  It took all day trekking back and forth across the campus between my lab and Kinko's trying all sorts of techniques to get my spectra printed as efficiently as possible.  All the while I was throwing away valuable pieces of expensive but ruined paper.  I was incredibly frustrated.  My blood pressure is climbing just thinking about it.  By the end of the day, I literally broke out in a rash which stuck around for two weeks -- all the way through commencement. The worst part is that my frustration was completely pointless. I still had plenty of time before the semester deadline.

So the next day, blotchy and itchy, I walked into the filing office8 holding an envelope containing my thesis with all the spectra copied onto the required paper.  Somebody checked over my work and then handed me a See's chocolate lollipop with a PhinisheD labeled pasted to it (see above).  I've had that lollipop ever since, and it's been sitting in a mug on my dresser for the past few years.  Nine years is a little long to keep a lollipop, and it's time to get rid of it.  I don't think I need a reminder of the most frustrating day of my life hanging around anyway.

Giants 0, Pirates 5: A Night of Giant Generosity

My wife is difficult to buy gifts for.  She doesn't need or want lots of stuff.  When I ask her what to get her for her birthday or Christmas or what-have-you, she just says she wants to spend time with me (bless her heart).  This makes her slightly crazy, but I think she's sincere.  When her birthday rolled around this July, I decided that I would put her to the test.  I bought us tickets to a Giants game.  There's a good 3 hours of togetherness, and that's just the game.  You can tack on about eighty minutes of travel time on MUNI,  and since Duckie and I are both anxiously punctual people we're always early.  Let's add another hour for that.  That's five to six hours of Chip and Duc time.  BAM!  Happy birthday, baby!

Now, this was still a birthday gift, so I didn't mess around with the tickets.  Through StubHub I found some really nice Field Club seats five rows behind the Giants dugout.  I knew Duc would want to be close, and she would love a chance to see her favorite Giant, Lou Seal the mascot, up close and personal.  Lou tends to run around on top of the Giants dugout under high pressure situations, so the seats I found were perfect.  And by the transitive property I am perfect.

The Food:
It was a good thing we got to the game early.  Since our seats were so close we wanted to be able to pay attention to the game so we wouldn't be knocked out of our chairs by foul balls.  Paying attention is hard to do with your face buried in a plate of garlic fries.  The early arrival allowed us to grab our dinners in the mini food court behind the center field bleachers and then wander around aimlessly for a while as we tried to find our way into the Field Club seating.  When finally made it to our seats, we still had plenty of time to eat before the game.

Anybody who's ever been to a Giants game with me knows what my go-to dish is at AT&T Park: the Cha Cha Bowl. This time I tried something new.  A Baby Bull tri-tip sandwich. It was tasty and all, but at $12.75 it certainly doesn't surpass the Cha Cha Bowl in quality to price ratio.

Duc was craving soup so she went for a bread bowl of New England clam chowder.  The soup was good, but like bread bowls everywhere, it was much too much bread relative to the amount of soup. Ninety-five per cent of the bowl went uneaten (yes I measured), so we ended up supplementing our dinners with an order of chicken tenders with fries.  Basically a kids' meal item from any family restaurant chain.  We (meaning I) had Dibs for dessert.  All in all, it wasn't the best ball park dinner ever but as it turns out, the food was still better than the game.

The Awful Awful Game:

The game sucked.  I won't go into the details.  In fact, I'm going to invoke a little revisionist optimism here and propose that the Giants deliberately dropped the game to the beleaguered Pirates who had lost 10 consecutive games coming into San Francisco.  They're a big-hearted team, these G-Men.  In fact, allowing the Pirates to regain some of their dignity wasn't the last act of generosity perpetrated by the Giants during the game.

