A Child, A Parent, A Giants Fan (Not Necessarily in that Order)

The Giants are awesome!  Oh wait, they suck!  Whatever she says!  I mean I agree with him!  Splunge!

Like some of you, I’ve been a casual fan of the McCovey Chronicles off and on for the last couple of years and like some of you I’ve become a rabid fan over the past several months.  This recent obsession is not a reflection of my persevering love of the Giants, but of my willingness to come out in the cyber-open in these relative Halcyon days of SF fandom.  Parroting some others who have fanposted for the first time recently, I have greatly enjoyed the humor, camaraderie, intelligence and overall stupendousnessnosity of the greatest baseball fans in the world!!  If I weren’t one of them, clearly I’d be sucking up to the rest of you.

I may never post again given that my statistical acumen leans more towards ERA and batting average than WAR and UZR and all the stuff you kids talk about, so I’ll take this post off-day/internal waiting-for-the-game to start opportunity and all the good, Whitesidian feelings I’m having to write a couple of goopy, sappy remembrances relating to my Dad and our shared love of the Giants and see if anyone has any similar sappy Giants family stories.  It seems like yesterday’s comments section was heading that way, kind of.

The first is a game during the time in life when many a young fan has his love of their team forged forever—between the ages of 12-15 or so.  Living in New Jersey at the time (1980) in an age before every game was everywhere whenever you wanted it, I had to wait for Saturday’s "This Week in Baseball" and the few Channel 9 broadcasts of the Giants-Mets that my Dad and I would watch together to see our heroes play for real.  I remember it like it was yesterday, made easier by the fact that I used to keep score of the games I watched on TV so I had a record of this important tilt between two teams that were 11 and 6 games back respectively on June14th.  (Game here:  http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN198006140.shtml)  John Montefusco (back in the limelight recently thanks to our man Sanchez), my favorite player at the time, had a no-hitter through five, and the Mets announcers kept talking about it.  Why would they do that?! Don’t they know the code?!  I guess they did.  It ended in the 6th, but still, we were up 6-2 going in to the bottom of the 9th with solid reliever Greg Minton coming in (you can imagine where this is going).  7 batters later, Steve Henderson had hit a walk-off three run homer against Allen Ripley.  In not so silent fashion, I threw my scorebook up into the air (never recording that nightmare home run) and ran upstairs to my room in bitter, hateful agony.  A few minutes later, my Dad quietly knocked on the door and said in a voice full of a mix of Dr. Frankensteinian horror/pride at this baseball maniac that he created "Hey buddy, it’s just one game.  We’ll get ‘em tomorrow."  Pffft-Tomorrow-I couldn’t understand the meaning of the word.

The second takes place in 1987, the summer my Dad died.  I was living on my own (in semi-squalor) in Atlanta (you thought you were in hell in 1993?  I was in the 7th layer), and it was bittersweet that the Giants were finally having some success and I wasn’t able to share it with him.  Sure 1978 and 1982 had been pretty exciting, but that’s pretty thin gruel compared to the teams we’ve had in the last 20 years.  I was attending a Giants-Braves game at the old Fulton County Stadium and the Giants were just killing the before-they-were-good Braves.  (Game here:  http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/ATL/ATL198709270.shtml).  Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you--that’s Jose Uribe with 4 hits, 2 of them triples.  A couple of guys from San Francisco were sitting in front of me (I recall that they were male nurses that apparently were on blind dates—make of that what you will).  By the end of the night, one of the guys and I had become fast-friends, bonding around the glory of being 7 games up and having shared memories of our Dads and the Giants, and as he left, he slipped me some cash, perhaps sensing my economic duress.  Hopefully now I’d be too proud to accept it (right?), but at the time, it was so weird that I didn’t think twice.  It was a $50 bill!  That was like 18 days of macaroni and cheez and Milwaukee’s Best for me!  That same evening I was also interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle as they were travelling around finding Giants fans from different cities and basking in the glow of the much-awaited playoff appearance.  I told them the whole story about my Dad and how he would have loved the season.  I went to the local library for two weeks after that game but never found the interview.  Perhaps the internet could provide it today? 

Now I find myself as a parent of two girls (9 and 7) in the midst of this very exciting season.  I gently, yet firmly try to engender a love of baseball and the Giants in them.  Well, the Giants will be their favorite team, that’s a given.  If I had to choose between one of them joining a cult or being a Dodgers fan…uh, that’s not a great analogy since they’re so similar, though one is creepier than the other.  But again they will be fans, but to what degree?  So far their fandom is more of the sympathetic type—"Well, gee, Dad, at least Edgar Renteria tried his best, right?"  "You bet, honey," I reply through clenched teeth.  These are tricky times, though—this isn’t sticking with piano lessons we’re talking about here.  Where they will end up, I don't know, but I have high hopes.

There’s been a lot of discussion on the McC C about unselfconsciously giving into the good times compared to the fun of the self-flagellating masochism that is being a Giants fan.  I think they both play a part of the Giants gamut—a lifetime journey.  Allen Ripley can be a cruel mirror on one’s angst-ridden adolescence while Jose Uribe can provide a poignant reflection on life’s passages.  I’m in either way, though I reserve the right to never watch another game at any moment.

I appreciate everybody’s indulgence in my own personal sharingisode.  I’ll hang up now and see if anyone else wants to relate a Child/Parent/Giant’s Fan story.