Opening Day

The day a baseball team opens its season at home is the best day to go visit that city.  The rest of the year you're a tourist -- part economic necessity, part annoyance, and all outsider.  But when the home team opens its season in front of its fans, all you need to do to see the best a city has to offer is buy a ticket and walk in the door.  Buy a cap and you might as well be a local.

Yesterday was Opening Day for my Giants, and it was a stunner.  The night before we had a series of booming thunderstorms roll over the city and there was talk that the game would be rained out.  God, however, is a baseball fan. While the clouds rolled in from the ocean, they parted north and south of the ballpark and left us with a beautiful, sunny day, cool and windy.

No Opening Day would be complete without some fanfare, some pomp and circumstance, and the Giants did not disappoint.  Before the first pitch, there was an on-field ceremony comemorating the 50th anniversary of the team's 1962 National League Pennant team -- the team that lost the World Series that year to the Yankees on a McCovey-hit grounder to short.  At home plate, the team assembled the surviving members, including radio-announcer, Lon Simmons, the manager, 90-year-old Alvin Dark, and Hall-of-Famers Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Gaylord Perry and the Say Hey Kid himself, Willie Mays.

The crowd gave them their standing ovation and with the National Anthem and the flyover jets out of the way, Matt Cain threw the first pitch across home plate right on time -- 1:35 p.m.

Cain pitched a perfect game into the sixth inning when some nitwit whose name I won't even bother to repeat here popped a line drive between short and second and got himself onto first base.  It would be the only hit the Pirates would get all day, as Cain pitched a complete one-hit shutout in only two hours and ten minutes.  Buster Posey hit an RBI double and then got himself batted in by Aubrey Huff, who had a fine day, even hitting a Splash Hit homer in the 8th.  Giants won, 5-0.