Forever Giant

The thing about breaking a bone is that you’re going to be aware that it’s different for the rest of your life. I broke my collarbone nine years ago and sometimes my collarbone still aches. I broke my arm four months ago and a surgeon opened it up and screwed the pieces back together, and now I can’t clap without being reminded, oh, right, you fell off your bicycle and you’re in your thirties. It hurts to clap. I went to see Matt Cain’s final game on Saturday. I clapped for what had to have been five straight minutes. I clapped when Bruce Bochy walked out to pull him. I clapped while he walked to the dugout for the final time. I clapped when he put his hands in the air, a gesture acknowledging his fans and also seeming to ask all of us what the damn fuss was about. I clapped when he threw his hat into the dugout. I clapped when his teammates hugged him, one by one by one. I didn’t realize I was sobbing until I wondered why my dress was wet. I clapped until I thought my arm was going to fall off. I would have clapped my way into hell.

The Giants lost ninety-eight games in the 2017 season. They played one hundred and sixty two of them. They — we?— finished forty games back of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I don’t know why. I’ve never been one to armchair manage. Some seasons suck because of injury. Some seasons suck because of management. Some seasons suck because there are only thirty teams and the other ones were better. I don’t know. “Odd year bullshit”, someone will mutter near you at some point at a sports bar, at AT&T Park, at your dentist’s office. A woman made me a latte this morning and saw my Giants sweatshirt and asked me if next year is our year. I told her that I sure hope so. She accepted the response and didn’t bother telling me that I didn’t answer the question. I don’t know. I assume it isn’t. What I should have told her was that on Saturday, I walked by three commissioner’s trophies. They are so pretty. There is gold trim on my sweatshirt. I don’t like to be a complainer.

In the middle-of-the-top-of-the-fifth, Bruce Bochy walked out of the dugout and approached Matt Cain on the pitcher’s mound. The stadium booed. Giants fans booed Bruce Bochy. I am not a booer — hurts my throat and I don’t like to be intentionally mean — so instead, I started crying. Not like this, not for Matt Cain. This is a bullshit garbage time game for a bullshit garbage time team and I would sacrifice nearly anything I own to watch Matt Cain throw just one more baseball. If he doesn’t make it through the end of the fifth, he isn’t eligible for the win. Give Matt Cain one more win. Just one more stupid, whatever win. Give him the Game 161, holy shit how were we this bad, it means nothing but this stupid game is nothing if not for its dedication to symbolism win.

Matt Cain threw more baseballs.

Specifically: He threw baseballs to Austin Hedges. Strikeout, swinging. He threw baseballs to Jhoulys Chacin. Strike, 0–1. Foul, 0–2. The entire stadium stood up and there went my hands. Clapping and clapping and clapping. Matt Cain threw a ball, which always sucks the life out of a two out, 0–2 count. AT&T Park did not flinch. Clapping and clapping and clapping. I haven’t heard the call yet; I didn’t have a radio at the ballpark and my phone was nearly dead. Everyone around me was Instagramming. 1–2 count, two outs, here’s the pitch… Chacin to Brandon Crawford and the throw to first is… good.

My mouth was open and I meant to be screaming and it took me a little while to realize I wasn’t.

I have had a hard couple of years. It feels like I put that backstory in everything I ever write and I’ll skip the details here. I have had a hard couple of years; I am in search of projects. When my husband and I were divorcing almost a decade ago I got really into scarves. I have conquered massive depressive episodes thanks to the New York Times crossword puzzle. In 2016 I started seeing movies. Like, a lot of movies. Unsatisfied with the ability to categorize and over-analyze that behavior, in 2017 I took to the California Sweep. I was going to see every California team — five — in their home ballparks, and this is the kicker: playing only California teams.

I practiced by starting my season in Scottsdale. Padres at Giants, Padres at Cubs, Giants at Padres. Three ballparks, five hot dogs, and a number of beers I will not disclose other than to note that one of them was an Old Style, because the World Series Champions deserve some respect.

I went to opening weekend in San Diego. Giants-Padres. We lost the series. I came back to San Francisco. Padres-Giants. I don’t remember if we won; mathematically, we probably didn’t. I remember who I saw the game with. I went to Angels-A’s alone; it was freezing and it was my second extra innings game in four days.

(The Friday before, I impulse-attended a Giants game that did not end until 12:45 in the morning. The Giants beat the Reds in the seventeenth inning. I do not leave games.)

I went to Anaheim to watch Angels-A’s; this was eight weeks ago and I swear I don’t remember who won because all I’ll ever remember is sitting on the concrete in the parking lot afterward staring at the sky because I knew where they were setting off the fireworks from. I screamed and giggled as stars fell into my hair and they cemented in me a permanent fondness for Anaheim.

And then I went to Dodger Stadium, where the Dodgers play baseball, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this about the Dodgers, but they are very good at playing baseball. And I sat there while they clenched the division. The team rushed to hug each other and the stadium erupted, and I watched that happen, and then I slunk out. Say what you will about me: I know when I have outstayed my welcome. There were fireworks after that game too. I don’t remember what they looked like.