In the top of the third, Giants starting pitcher Ryan Vogelsong loaded the bases with two out.  In an act of excessive kindness, he walked in a run to help the Pirates cause, giving them a 3-0 lead, and, of course, the bases were still loaded for Pirates shortstop Brandon Wood.  Then, something amazing happened.  Wood hit a grounder to Giants third baseman Pablo "Kung Fu Panda" Sandoval (that's not the amazing part).   Pablo fielded the ball and stepped on third for the last out of the half-inning (still not the amazing part, though in that game it was certainly a welcome result).  The majority of the crowd in our section stood and called out to Pablo in the hopes he would throw us the ball (not amazing.  Calm down, we're close).  So Pablo threw the ball into the crowd.  It essentially flew down the aisle closest to third base.  Who do you think had an aisle seat?  Who do you think was wearing a glove for the purpose of protecting his wife from hard hit foul balls?  Who do yo think deftly adroitly skillfully reached out and plucked the ball out of thin air?  I'll give you a hint: the answer is the same to all three questions.  I'll give you another hint: the answer rhymes with Flip Crazy.  If you haven't guessed that it was me by now, you are probably not going to be a future Jeopardy champion (now you can be amazed).

So now we have an honest-to-God game-used baseball on our shelf of bobbleheads and other baseball memorabilia.  Sure, it might have been more physically impressive to have caught a foul ball, but the quality of the ball we got is much higher.  This is a ball that was actually used to make an out and end a scoring opportunity for the visiting Pirates.  A foul ball doesn't even necessarily count as strikes.  Yep, we got a good ball from a terrible game.

About six years ago, Duckie and I had bleacher seats at a Giants game, and we actually arrived early enough to see the Giants batting practice.  Marquis Grissom was in the outfield shagging flies as we watched. When it was time for the Giants to head into the dugout, Grissom chucked his last ball into the stands.  He threw it right at me.  I reached up reluctantly and watched the ball careen off my thumb into another section of the stands where some jerk pocketed it for himself.  I left the park that night with a bruised thumb, no lousy batting practice ball, and a pathetic story of my own incompetence.  That was my "I almost got a ball" story, and now I get to retire it.  It's been replaced by a "the day I got a ball at a lousy baseball game" story.  Someday, I hope to make another upgrade to a "the day I caught a ball at a good game" story, but for now I'll savor what I've got.

Athletics 7, Twins 3 -- and a game of Mound Ball to boot

I know, I know.  It's another baseball post.  I was hoping to sneak something else between game summaries, but it hasn't happened.  I promise to work on it.

I even thought about skipping this summary completely, but since Duckie and I attended the A's/Twins game last Sunday, the A's have been swept in Seattle by one of the worst offenses in baseball and they've also dropped the first of the weekend series in Tampa.  It would be a shame if Duckie and I attended the last win of the season for the A's, and I completely failed to blog about it.

Going into the game, the A's were actually playing pretty well.   They were scoring more runs per game than anyone else in baseball after the All-Star break.  At least I think I read that somewhere.  In any case, that wasn't what brought us to the game.   We bought the tickets months ago with the hope of getting a hold of the promotional giveaway item for the game: gold Kurt Suzuki jerseys.  We knew the Coliseum would be handing out the jerseys to the first 15,000 fans, and we made sure to get there an hour early to get ours (though, honestly, based on fan attendance at A's games, I wasn't worried about missing out).  The jerseys are pretty sweet.  Take a look:

The Food:

With our jerseys in hand and an hour to kill before game time, we took the opportunity to have a nice ballpark lunch.  Duc has been craving spicy and tangy foods these days, so she wanted nachos with extra jalapenos, and I decided to go the hot dog route.  I bought the dog first from a special sausage-centered concession stand.  For some reason my focus was on total quantity of food, so I picked the Super Atomic Dog with peppers and onions for $7.50 over a bratwurst for $5.95.  It was the wrong choice. (I'll 'splain shortly).  I don't remember what I paid for the nachos, but I do remember that the woman serving me took my request for extra jalapenos very seriously.  I almost told her to stop as she added tongful after tongful to the top off the tortilla chips.  It looked like a lot of freaking jalapenos, but the amount worked out fine in the end.

