October Baseball in San Francisco, by Chuck Strom, Celebrity Guest Blogger

There are few experiences in life as exciting as attending a baseball game in October, when the outcome of a marathon season hangs in the balance. Despite the handicap of being a Giants fan of modest means, I had seen two such games in my life prior to last year. The latter, back in 2002, was the first Giants victory in a World Series game in San Francisco in forty years, and the memory of it makes my heart sing to this day.

Unfortunately the Giants followed up their 2002 pennant with an early playoff exit in 2003 and several more seasons of depressing mediocrity, so when they finally returned to the promised land last October with a victory over the Padres on the last day of the regular season, I knew that I needed to get myself to a game or risk waiting another decade for the next opportunity. Thanks to Stub Hub, the official online scalper for Major League Baseball, getting my ticket to Game 5 of the National League Championship Series was easy though expensive. As the series progressed I realized that I could see an even better game than in 2002. With the Giants leading the Phillies three games to one, a victory would earn the Giants their fourth pennant since moving to San Francisco in 1958, and I would see for the first time in person a celebration on the mound.

Accompanied by a friend from my office who also appreciated the significance of the occasion, I arrived at AT&T Park in time to load up on souvenirs in the nearby Giants Dugout store before presenting myself at the gate when it opened. After finding our carefully chosen seats in the right field upper deck, where we could see the Bay Bridge beyond left field and the boats in McCovey Cove beyond right, we took advantage of the open promenade – a welcome feature of most recently designed ballparks – and walked slowly around the field as both teams took batting practice. The stands filled gradually with fans dressed in Giant orange and black. They looked happy and expectant, especially those sporting black beards in honor of Brian Wilson, the Giants’ eccentric closer. It felt as if we’d been invited to the biggest party on the planet, with a minor celebrity sighting to add spice to the occasion as ESPN columnist Tim Kirkjian appeared out of a concourse, passing directly in front of us on his way to the press box. Eventually the walkways got too crowded, so we headed back to our seats about forty-five minutes before game time.

Like everyone else in the park we had eagerly anticipated the game’s pitching matchup: Roy Halladay for the Phillies and Tim Lincecum for the Giants, whose pictures appeared on the cover of my official NLCS program. Prior to the series Halladay was the more intimidating of the two, having followed his league-leading twenty-one wins during the regular season, one of them a perfect game, with a no-hitter in the divisional playoffs. The victory the Giants had managed in his NLCS Game 1 start had come mostly from two freakishly timed home runs by Cody Ross, a utility outfielder who had come to the Giants via the waiver wire and batted in all of seven runs for them during the regular season. We chanted Ross’s name during his pre-game introduction, hoping that somehow we could make lightning strike twice, but the logical side of my brain assumed that Halladay would revert to his usual dominance. In order to win, I believed that the Giants needed to summon all the luck they had previously enjoyed in the playoffs to scratch across a run or two. Then they could lean heavily on Lincecum, whose slender countenance had become the symbol of the franchise, to throw a shutout.

For the game’s first two innings it looked like that strategy would work. Lincecum could be vulnerable early in games, missing high with his fastball from too much adrenaline and then having to give batters a pitch or two to hit. If he had good command from the beginning the Giants usually could count on a victory. When he set the first six Phillies down in order, with two strikeouts in the second inning, the prospects of a pennant celebration looked bright. “Timmy’s got it going tonight,” I said. Better yet, Halladay’s fastball was off, registering only in the eighties on the radar gun, and while he managed to hold the Giants to one run in the first, he threw a lot of pitches and seemed on the verge of breaking down.

In the third inning, however, the Giants forgot how to field the ball. After a bloop single and a hit batsman put Phillies on first and second, Halladay laid down a poor sacrifice bunt, but when the catcher Buster Posey attempted to throw out the lead runner, third baseman Pablo Sandoval failed to touch the base with his foot before throwing out Halladay at first, thereby missing the chance for a double play. Then first baseman Aubrey Huff took a grounder off his shin and allowed two runs to score. Huff went briefly to the mound and said some words to Lincecum as the next hitter came to the plate, but the apologies or reassurances he offered were of no avail as Lincecum then gave up one of the Phillies’ few solid hits of the game, allowing a third run to score and leaving the Giants in a hole.

Though frustrated at this turn of events, most of us in the stands felt confident that the Giants, who had frequently come from behind in the playoffs, would do so again against Halladay, and I calmly waited for the decisive moment to come. In the fourth inning it looked like I might get my reward, as Cody Ross doubled in Pat Burrell to close the deficit by a run. But just as we were ready to elect Ross president-for-life, he inexplicably tried to advance to third on a fly ball to right, only to be thrown out by Jayson Werth to end the inning. Additional Giant failures in the clutch allowed Halladay to survive another two innings before leaving for a pinch hitter. Lincecum for his part got himself back together and held the Phillies to only two more hits through the seventh inning, helped in part by Huff as he redeemed himself by catching a line drive with runners on the corners and doubling his man off first. In the eighth inning I got my decisive moment, but unfortunately it was to the Phillies’ benefit as their set-up man, Ryan Madsen, struck out Posey, Ross, and Burrell in succession. At that point a pall settled over us as we realized that the Giants would have to win their pennant in Philadelphia, a daunting prospect given their prior postseason history on the road, where similar series leads had evaporated in 2002 and 1987.

If my friend and I had been wiser we would have left at that point, but instead we stayed to the bitter end, which was punctuated by Werth’s opposite-field home run in the ninth inning to right, an occurrence almost never allowed by the winds on that side of the park. As penance for our loyalty we spent much of the next hour filing slowly out through the stairways and concourses to the street outside, the once-happy fans around us now sullen and morose. In the car on the way home we heard that Halladay pulled a groin muscle during the game but had stayed in nonetheless, a development that made me feel all the more that the Giants had missed their chance at glory. Around midnight I pulled into a truck stop for some coffee to sustain me while my friend slept in the passenger seat. As I filled my cup another returning fan saw where I’d been from my NLCS souvenir cap. Seeing my discouragement, he came over and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll get them on Saturday.”

And as we know now, they did.

– Chuck Strom

Here’s Chuck’s other World Series article, The World Series Championship Trophy Comes to Redding, CA