On a side note, is anyone else bothered by the noted decline in quality of nicknames in professional baseball? How many players, aside from Chipper Jones, are known primarily by their nicknames anymore?

The defining moment of my youthful fandom, however, has got to be when I was nine years old and I went to Dave Dravecky's comeback game against the Reds. I'm pretty sure I can still remember his line off the top of my head: 8 innings, 4 hits, 3 runs, 27 bajillion standing ovations. That was a great freaking day to be a Giants fan.

Then, at the same time I got married and moved to SF, and the A's began at least the third fire sale in my lifetime (still mad about Don Baylor), I watched that (I thought) overrated, boorish leftfielder hit 73 homeruns and draw about 3,000 walks.  With fascination, as he seemed more or less unaffected (bored) by the whole "race"; the whole surreal bit was just mindblowing to me (and still is, steroids or no).

I love being able to walk to the park after work and catch a game, and now that I've lived in Oakland and NY and SF I've come to appreciate root, root, rooting for the home team.  I love seeing young players come up, I like stolen bases, pitching, and great defense, and I look forward to the fairweather crowd leaving the park when Barry retires.  Of course, they're only there between the 3rd and 6th innings anyways, so maybe it won't make much difference.

I did make one trip to Candlestick, in 1978 with my dad.  It was pre-swoon, so things were pretty exciting. Day game, so I got a nice third-degree sunburn to go with my frostbite in June.

BB

I started paying attention to baseball in 1988, when the A's went the the WS against the goddamn Dodgers.  If nothing else, being an A's fan at that time taught me a valuable lesson.  The Dodgers are evil.  Man, I hate Kirk Gibson.

The Giants started to grab my attention in 1993 with that amazing season, but I really left baseball for awhile, and like many here, the 1997 team pulled me back.  An improbable story of a team that shouldn't have even broken .500, wins the division with some great games along the way.  I listened to the Brian Johnson game on my radio in my college dorm room.

Since then, it has been all downhill.  I watched the 2002 World Series from my office in South Carolina, and now, thankfully, I'm back on the west coast.

West Side!

I stuck with the team through the bad years in the middle 90s.  I remember listening to a lot of games on the radio at home when I was in high school.  It seemed like a blessing when they got good again in the late 90s and I appreciated it more because I had been there, sitting outside in the summer, listening to the radio through meaningless games when they struggled.

I think I started my path to become a baseball fanantic with Barry in 2001.  I had already been a Giants fan for more than a decade so I was hooked on baseball.  But I wasn't must-read-many-baseball-blogs-everyday hooked until a year or two ago.  I started down that path in 2001 when I knew I was watching something special (and better than 1998) when Bonds made his chase.  I also started to miss baseball badly around this time because I played football in college.  Our high school baseball team was horrible and I was glad to be done with it after that.  But then a couple of years out I started to get the urge to play again and it hasn't gone away.

Over the last two years I've become obsessed with baseball in general and started to pay attention to every little detail, learning the salary rules, how teams are put together, reading about baseball online every day, etc.  I thought I was only going to write a sentence or two about Will Clark but I guess there was more to the story.

And I love this site.

i grew up within a new england family in san francisco so i was kinda groomed to be a red sox fan, but as a left hander the giants had this fella named will clark who was also left handed, so while playing wiffle ball in the front yard only right handed i would be will clark and robby thompson and jose uribe tossing aside the greenwells of the bosox as the al is a insignifigant speck on the game of baseball for its love of the DH, my mom taught me to bat righty and later became a switch hitter in high school (side note i struck out jesse foppert in a game once so don't be too up on him :) even though he is a pitcher now)

i remember in fourth grade the 89 series when the giants clinched the principle came on the loud speaker and anounced it to the school, for the next 10 minutes our teacher couldn't control those of us in our giants gear (it was so worth the detention) and like many i kinda stopped following the game, still went to games but just became uninterested in it (stopped playing and everything), but that changed in 99 when in college i started hanging with a new crowd with pickup basketball games and started a wiffle ball home run derby by the pool in our apartment complex.  add in willie mays coming to our work every couple weeks to eat a late lunch while we were prepping for dinner and conversing about the giants with him and i started getting back into the game, so by the time i left for oregon i was a diehard fan again following the movements and signings of the free agents and youngsters in the minors

Of course, the Giants had Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, you know, those guys.

Of course, the Giants also went to the World Series that year. Our teacher put the games on during study hall.

It worked. I was hooked. Have been ever since.

Baseball is a powerful game... my first experience involved Astroturf-era Candlestick, the Padres 1970's road unis, and a crowd of 2,549, and it was still enough to hook me for life.

By the way, I've had two friends check out their first game memories on Retrosheet, and both were way off. ("Hmmm, I could have sworn McCovey hit seven homers that day, but maybe he didn't...") A caller to KNBR a few weeks ago talked about going to his first game "the day after Joe Morgan eliminated the Dodgers," which would be a neat trick since that happened on the last day of the season.