San Jose Giants baseball is back
Baseball made a long-awaited comeback in San Jose on Tuesday night, and even with a limited-capacity crowd and everyone masked up, being back at Excite Ballpark was a breath of fresh air.
Turkey Mike’s BBQ was open and serving up favorites from the charcoal pits, and everything seemed right with the world when the Fresno player designated the “beer batter” struck out midway through the game, cutting the price of beer in half for 15 minutes. And even though the Grizzlies ruined the San Jose Giants’ homecoming party by beating them 5-3, most fans stuck around for the postgame fireworks show.
Sure, it wasn’t quite the same experience as in 2019, the last time the team played. To begin with, you can’t just walk up to the box office and buy tickets right now; advance purchase is required, and seats
are sold in “pods” of two or four. (Go to sjgiants. com for ticket information.) The seats around the pods are blocked off with caution tape, and folding chairs have their seats ziptied to the backs, which keeps people from moving around or combining pods.
The bounce houses and slides that made up the kids fun zone near the stadium entrance were cleared out, and that’s where all the fun fanbased promotions in between innings happened instead of on the field. You can leave your cash at home because it’s not being accepted for food sales or other transactions at the former Municipal Stadium, and there aren’t any vendors selling ice cream and other treats in the stands — right now, anyway. And sometime during the pandemic, construction started on another expansion of Sharks Ice, adding a new view beyond the advertising-laden outfield fence.
There have been some changes in the Giants’ front office, too: General manager Mark Wilson — who was hired by Harry Stravenos as an intern for the San Jose Bees in 1982 — retired in December after a career that included a live in-game horse race, a
Bryan Adams/Def Leppard concert in the outfield and thousands of baseball innings. And Linda Pereira, the director of player personnel who managed the host family program for players, parted ways with the team after 53 years with the organization. They were both part of the team’s charm, and they’ll be missed.
But none of those changes seems to matter much as fans got up to dance to “YWCA” or sing “Take Me Out to the Ballpark.” Baseball was back, and it felt good.
BELLS CELEBRATE >> It’s a big week for Bellarmine College Prep, the Jesuit boys school in San Jose, which is marking the 170th anniversary of its founding Saturday. The annual BellsGive fundraising campaign is tied to the anniversary as supporters are being encouraged to make a gift of at least $170 for its direction tuition aid fund. One big donor didn’t follow those rules, but Bellarmine doesn’t mind: It’s an anonymous $250,000 matching gift.
There’s more celebrating going on at Bellarmine, which has received a gold-level award as a Green Ribbon School for its sustainability efforts on campus from the state Department of Education. Two Bay Area schools — Los Altos High School and the Nueva School in Hillsborough — were among 27
schools nationwide honored as Green Ribbon Schools by the U.S. Department of Education.
DEPARTMENT OF GOOD WORKS >>
With this month’s emphasis on Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage, let’s put a spotlight on the International Children’s Assistance Network, a Milpitas-based group that has been making an impact in the valley’s Vietnamese community related to domestic violence, mental health and generational and cultural issues that have lingered in the decades since the Vietnam War.
The organization was co-founded by Quyen Vuong, a woman with a great success story. Vuong, a former refugee who earned a Fullbright fellowship in 1989 to work in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale, received her MBA at Stanford and has a master’s of social work degree from San Jose State. And it’s getting a boost this year as one of two local nonprofits — along with Midtown Family Services in San Jose — to receive grants from the Social Impact Fund created last year by the American Heart Association and Milpitas-based tech company KLA.