Nothing Gold (Or Orange or Blue) Can Stay
So ends another baseball season for me (with apologies to Robert Frost)
The best baseball of the season has already been played. The last pitch, in my mind, thrown. Fall is here now and I must slink into the long, cold, dark.
The final out of the series of the season, maybe of recent memory, maybe of my lifetime, came Thursday night at the hands of first-base umpire Gabe Morales who said that Giants first basemen Wilmer Flores, who stood at the plate as the winning run, did a check swing on a two-strike Max Sherzer fastball with Kris Bryant on first.
He did not swing.
But the game was over anyway.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.
Flores (0-17 lifetime vs. Sherzer) probably wouldn’t have hit a home run to storybook walk-off the Giants into the league championship series against the soon-to-be-overwhelmed Atlanta Braves, but he could have.
A lot of things can happen in baseball when given the chance.
I guess it’s one of those the Giants now get to make T-shirts along the lines of “Han Shot First” (“Wilmer Held Up”), righting the wrongs of revisionist history to make themselves feel better; a trope to add on to what was otherwise The Biggest Disappointment end cap to the franchise’s best season in history.
Baseball is weird like that. Sometimes the best team prevails in the playoffs and lives on forever in memory as the ‘27 Yankees or the '55 Dodgers. The real ones become the '86 Red Sox, or the '01 Yankees, or the '03 Cubs—teams so complete they had to be cursed—the memory of their losing long outlasting any hangover from a clubhouse celebration.
As such, it didn’t happen for the Giants this season.
They go home early with more what-ifs/what-could've-beens than a three-month breakup.
It is, wholly, like they’ve been ghosted by the game they learned to tune themselves in complete harmony during the regular season. No team I’ve ever seen figured out baseball better than these Giants. They said the right things, made the right moves, listened when they needed to listen, and came in clutch over and over again whenever the fickle winds of the bay gusting from right-center blew their way.
Through the bad bounces, injuries, and with the help of just plain dumb luck, the Giants and a scrappy lineup of aging veterans, cast-offs from around the league, and young talent that actually delivered on their promise, won 109 games this season. But the 110th was just too difficult.
Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief.
Both my grandmothers were (and one, at 98 still is!) big baseball fans. On my mother's side, the transplant from the Midwest adopted the Dodgers as her team in the fifties after they moved out West. To her, they’ve always been and will remain the team of Vin Scully and Jim Murray, plunked down in a found swaying palm paradise. Shangri-La on a diamond.
My Northern California grandmother bled black and orange, obsessing over box scores and lineup cards; long-suffering in their repose with a perennial soft spot for Mays and McCovey—the best to ever play.
She delighted in the Giants teams of my youth, Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, and Matt Williams; she even took me to The City and bought me my first Giants item, a gray away jersey with the old SF logo on the left chest. I used to wear it during endless summer whiffle ball sessions with my best friend and his brothers—me trying to stand like Clark in the batter's box, leaned almost all the way on my back foot angular and coiled, left sleeve tucked up almost to my chin, swinging away.
Both grandmothers religiously clipped and sent me articles about their favorite teams, not necessarily vying for my fandom, but showing me, in print, the words they felt for their boys in orange or blue.
It came to pass that my family’s move to Northern California in my early teens sealed the deal on the Giants' front. My Dad was finally happy, listening to 150+ games a year on his little black radio in the garage next to his dog.
My friends were all die-hards. Candlestick became a second home in the summer, especially after we learned to drive. I remember pre-gaming in the parking lot beneath the gray tower. Tens of friends and acquaintances lubing up and layered up, getting ready to dump into the third tier of the Stick, wind-burned faces and frozen hands. So many losing seasons, but also so much to cheer for.
I’ve lived in both SF and LA in my adult life and know enough about the two to stop acting surprised when the Cities Have Changed from when I was there; that’s what cities do. I currently reside smack dab in the middle of the two: 237 miles from my house to China Basin and 197 miles to Dodger Stadium.
The 40 miles closer in proximity to LA is what makes it so in the eyes of MLB I’m in Dodger Territory. This also means the mother of my little boy who was raised here grew up a Dodger fan, though, in her home office, she stares all day at a framed photo of the ’89 Giants and a giveaway sign from Barry Bonds’ retirement game that says “Thanks, Barry.” Subversive signage notwithstanding, Pantone 294 still courses through her. And my son’s first (and favorite) piece of sports memorabilia is a kids' shirt from the 2016 Dodgers season that somehow made into the rotation, now more of a half-tee that he wears to bed.
It stands to reason he’ll choose one side or the other one day, and I can’t help but think both of my grandmothers would be proud either way. In the end, all those notes and articles and seasons later, I realize they were teaching me the intricacies of this existence and that is what baseball fandom so thinly obscures—a life of disappointment filled with flashes of hope that fade, even for the victor, all too soon.
So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.