Sportsball

Started: 2025-09-22 20:38:12

Submitted: 2025-09-22 21:55:14

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Seeing the Washington Nationals play the Giants at Oracle Park on a bright sunny summer afternoon

In August I got a text from my friend and colleague Rahul asking if I would be interested in an extra ticket or two for a Giants game on the upcoming Saturday; his running group was attending and they had more tickets than people. I accepted, and asked my children if they would like to attend, dangling the prospect of ballpark snacks. To my minor surprise both of them accepted. Kiesa doesn't believe in crowds or sitting in the sun (and she was getting ready to leave for Seattle the next day to attend this year's Worldcon) so she stayed home.

The one other time I saw a Giants game at the Giant's current waterfront ballpark was in 2018 when I made it a checklist item before leaving San Francisco; at the time, AT&T had naming rights. As a kid growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, I saw a Giants game at Candlestick Park, though my memory is sufficiently hazy that I had to ask my parents to confirm that it was real and I wasn't remembering the wrong thing.

We left Santa Cruz on Saturday morning, the 9th of August, with what should have been plenty of time to get over the mountain and up highway 85 to the Caltrain station in Mountain View. I didn't ask my phone for directions because I knew the way, but soon after merging onto highway 85 north traffic slowed to a crawl. It wasn't clear what was happening; the best I could tell was that there were an extraordinary number of vehicles trying to take the Saratoga exit, possibly because of a construction-involved detour, and they were backed up and clogging the through lanes. As soon as we passed the Saratoga exit traffic cleared and I cruised on to Mountain View, watching the time nervously against the arrival of the northbound Caltrain. By the time we pulled into the station parking lot we had a minute to spare before the train arrived. I told the kids that they should be ready to jump out of the car as soon as we parked, and we hurried across the parking lot just in time for the northbound train to cross in front of us at the at-grade pedestrian crossing at the end of the platform. When the train had passed and was stopped at the platform, the crossing guards went up and we hurried across the tracks and into the last carriage.

After catching the train, with seconds to spare, my next objective was to find Rahul and the rest of his group. We walked up the train, in the direction of travel, for several carriages until we found them standing in the aisle on the upper deck of a crowded carriage. (At least half of the people on the train looked like they were heading to the Giants game.) I met other people from the running group on the train and chatted with them as the train stopped at every station between Mountain View and San Francisco, collecting passengers at every stop.

When we reached San Francisco we walked down King Street along with most of the rest of the people from the train, and after some waiting to find other members of the group who hadn't come on the train, we entered the ballfield through the Willie Mays Gate.

Willie Mays Gate at Oracle Park

Our seats were on the upper tier ("view reserve"), which meant we had to climb to the top level. We ended up taking the long ramps that zig-zagged back and forth up to the highest level, past the levels for the lower seats and the boxes and whatever else was along the way. We reached the upper concourse just as the first pitch was being thrown, and by the time we found our seats it was the bottom of the first inning and the visiting Washington Nationals had already scored a run.

Julian, Jaeger, and Calvin at Oracle Park

I sat in the middle between the kids so I had to ask Julian to take a selfie of us, which sort of worked, in that we're all nominally pictured, though awkwardly framed, and Calvin is ignoring the camera, so at least it's an authentic artifact of this moment in our lives.

Giants versus Nationals at Oracle Park

We watched an inning of baseball and I tried to keep track of what was going on while I wondered how much my kids understood of the game. (I think this is the first time either of them have seen a major-league sport, though I think they might have seen minor-league baseball while visiting their grandparents.)

We left our seats and headed back down to the concourse in search of lunch. We each got a slice of pizza, plus two orders of garlic fries between us. We returned to our seats to eat and watch the game, which involved a lot of strike-outs and very little scoring. When batters did hit the ball half the time it was a pop foul (landing in the stands usually somewhere across the ballpark, but once a pop foul landed at the bottom of the section next to where we were sitting, as spectators jostled to catch the ball), or a pop fly that the outfielders easily caught, or a line drive that the infielders routed to first to throw the runner out. Sometimes the pitcher would walk the batter. Sometimes the batter would actually reach first without getting thrown out. But more than once the Giants had loaded the bases and the clean-up batter swaggered up to the plate only to strike out on top of two outs, and it was all for nothing. Both teams scored a couple of home runs by hitting the ball into the bleachers on the far end of the ballfield but no team batted in any runs so it was only the lone hitter running around the bases by himself. It was far from the most exciting baseball I've ever seen.

We started the game siting in the sun, and as the day wore on the sun moved in the sky but did not shade us. All of the seats in our section had sold out but many of the seats remained empty throughout the game. At some point in a later inning our group noticed empty seats in the shade at the top of the section and we relocated upwards, crawling over the rows of seats in search of a cooler seat. I thought about looking for ice cream or a beverage on the concourse but the people who returned with refreshments in hand reported epic lines and low supply because everyone else was doing the same thing.

After nine innings the game ended when the Giants had a couple of base but the Nationals threw the runner out at first. The Giants lost to the Nationals, the beginning of a long losing streak that lasted until I stopped looking at the sports headlines.

We joined the crowd and shuffled out of the stands, down the stairs and onto the concourse and down a long set of stairs in a darkened shaft to ground level, subdued by the Giants' loss. On the sidewalk in front of the ballpark the group began to break up: some headed immediately for the Caltrain station in hopes of catching the train leaving in a few minutes, while some decided to spend more time in San Francisco.

I took a more leisurely walk back to the station, stopping at Safeway along the way for refreshments for the train. (The last time I went to this particular Safeway was almost ten years ago, when I was living in a furnished apartment in Mission Bay starting my job as an SRE at Google.) I found the frozen section with ice cream sandwiches (though I had to buy a four-pack, which was not the right number for my group). We crossed the street to catch the next train, then rode south to Mountain view and drove the rest of the way home.

The home team lost but we still had a good time at the ballpark on a warm summer day.