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.