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Note: This entry contains spoilers for today's Giants/Padres baseball game. If you don't want to know how it went, come back and read this later.

The rest of my group at work decided to go to a baseball game. They never actually asked if I wanted to come along; they just scheduled it. I figured, oh, what the hell, if work is gonna pay for me to go to team-bonding at a baseball game I can live with that. And then the one in charge of organizing it said "We've got the tickets; you owe me $20 apiece."

But of course by that time it was too late to back out, so I reluctantly went along with it.

This morning I was supposed to be at a meeting in SF at 10 a.m. I usually have a hard time making it to our Redwood City office (a 20-minute drive) by 10; I knew it would take extraordinary measures to get me to SF (a 45-minute drive minimum) by 10. So I decided to set an alarm for once; I'd go to bed early, sleep without earplugs so the alarm would wake me, and take the train to work.

The first thing that went wrong was that I was once again up 'til 2 a.m., despite being half-asleep by midnight. There was stuff I had to finish, and I knew I wouldn't have time to do it in the morning.

The second thing that went wrong was that I barely slept after I went to bed, despite being exhausted.

The third thing that went wrong was that I left the house a little later than planned, which resulted in my arriving at the train station only about two minutes before the northbound train was due. Plenty of time—except that the southbound train was sitting at the station, and there was a gate and a barrier blocking people from crossing over to the northbound tracks for the duration of the southbound train's stay. So I stood there on the wrong side of the tracks, debating whether it was worth risking the loudly proclaimed $271 fine to duck around the barrier, while my train arrived, stopped, disgorged passengers, took on new passengers, and departed. (The southbound train actually did leave in the midst of this process, but by the time the barrier went up in the wake of the southbound train's departure, the northbound one was pulling out.) Moral: following rules will make you an hour late to work. (Better moral: don't cut the timing so close, Jed. You know this sort of thing happens whenever you do.)

I considered driving after all; I'd have made it in plenty of time. But then I remembered that I'd had somewhere around three hours' sleep, and that I was going to be in SF 'til 11ish tonight, maybe midnight, and that I was probably in no shape to drive right now, much less sixteen hours later.

So I waited 45 minutes for the next train, and arrived at work about an hour later than intended, rather than the 15 minutes late that I would've been with the earlier train.

Later, I wandered over to PacBell Park. Took about half an hour to walk there from our SF office; longer than I expected. But I was just as happy to miss the beginning of the game.

(About halfway to the park, I noticed that I was singing The Austin Lounge Lizards' song "Cornhusker Refugee," about a gay Nebraskan living in San Francisco: "It's hard to be gay / in Lodgepole, Nebraska. . . ." I couldn't quite figure out why it was running through my head 'til I got to the line "On the bar television / the Giants are losin'. . . ." I'm amused that my strongest association with the Giants seems to be a bluegrass song about a gay guy.)

It was the first baseball game I've been to in, oh, probably over twenty years. My only memories of the last one (at Candlestick park) are that it was chilly, that there were seagulls, and that I had a chocolate malted.

This time it was less chilly (we were in sunlight for the first hour or so I was there), there were seagulls (and a nice view of the bay), and I planned to get a chocolate malted for nostalgic purposes, but by the time I finished my garlic fries I was stuffed.

The result of the match? Oh, yes—the home team won! But, as the British Ambassador pointed out, Things were fairly slow for most of the game, except three runs by the Padres while I was off getting garlic fries. There were several times when Giants players bobbled catches, while the Padres seemed to catch everything that was hit. The Giants went into the bottom of the ninth inning three runs behind. The audience had been dead through the whole game, and a fair number of them had left after the 8th inning. But the display board and the PA system did a remarkable job of rallying audience enthusiasm—cheers, demands for noise, a clip from Top Gun (or some similar movie) in which the good guys use air-to-air missiles to blow away an enemy plane bearing the Padres logo, and so on—and then the Giants brought in Barry Bonds, who even I had heard of, as a pinch-hitter.

So there followed a spectacular sequence in which there were two players on base, Bonds came to bat (to overwhelming roars of support from the audience), and the pitcher intentionally walked him. Bases loaded, bottom of the ninth—this is the way it always goes in baseball stories and movies. What a cliche. Presumably next we would go to two outs, then a three-and-two count, and then someone would hit a home run (bringing the Giants to one run ahead) and the game would be over.

Ah, but life does not always obey narrative conventions. A good solid hit brought all three of the runners home; Bonds ran in about two steps behind Snow (?), the player ahead of him. And apparently due to Snow being slow, that gave the Padres catcher time to tag Bonds out. (I think. I didn't actually see this, as there were hordes of standing cheering fans between me and the plate.) The guy who made the hit was stuck on third.

The upshot of all this was that the Giants managed to tie the score in the 9th inning. Things went on for three more progressively more lackluster innings, as fans and players all got tired, until the Giants managed to bring in another run in the bottom of the 12th and end it.

The thing, I think, that intrigued me the most about all this was that there seemed to be this morale feedback loop going on for a while. The fans got more enthusiastic, the team brought in Bonds, the players got livelier, things started going better for the team, the fans got more enthusiastic, and so on. I've seen that happen in live theatre, where a dead audience can really hurt a performance, but I didn't realize it happened in sports too. And I could be wrong; it could be that there wasn't any causality there. But it was an interesting illusion of causality, at least.

I also admit to being pleasantly amused by the announcer's enthusiasm when introducing Benito Santiago (the Giants catcher). She was enthusiastic about all the Giants players, but she really laid it on for Santiago. "And now . . . Benito . . . SANTIAGO!" Much fun.

Overall: much more fun, and more engrossing, than I'd expected. I remembered enough of the rules to be able to follow the game, and we had a couple of native guides to explain some of the finer points. (The one who knew the most, though, seemed a little annoyed by our questions; I wished various of my baseball-fan friends were there to answer questions. Nothing that stuck in my memory enough to ask it now, though.)

'kay, time for me to go off and have a celebratory dinner with co-workers. Much socializing today.