San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Three spring rituals every San Franciscan should do
There are three things every San Franciscan should do at least once: Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, get up before dawn on April 18 to go to Lotta’s Fountain to commemorate the 1906 earthquake, and sneak out of work early on a weekday afternoon to go to a Giants game.
They are rituals of spring, and each has rituals of their own. On Wednesday, I tried the ballgame.
April baseball is a bit like April love: everything is new, everything is promising. You can’t wait to get started. It’s only later that you realize there is a long haul ahead.
But in April it’s all new. I got there early, in time to walk around. There are new condos all around where parking lots used to be. One called the Canyon, on Third Street just past the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, looks promising, looks ready to open. There’s a new park along the south side of McCovey Cove, with Oracle Park and the city towers just across the water. The ballpark opened on an April day 24 years ago, so I wore my Opening Day gear, a faded black T-shirt and a nifty cap I got on that historic day. I WAS THERE, the shirt said. I felt like a pioneer. Or a relic.
I met my friend Don Cohn at the Willie Mays
statue. He’s my baseball guide, a retired firefighter and a dedicated fan since 1958.
It was the first game of the season for me, and it takes a while to settle in. I’d been watching football all fall and winter and more lately basketball’s March Madness on television — a wham-bam-slam of a sport. So baseball seemed slower, more careful, a game of inches, a marathon.
The Giants have high hopes for 2024, new players, new manager, new attitude. But they started off slowly, lost in San Diego, lost in Los Angeles, lost the first two games of a three-game set to the Washington Nationals. So the fans had a wary edge that sunny Wednesday.
And here were the Nationals again. It started off well enough, pitcher Jordan Hicks, one of the expensive new Giants ($44 million over four years) getting the side out easily in the first inning. But in the second, Washington’s Joey Gallo hit what broadcaster Jon Miller called a “towering” home run to right field. One to nothing, Nationals. Up in the club level, Don Cohn thought it
was a bad omen: “Joey Gallo, of all people,” he said in exasperation. “He’s hitting .157 and he hits a home run.’’ Gallo is a journeyman who is playing for his fifth team. “Always a Giant killer,’’ Cohn thought.
But the Giants came roaring back in their half of the second inning: a key hit by Nick Ahmed, stolen bases by Tyler Fitzgerald, good speed, good pitching. It was 3-1 quickly.
From there the Giants were clearly in charge; Hicks was good for six innings, the relievers were effective, the Nationals never threatened again. Time to put your feet up and just watch. Plenty of room. There were 25,558 people on hand in a 42,000 capacity stadium. Final score 7-1, one of those goodmood kind of games.
“Nothing Like It” is the team slogan this year, and maybe that’s true, at least on a warm April afternoon. Even after all these years it’s still impressive to see the waterfront setting of this park.
Other places have green grass, blue sky, hot dogs, scoreboards, flags streaming in the breeze and baseball, but this one has San
Francisco Bay in the background, bridges, tugboats, ferries and big ships like a moving stage set just beyond the walls. After 24 years and three other names, the stadium still feels new.
Baseball is famously a game of strategy. A thinking person’s game, but it’s also a social game, with pauses that allow you to talk to your neighbor.
Don Cohn struck up a conversation with Graham Frank, who is 9 and from Palo Alto. He had a Giants shirt, cool sunglasses and two new baseballs he got on a tour of the batting cages under the stands. Graham is new to the Bay Area, but this was his fourth Giants game. Cohn, a native San Franciscan who now lives in the Sierra foothills, isn’t sure how many Giant games he’s seen. “Maybe 500,’’ he said, “I lost track, maybe more.”
He’s been to spring training, fantasy camp, and he’s been a season-ticket holder for so long he gets special treatment. Last Monday he brought the lineup card to the other manager and the umpires, a cherished pregame ritual.
We observed all the other rituals for the fans in our own baseball afternoon: the T-shirt toss, the seventh-inning stretch, singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” standing for the last pitch.
Not all the rituals are appropriate. In the middle innings a woman dressed in muted green and wearing an A’s hat stood and urged our part of the crowd to help begin a wave, the crowd standing up and sitting like a wave around the stadium. It always looks good on television.
“No!” somebody shouted. “No wave! We don’t do the wave here! That’s an L.A. thing!”
The next San Francisco thing is on Thursday, April 18, at 5 a.m. in the morning at Lotta’s Fountain, at Geary, Kearny and Market streets, to mark the 118th anniversary of the fire and earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco.