That sounded a lot better than working, so after lunch I took off and drove down to Concord, where I took a BART train into San Francisco. It was my first Orange Friday, when the Giants wear their orange alternate home jerseys. I arrived about an hour before the 7:15 start, which was late for me but early enough to find a place to stand behind the lower box sections near home plate, where I could get a decent view of the band.
The members of Metallica, including vocalist James Hetfield and guitarist Kirk Hemmett, live in Marin County and go to Giants games regularly, being members of the large fraternity of celebrities who like sports as much as anyone else. Hetfield and Hemmett came out in Giants jerseys with the number “81” to mark the year they founded the band. After a few minutes of mingling on the field with players and team officials, they took up a special pair of black electric guitars marked with the “SF” Giants logo (later auctioned for charity) and played the Star Spangled Banner. After I got home, I compared their version to Jimi Hendrix’s from Woodstock and liked Metallica’s better, because they played it straight without unnecessary embellishments—good advice for vocalists.
With the Dodgers in town on a Friday night, the crowd at AT&T was a little rowdier than usual. At one point, a fan dressed in Dodger blue profanely shouted his opinion of Barry Zito, who was pitching for the Giants. This brought equally profane jeers from most of the lower box section where I was standing. I couldn’t figure out what kind of death wish inspired the Dodger fan, but moved along to make sure I was somewhere else in case something bad happened.
The game itself was awesome. With Clayton Kershaw, last year’s National League Cy Young Award winner, pitching for the Dodgers, I had anticipated a loss by the boys in orange. As I expected, Kershaw dominated them for the first five innings despite a microscopically small strike zone called by home plate umpire Joe West. Zito, for his part, suffered much more from West’s reluctance to call strikes, giving up six hits and four walks and pitching constantly from the stretch. Somehow, he limited the Dodgers to one run after giving up a double in the fifth inning to Kershaw, who hits the Giants almost as well as he pitches to them. The Giants tied it in the sixth with a triple by Marco Scutaro and a double by Buster Posey. In the later innings, four Giants relievers found West’s strike zone just as difficult as Zito had, allowing several more Dodgers on base yet managing to strand them, while Kershaw and a relief pitcher retired the Giants easily. Finally, as I debated whether to stay for extra innings, Posey led off the ninth by pulling a fast ball into the left field seats, sending all but a few of the forty-two thousand fans into delirium, while I dashed for the exit to catch the train back to my car.
On the way home, I thought of how wonderful it was to see Posey play in the full measure of his greatness. This may seem an overstatement, but if Posey’s career lasts long enough, people will speak of him with the same kind of joy reserved for those who got to watch players like Michael Jordan or Joe DiMaggio. Posey is that good at what he does, and thus far he has done it with grace and humility,
without any evidence of the unsavory behavior that we often expect now of professional athletes. Judging by the size of Posey’s new contract, I think the Giants know how lucky they are to have him.