Why was the Super Atomic Dog a mistake?  First of all, somehow my puny malfunctioning brain didn't catch on to the fact that "Atomic" meant the dog would be spicy.  I like spicy food, but not so much in hot dog form.  Second, the juice from grilled peppers and onions dissolved the crease of the bun which disintegrated when I picked it up.  The whole thing was a messy pain in the ass to eat, and much of the peppers and onions ended up in a pile in the tray. That's what you get for bringing your malfunctioning idiot brain to the ballpark. Duc's nachos were more successful.  Not all the jalapenos were eaten, but we put a good dent in them.

Off the field:

The off-the-field entertainment was typical stuff.  There was a weird competition in which two ten year-olds put on visors with tea bags dangling off them and they had 1 minute to flip both tea bags onto the brim of their visor without using their hands to win a prize.  I prefer the frozen t-shirt competition in Cleveland.  There's something unsavory about tea bags.

The best off-field entertainment, though, was provided by our neighbor to my right and a game called 'Mound Ball'.  I talked to this guy a bit and learned that he came up from Sonora with his friend and his friend's girlfriend.  Apparently, they were originally going to bring the friend's 30 year-old son so he could see Twin's catcher Joe Mauer play ball.  This was something of a bucket-list wish for the son who had some form of terminal cancer.  Unfortunately, the son passed away a month before the game.  A sad story to be sure, but it didn't keep the group from having a good time at the game.  The game of 'Mound Ball' certainly contributed to the fun.

Mound Ball works like this: every inning the three participants put a dollar in a cup (in this case the money apparently ended up in the girlfriend's bra -- a different sort of cup, but still a cup I guess).  Each inning is assigned to a different player in rotation.  After the third out of every half inning, the umpire throws a baseball toward the mound for the next pitcher to use for his warm up.  Sometimes the ball rolls up the mound and stays on the dirt, but most of the time it rolls all the way back down to the grass.  If the ball the umpire throws to the mound at the end of the inning (the balls used in the middle of the inning don't count) stays completely on the dirt -- it can't be touching the grass at all -- the player assigned that inning gets to take all the cash in the cup at that time.  If the ball touches the grass, the players just add another dollar apiece and move on to the next inning.  The point is that the money builds up until somebody wins, kind of like a skins game.

Okay, so it's not the most exciting game in the world, but it kept our neighbors occupied.  It also provided the single most enjoyable off-field moment of the game.  When the 6th inning rolled around, the Mound Ball moolah had gone uncollected by any of the players.  Our nearest neighbor owned the rights to the inning.  When the A's surrendered their third out, the ump chucked a ball at the mound, and sure enough it rolled up onto the dirt and sat there.  Our neighbor stood and cheered it all the way: "Go! Go! Go! YEEESSSSSSSS!"  Of course no one in our vicinity was standing or cheering for any reason (Why would they? The A's just got out), so our friend stuck out like a loud middle-aged nut job screaming for no reason.  He made $18.  That's enough to buy a ticket to another A's game.

The Game:
I'll keep this brief.  The A's won, so it was a great game.  Brandon McCarthy pitched very well for the green and gold, striking out 9 Twinkies.  The bullpen struck out five more to bring the total to 14 Ks.  In fact, the only Twin not to strike out was the aforementioned Joe Mauer.  Even pinch-hitter Trevor Plouffe struck out.  I only mention him because his name is on the list of "Worst Names in Baseball," along with Taylor Teagarden and Madison Bumgarner.  Plouffe (rhymes with poof) sounds like something used to apply make-up, or maybe a brand of toilet paper.  The boy needs a name change.

So we saw the A's last game of its best month this season.  Since then, they've sucked.  I don't really think the A's will go winless for the remainder of the season, but it'll be a shame if they just suck through August and September.  More July would be nice.