Visiting Petco Park

My goal this year is to visit every major league ballpark in California at least once, and to visit as many of the minor league parks as I can.  To that end, during a recent visit to San Diego, I took a tour of Petco Park, and attended a game against the visiting Diamondbacks.

Petco is made of imported Indian sandstone, and includes this nifty waterfall at the main gate.

Me, in the press box.

Visitors' dugout.

Batting cage under the park.  I don't know who was taking batting practice here, but during the tour, we got to watch for a short time.

This is the Padres' pitchers' warmup bullpen.  Note the flowers, the cushioned seats.  The visitors' pitchers' warmup bullpen has a couple folding chairs, no flowers.  

The Padres' organization has a strong military connection.  Servicemen and women receive discounted tickets, and throughout the park, the team acknowledges and celebrates the military.  This wall includes a Padres' Veterans Hall of Fame, with portraits of Padres who'd served.  Another wall featured the names of every ball player who ever served, along with a scale model of an aricraft carrier.

I've never seen a ballpark so dedicated to growing plants wherever possible.  There are more than 10,000 plants in the park, and some grow more successfully than others.  These bouganvillia (sp?) hang down three stories.

Lee v. Cain

The Philadelphia Phillies were in town this week, and that meant some truly epic pitching matchups.  The Phillies are one of the other premiere teams in baseball, probably the highest payroll in the National League, and like the Giants, they spent a big chunk of that money on pitching.  The Giants faced the Phillies in the NLCS in 2010, and squeezed out a victory against a truly wicked pitching staff.  But immediately after the World Series, the Phillies went out and picked up one of the best pitchers in the American League, Texas Rangers' ace, Cliff Lee.

Of course, the Giants had just finished beating Cliff Lee in the World Series, so this made the Phillies' starting rotation the most fearsome in baseball -- with the possible exception of the Giants' starters, natch.

So last night was an epic pitchers' duel:  Cliff Lee vs. Matt Cain for the Giants.  Cain just two weeks ago became the highest-paid right-handed pitcher in baseball, getting a deal that will lock him up through 2017 and pay him $127 million.  And deservedly so.  On Friday, Cain pitched a one-hit shutout complete game at the home opener.  He's at the top of his game, and it was always a good game.

Last night, Cain pitched a nine-inning two hitter, and Cliff Lee pitched a ten-inning four-hitter -- shutout baseball that went into extra innings and finally ended with a Melky Cabrera walkoff single in the 11th against the bullpen.

Crazy.  An 11-inning game that was over in two and a half hours.  And the losing pitcher?  The guy who was on the mound when we finally got a run?  That guy's name is "Bastardo".  No foolin'.

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.

The New Year in Neverland

The New Year shouldn’t start on the first of January. Why we would choose to start our calendars at a time when the days are so short and cold, and everything lies fallow is beyond my understanding. To start each year under gray flannel skies seems like an act of self-hatred, a nihilist’s snide prank on all of humanity. It is too empty, too brutal for a proper beginning. Nobody chooses January as their favorite month. It is an injustice that Americans should and would rectify, if only the more enlightened among us could pound some sense into the bean-counters and bureaucrats who live to dot I’s and cross tees.

We should celebrate the New Year in March, when the full rosters report to spring training and the exhibition games start in Arizona and Florida. That should be the start of our American calendar – a time when every fan can look to their team with love and hope, when all things are still possible, all the losses and mistakes are still forgivable, and everyone knows in their heart of hearts that this will be the year. That’s how a New Year should begin, with thoughts about sunshine and forgiveness and full of confidence of future glory.

So we begin another hopeful year. The rain and snow has come and mostly gone. The sunny days are starting to gain on the cloudy ones. Plants are green again, and the ground is muddy still, but no longer frozen. The cherry blossoms will be blooming in another couple of weeks. The days are getting longer, climbing the big hill up the roller coaster until the end of June, when we will all begin the lovely ride down the other side.

These are some of the thoughts that occurred to me last night, Monday, April 2^nd, 2012, as I watched my San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s in an exhibition game at AT&T Park – my team, my ballpark – in their first home game of the year. I am a season ticketholder again, a luxury I refuse to give up entirely, even though I split my tickets to keep them affordable. I hadn’t planned on going to this meaningless exhibition game. I had, in fact, given the tickets to this game to my ticket partner, thinking it would be better to wait until the official home opener two weeks away. But at the last minute, a friend called up and said he’d lucked into two tickets between home plate and first base, free tickets, and would I like to go?

Here’s a little lesson I’ve learned in life: when life hands you a free baseball ticket, go. Whatever else you have to do will get finished. Never let chores get in the way of your life.

Baseball is timeless. That’s a cliché observation that has been drilled into the literature and lore of baseball by every writer that has ever tackled the subject, and all of them do it more justice than I can here. But it is baseball’s timelessness, both literal and figurative, that sets it apart from other sports, and other games. Basketball, football, hockey, boxing, wrestling, even running and swimming and cycling and motorsports are anchored to the clock, measured out in time. Baseball is played separate from the clock. When the first pitch crosses home plate, the time is announced – “First pitch, 7:18 p.m.” last night – and then the clock is completely ignored. The game can go on and on, into the afternoon, past sundown, into the night and under the lights. An inning can be quick-quick or it can fatten and swell and stretch. If you’re paying attention to the game, the clock disappears. And if you’re really paying attention, it isn’t hard to imagine the calendar disappearing, the deep smells of roasting hotdogs and peanuts, garlic. The girls in sun dresses, the boys in jerseys, the men in hats. It could be last summer. It could be your first summer. It could be your father’s or your mother’s. Your grandfather’s.

Baseball takes the whole summer. It is every day, not like football, a one-game-a-week event that is all fiercely autumn. Football is about endings and downs, about taking away yardage and fighting. Baseball is about beginnings.

And that’s how it works its magic on you, how it keeps you young while it makes you sentimental. No matter how many gewgaws or how much tinsel the bean-counters and the bureaucrats hang on the game, no matter how loud they play the music or how much they charge for a beer, people will still need to feel time stop, and the afternoon swell into evening, and they will still need to believe that their life is full of more beginnings. Baseball is Neverland, a place where you never grow up, never grow old, and never even notice the clock.