Saturday BP, 7/14/18

I’m not sure when I stopped caring about Giants vs. A’s games.

I come from a three-way split family of baseball fans. It was always about 50% Giants, 40% Dodgers and 10% A’s, and we would go to the Giants vs. A’s games fairly frequently. The Dodger fan portion of the family would either switch to A’s loyalty or just wear their irrelevant Dodger gear.

Sami Higgins via MySpace. Yes, I said MySpace. Circa 2005. I’m the grubby one on the bottom right who just came from volunteering at a Relay for Life.

We stopped getting to games a couple of years later. Partially because that’s just how life goes; everyone grows up and gets busy. Also, this was back when you could afford to take a family group of 15-20 people to a game and not need to sell your house to do it.

It might have been around the time my Papa passed away in 2015 that the games stopped meaning as much, since he was the main A’s fan in the family. I bet you can spot him in the picture above. My uncle and cousins had already converted my Nana to being a Giants fan, mostly, by taking her to a World Series game and buying her a Hunter Pence jersey. And now there’s just one uncle left who is an A’s fan.

Or maybe it was in 2014 when the Giants cemented their dynasty. Either way, it hasn’t felt much like a rivalry in quite some time. It’s not fun to pick on A’s fans most of the time, because most of the time they seem pretty miserable already. Or they will bite your head off, almost literally.

So my experience has been that Giants fans just don’t really care about these games anymore. (Of course, as I wrote this, the Giants took a huge lead in last night’s game so this may change.)

But A’s fans do and they want you to know it.

Well, that’s probably not true, it’s more likely just people in the A’s organization who think an anti-Giants marketing strategy is stronger than a pro-A’s one, but it comes across as so petty. “Come to our games because you hate the Giants! We hate you! We’re better! Your fans aren’t real fans! We exist! Look at us! Please! Pay attention to us!”

And the sad thing is the A’s are actually fairly good this year and are in the midst of a great couple of months. You would think they would opt to market the team on its merits, but time and again they rely on the old standby.

Anyway, as Giants fans, how do you feel about the Battle of the Bay series? Not the games, obviously you’re more than likely rooting for the Giants to win them. But as a whole...thing. A marketing ploy. The trophy. Do you care? Or is it just another series?

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