Turning 50 At The Ballpark, by Chuck Strom

When you go to baseball games, what you see at the park can be totally at odds with what happens over the rest of the season. Last October, I watched the Cincinnati Reds beat the Giants nearly to death 9-0 in the second game of the playoffs, which everyone in attendance assumed would be their last home game of 2012. Of course, that turned out not to be the case. In 2013, I attended four games and saw three victories, and the only loss was close. In my absence, however, the Giants collapsed with the worst record in baseball for about two months starting in mid-May, and their thrashing by the same Reds team in a series after the All-Star Break erased any serious thought of contention in October. I’m still not sure if I should have been at the park more for my team or that by seeing them win I put on a jinx.

Nevertheless, when I saw in July that my 50th birthday coincided with an Orange Friday night game at AT&T, when the Giants wore their orange jerseys for good luck, I quickly decided to be there for the occasion. I wanted to have a good feeling about life, and it was as good a place as any to guarantee it. Black would be my color when I turned 50, but it would come with Giant Orange.

I was prepared to go on my own, but fortunately my brother was able to come with me. I’ve come to appreciate ballpark outings as rare opportunities to deepen our friendship. Both of us have jobs and families that take up most of our time, and even on the occasions when our families visit each other, there are few opportunities for conversations that delve below the surface of life. At ballgames, however, we can spend time without having to pay attention to anything other than what happens on the field. Given my habit of getting to the ballpark when it opens to watch batting practice, we usually have several hours together, which is more than enough time to get over any initial reserve and relax. Not that I’ve found that to be difficult with him—one of his qualities I’ve appreciated most is his ability to convey an immediate warmth and ease even if we’ve been months apart, as if we’d only seen each other the other day. He does this with most people, and it is probably a reason why he has been successful. I follow my Scandinavian ancestry more closely and tend to be reserved in social situations, often because I have a hard time remembering names. I like to think, though, that I’ve improved over the years.

I was glad that Matt Cain was scheduled to start for the Giants, because he was the last member of the 2012 championship rotation whom I had yet to see pitch—a small item to cross off my list. For years, a Cain start had been a reasonable guarantee of either a win or a tight, well-pitched game, but in 2013 he, like most of the Giants rotation, had suffered a post-championship hangover and struggled for much of the year. Often he would pitch once through an opposing lineup without incident, but then he would melt down on the second pass and give up several runs. Two starts previously, he had given up three runs to the Mets while recording only two outs, failing to make it past the first inning for the first time since 2006. The visiting team that night, the Chicago Cubs, had just traded away their best hitter, Alfonso Soriano, but I still felt nervous about how the evening would go.

It looked like my worst fears would come true when the first two Cub hitters reached base, one on a single and the next on a throwing error by Pablo Sandoval. At that point, however, Cain may have gotten a little angry on the mound, because he struck out the next three hitters, much to everyone’s relief, and allowed only another two hits through the next four innings. Unfortunately, the Giants were in one of their franchise-wide slumps and managed only two hits of their own through the fifth, despite facing a pitcher, Edwin Jackson, with a 5.03 ERA before the game. The Giants had a way of making other pitchers look their best.

Cain was the first to waver, giving up a double in the sixth to Nate Schierholtz and a single to Starlin Castro, scoring Schierholtz. Though Cain got out of the inning without further damage, I thought the game had been decided right there. In the seventh, however, the Giants managed what was for them a terrific rally, loading the bases on a hit between two walks. The next hitter, Jeff Francoeur, whom the Giants had picked off the Kansas City Royals’ junk pile a few weeks back, hit a flare that just cleared the first baseman’s outstretched glove. “Get down!” I said as the ball landed softly in the outfield grass. Then the crowd roared as two runs crossed the plate. Perhaps my birthday would get a proper ending after all.

With the score still 2-1, my brother and I went downstairs to watch the ninth inning from behind the third base seats in the lower deck, not wanting to get caught in the departing crowd. As expected, Sergio Romo came out to finish the game to El Mechon, his distinctively Mexican choice for entry music. Though he had compiled a respectable number of saves during the year, I got nervous again when I saw him step onto the mound. Because his fast ball was far from dominating, he was more dependent on his control than a closer should have been. When his trademark slider worked, he could get hitters out. When it didn’t, his outings got complicated fast.

As it turned out, Romo didn’t have it that night, and the first two Cubs reached base on a single and a walk, the latter on four pitches. Romo did his best to work out of the jam, striking out the next hitter and getting the next one to hit into a fielder’s choice, moving the runners to second and third. Then the Cubs’ first baseman, Anthony Rizzo, who otherwise hit .233 during the season, hit a sharp grounder to Brandon Belt at first that went past him for some reason I couldn’t discern from where I watched across the diamond. Later on video I saw that the ball actually went through his legs in about the same way that had famously happened to Bill Buckner in the 1986 World Series. At that point, my brother and I left. It was getting late, and I had a long drive home.

On our way back we stopped by my brother’s office to pick up his laptop, so he could work at home over the weekend. It was a new building, and he showed me the view from his window. About a mile away, I could see the stadium lights shining over the game that had just concluded with the score as we’d left it, as my brother showed me on his smart phone. I felt a little sad, not so much for the loss but rather because I knew that the season was over for me. Three hours was too far for me to drive to see the Giants play out the string. It wasn’t even August yet. As we left to go home, I looked back out the window and remembered a sign I’d seen on the TV broadcast in 1988 when the Cubs played their first night game at Wrigley Field: “Will The Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights?”

– Chuck Strom