Take me out to the ball game

Jose and I went to see the Giants play the Dodgers yesterday at Oracle Park. This continued a tradition stretching over many years of us going to a game or two each season, although last year, for obvious reasons, that tradition was interrupted.

Going to see the Giants is a always a highpoint of my summers. Ever since I was six or seven years old, living three blocks from Yankee Stadium in the 1950s, I’ve loved going to ballgames. My father, who was an ardent Giants fan until they moved to San Francisco, used to take me to see them at the old Polo Grounds; we’d walk over the bridge crossing the Harlem River into Manhattan. Whenever the Giants played their greatest enemies, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the tension was palpable.

So yesterday’s Giants-Dodgers game was the place to be. Both teams are doing well in the National League West, the Giants in first place, the Dodgers in second. The Giants have a lot of young players; even Jose, who keeps up with these things, didn’t recognize some of them. The weather was baseball-perfect: mild, about 70 degrees, with fleecy white clouds scudding in front of a hot sun. The boats were gathered in McCovey Cove, hoping to scoop up a home run ball.

We had good seats, on the ground level, about seven rows up from the first-base line.

Jose had brought two of his grandsons, ages six and nine. This was their first-ever professional baseball game, and it had also been their first time on a ferry boat: they’d come over from Larkspur. I told the younger boy, Max, that something very special was going to happen in the seventh inning.

“Will they squirt water?” he asked. He thought the giant scoreboard had some kind of contraption.

“You’ll just have to wait and see.”

At the seventh inning everyone rose, and 35,000 people lustily sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I’ve been singing that song at ballgames for 65 years and I still love it.

Many people weren’t masked. I had thought that, with the delta variant, they would be, but no. I was, and so were Jose and the kids.

But people were just so happy to be outside, at Oracle Park, on a beautiful day. Probably most of them had been vaccinated, and they felt that, having done their part, they didn’t have to mask. That’s the conversation going on now in America.

It’s hard to describe the happiness of being at a baseball game. People may have worries and cares, but they’re set aside for those magical hours. Everybody cheers for the same things and groans when things go south. The organist plays his silly little tunes and we all clap along. Somebody starts to chant: LET’S GO GIANTS and suddenly thousands of others join in. But “we don’t do the wave,” as one woman seated behind me explained to her friend. The camera catches up with someone in the stands—a kid wearing a Posey shirt, a young woman dancing—and their face goes up on the scoreboard, 40-feet high. People laugh, cheer, eat hot dogs and garlic fries and ice cream. (Max insisted on letting his melt to soup, and then he drank it through a straw.)

Oracle Park has completely transformed this part of eastern San Francisco, in a good way in my opinion. It made me think of our current struggle in Oakland to have a new A’s stadium built on the waterfront. A lot of people in Oakland would say that Oracle Park has destroyed the old neighborhood. Where before there was lots of cheap housing and auto body shops, now it’s multi-million dollar condos and expensive restaurants. Is that “gentrification,” or is it a healthy upgrade?

Anyhow, the Giants beat the Dodgers 5-0, and everybody was happy (except for a few Dodgers fans).