The Giants lost Game 161. The Giants lost Game 161, because this game is cruel and the Giants are not very good at baseball. Matt Cain was not responsible for the loss. The Giants were going to win a baseball game, it was the ninth and we were up 2–1 because when you play the Padres it is always a one-run difference and then Sam Dyson threw a baseball to Austin Hedges and he hit that baseball and suddenly it was tied and then more suddenly the one-run difference was the bad kind. I had abandoned my seat innings ago in favor of a nomadic viewing experience that took my Irish skin out of the sun. By this point I was leaning on a railing at the back of the bleachers. A man in a Dodger hat walked up an aisle and raised his hands in the air in a gesture that somehow communicated “Go ahead, I know” and two full sections booed him. A Padres fan stood on a bleacher and flipped him off with both hands. His team won 104 games this year. He’s going to be all right.

Here’s the thing about losing Game 161: I don’t think I’m going to remember that we lost. Even if I do — how would that be the story? It was one game. It was one game, a garbage game, at the end of a garbage season. There are 162 of them. Sweating an individual game loss is a good way to make quick work of your sports fandom career.

Here is the weird secret about sports: you’re going to spend most of your time losing. Just focusing on baseball, there are thirty teams. Every year, only one of them gets to win. If sports followed any general law of probability — and they don’t — that means that at most, you’re going to snag one of those shiny trophies of your own once every thirty years. You can have one at birth, and you can have one when you’re a grownup, and you can have one when you’re approaching retirement, and you may have a third if you are very lucky.

But sports do not follow general law of probability. Cubs fans who lived to gain a third digit to their age still died and never knew what that trophy looked like in its fancy case at Wrigley. If we’re catching up on math, the Cubs are still owed a few more, to say nothing of the Indians, the Mariners, the Padres. Maybe you end up lucky and you are born in a place where teams are known to win; maybe you end up lucky and you move to San Francisco and you adopt the Giants two years before Even Year Bullshit takes hold and you, you bandwagoner, you get to wear a sweatshirt that has gold on it. And once you take on other sports — when you get yourself a football team, a basketball team, a hockey team — you’d think that gives you a better shot at one of those pretty trophies or rings or whatever, but it doesn’t. If you want to do this thing, you’re going to spend most of your time not winning.

When it comes to convincing your friends to like sports, I have a track record of zero. I am a bad brand ambassador. I convinced three friends who don’t watch football to play fantasy football with me this year and that’s honestly the best I’ve ever done. Because anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of sitting at a bar with me while my team is playing has watched me sit there in what has to look like legitimate agony. I have this weird tick where I twist my fingers up in each other and I put my face in my hands and I mutter at my phone and I use completely inappropriate language and I’m something of a yeller. It doesn’t look appealing, and I know that because I have never once convinced a friend that isn’t already in this that sports are fun. “You’re going to spend most of your time losing” isn’t the best pitch I’ve ever made. And I don’t have a better pitch because, hand to god, I don’t think people should be sports fans. There are better ways to spend your time, or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know, because I devote my entire life to this. As I write this there is a Colts-Seahawks game on my television. I do not like the Colts or the Seahawks, my fantasy team is down by fifty, and the score of an actual game in the National Football League is 3–2. That’s a score of a Padres game, not a sport where the good play gives you seven. My real team is 1–3 and the fake team I made up to make me more mad is 0–4. You spend most of your time losing.

It’s going to sound like I made this one up for the sake of poetry or knowing how to end this essay, but I swear to god it is 100% true. Walking, alone, after the end of the game, in search of beer and a place that didn’t have a television to show me “highlights”, I was a few feet ahead of a man and his son. I’m no good with kids but I’m going to say he was about eight. His dad had taken him to Matt Cain’s final game. “I’m sorry we didn’t win,” he said to someone whose entire life has been 37.5% composed of years where the Giants won the World Series. And his son responded: “It’s okay. Even if we don’t win, it’s still fun!”

Youth.

But what he will figure out over the course of his lifetime is: Even if we don’t win, we will hold on to the memories that are good. We will remember how much our hearts needed Bruce Bochy to not pull Matt Cain, to let this last just a little longer, please. We will remember the second that Matt Cain snapped his stoicism and smiled and flung his hat into the dugout. We will remember the night we won the Series and we screamed ourselves hoarse in the middle of the street. We will remember hot dogs and sunburns and laughing in the sunshine. We will remember buying beers for our friends whose teams embarrassed themselves; we will remember the beers bought for us because man, that was… it’s a long season, and there are more to go.

We lost, but we will be back here tomorrow.

While writing this, there was a pick in the Seahawks-Colts game that was so flawless it was like Jacoby Brissett had rehearsed it. It was returned for a Seahawks TD. Blair Walsh successfully scored his PAT and the Seahawks are up 10–2. Sports are stupid. Points are finite, and that’s seven points that could have been given to T.Y. Hilton, who is currently underperforming by nine points against his projection. I can’t imagine there’s any reason I know this.

Every sport, every season, over the course of needing to come up with new language to use thanks to the exhaustion of our 24-hour sports news cycle, will run some sort of promotion regarding how great this is. Together, We’re Giant. Who’s Got It Better Than Us? This Is Why We Do This, every supercut will scream at you. It’s All Worth It Because Sometimes It Is Good.

Sometimes you stand with 40,000 of your closest strangers and you have yourself a good cry. Matt Cain was a Giant for longer than I have been a Giants fan. We’re running out of players for whom that idea is true. I’ve been here awhile and if the previous 2400 words didn’t communicate it clearly enough, I will be here. They have lost more than they have won; I am still so lucky. I have never watched as much baseball as I have this year and I don’t give a good damn that the Giants lost ninety-eight games.

I’m going to clap until my arms fall off.

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