San Francisco Days

I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June — a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham’s office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, “Oh, no, this won’t do.” He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel’s-hair polo coat and helped me into it… [When] we went back to Stoneham’s office, I took off the polo coat, and Stoneham hung it up in the closet again. I suddenly wondered how many Giants games it had seen.

—Roger Angell, “The Companions of the Game,” Five Seasons, 1975

What can be viewed as a certain sameness to every baseball season can also be looked upon as reassuring if momentarily distressing regularity. You know there’s going to be the indignity of Sunday Night Baseball; you know there’s going to be the late night West Coast opener that your system and your team aren’t quite geared to handle; you know you’ll be cursing your talented but erratic (or erratic but talented) lefty deep into the next morning when that opener, in fact, is not well handled; and you know you’ll be waiting far too long to avenge the bad taste of last night’s 10:15 start with another 10:15 start.

You also know, or at least you may have noticed, that there will be one tiny gem tucked into the schedule most every year. There will be a weekday afternoon game in San Francisco.

There was in 2006: a Wednesday afternoon win following a Tuesday night win following a Monday night loss. There was in 2007: a Wednesday afternoon win following a Tuesday night win following a Monday night loss. And there it was again in 2008, the very same pattern made famous first by Brian, Barry and Billy and then by buzzcuts. This time around, Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco was more mundane if ultimately no less satisfying: score early, pitch well, feel unease, hang on, what’s for dinner?…ooh, they’re showing it again!

You can’t necessarily count on the West Coast trip breaking just this way — although vigilant reader Ben pointed out to me after Ollie’s implosion Monday that the Mets were poised to follow a seemingly irrefutable pattern, going so far as to note we’d won the Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon games by three and two runs, respectively, in ’06 and ’07…which is just what we did in ’08. You can’t necessarily count on anything in baseball, but you like the idea that you can, especially day baseball from San Fran.

I actually took off from work in 2000 to watch the Mets play an afternoon game on TV during their first trip ever to Pac Bell. My Baseball Tonight glimpses whetted my appetite that much. It was a terrible game and a terrible series, setting the stage for the Mets’ first several sojourns there. Pac Bell (and let’s just refer to it as such, for the constant jangling of its ever changing nom de phones just gives me a headache) behaved as Turner West at the dawn of the century. It took the Mets four seasons and thirteen tries to win a single regular-season* contest there, and that didn’t happen until Piazza, New York Catcher sacrificed his groin — so to speak — to avoid being hit by an inside pitch from Jason Schmidt. Mike was pronounced out indefinitely. Then the Mets finally won a regular-season game at Pac Bell. Talk about a tough way to change your luck.

(*Feel free to interject that the Mets won an enormous and thrilling postseason game in October of 2000 at the very same venue. That took the edge off any potential Pac Bell curse before it could start leaving threatening messages on our voicemail.)

The bad taste of any given loss drenched in San Francisco sunlight will eventually block out the good vibes I have coming in to every day game there, but those vibes are always good the next time around. Pac Bell remains the best-looking park in the National League for afternoon baseball, at least on television. It simply sparkles. It’s never cloudy…never — at least not on my watch. That green lawn beyond second base just expands out into forever. Not so good for Fernando Tatis, but a damn fine sight for the invention of color TV. The brickwork, the arches, the stationary cable car, the peekthrough walkway, the fanciful glove, the silly Coke bottle, the massive scoreboard that starts somewhere near Market Street and ends in Sausalito…plus where else you gonna get a whole bay to keep you company at a ballgame?

You can count on hearing the same things from the fellas when you tune in for day baseball from San Fran. You will hear that it’s a gorgeous day, that it’s 57 degrees (it’s always 57 degrees in San Francisco), that it was a little chilly last night but it’s 57 and gorgeous this afternoon, that this is so much more comfortable than it was at Candlestick, that Candlestick was, in more polite terms than is permissible to mention on SNY, the ass end of the earth. Pac Bell, according to Gary, Keith and Ron, is everything that Candlestick wasn’t. Too much wind at Candlestick. Too much foul territory at Candlestick. Too many roving biker gangs at Candlestick. Horace Stoneham had one nip too many one fine morning at Candlestick Point in the late ’50s and was convinced by crooked elements to stick a stadium out there on the edge of the Arctic. Horace took another nip and signed on the dotted line.

Here at Pac Bell, you’ve got the scenery and you’ve got the observations that come with it. There’s the Bay Bridge — it takes you to Oakland. There’s Willie’s statue — 24 Willie Mays Plaza, to be exact. There’s McCovey Cove — imagine how many Stretch would have hit here. There’s the kayak korps — whoops, they went the way of Barry Bonds. But what a nice place, huh? What a nice day for a game, huh?

The bundling-up of the San Francisco crowd is always duly noted. I bundled up on my one trip to date to Pac Bell — a Friday night in July — and I was overmatched by the elements. My friend Fred, not a huge sports fan but an observer-at-large second to none, chuckled when I told him how Stephanie and I required defrosting after seven innings: “Yeah, whenever they show highlights, I notice everyone at a Giants game is dressed like it’s winter in the middle of summer.” Given how frigid it gets at Pac Bell yet what a marked improvement it represents in climatological terms, I can only imagine that Candlestick must have been an ice cube tray in a deep freeze in Green Bay in a particularly harsh January.

One thing that jumped out at me yesterday afternoon was something I’m not used to seeing from San Francisco in this decade: swaths of empty seats. Paid attendance was 35,646. Similar crowds were announced Monday and Tuesday nights. Horace Stoneham would have killed (or maybe even sobered up) for such figures at Candlestick, but they’re a bit thin compared to what was the norm at Pac Bell for Mets games when the park was novel, when Bonds was productive, when the Giants were any good. Capacity in San Francisco doesn’t much exceed 42,000. For several years, the wind was against you if you wanted your choice of ticket. Now, no matter how pretty their park remains, it is a veritable breeze. Something for us to think about in parochial terms down the road…perhaps.

Something else: In 2006 and again in 2007, the Mets scored five runs in the first game they played after leaving Pac Bell. And they won. Should it happen tonight starting at 10:05, you read it here first.