Philadelphians 3, Your SF Giants 0
1. Return to Dystopia
The world intruded on baseball last month; sanity on summer break, and the games you played were of a higher, more profound, order. Seeking distraction, you return to the fog, the icy wind and the dramatiks playing ball on the banks of Mission Creek.
The Mighty Philz are in town for a four-game soap opera, so you head for the Mission Bay Philz for something to soothe the waves of overstimulation — eye/ear-splitting sensations cranked up by the owners of Your SF Giants so you will feel (on a visceral level) like you are getting their money’s worth (average ticket prices up 14 percent from last year). Something large. Something strong.
Two blond sisters from the foothills sing the national anthem in country/cowboy style. The wind howls in from right field on all the right notes, and you notice Brian Wilson’s beard being aggressively marketed by corporate behemoths. Could he be the secret “closer” in U.S. negotiations with the Taliban?
2. Mad Man
Madison Bumgarner on the mound for Your SF Giants. Not the best of all possible pitchers to open a series, and here’s why: back-to-back home runs in the second inning. Bumgarner makes mistakes in the early innings. For example, he throws a fastball high in the strike zone with no spin on it to Hunter Pence, who looks like he emerged from a local biotech lab as a prototypical player in the Year 3000.
Mad Man knows everybody makes mistakes; what he doesn’t know is that he’ll make the same mistake four pitches later, with the same crowd-silencing results. Next he throws a ball so wide even Pablo Sandoval couldn’t hit it. Polite applause from either very desperate or very cynical fans.
Over the next seven innings, only two Philadelphians make it to first base. Despite the cold shoulder he gets from his teammates’ bats, Bumgarner keeps fans frozen to their metal bleacher seats as he whips his pitches homeward. From deep center field, his arm looks like a huge old dinosaur wing.
3. Happy Face
The Kiss Camera provides the night’s most consistent offense from GiantsInc.
Why? Because Philadelphian pitcher Cliff Lee pitches like … Cliff Lee. Remember him? Twice mauled by the Giants’ midget hitters in the World Series, do you think he’s forgotten the crowning humiliation of his career? It doesn’t look that way after six innings; Lee’s thrown only 64 pitches compared to Bumgarner’s 91. And when he races off the mound in the seventh inning like a teenager on a hot date, you sense just how obsessively he must have planned for this moment.
This Cliff Lee will not be battered. “He’s doing it with offspeed stuff and breaking balls,” says the TV Commentator sitting next to me in the press box. I can’t tell if he really means that or if he’s trying out a line to use later on his show. Although we are all “objective,” those of us on the SF side of the box are either sleeping or looking worried, as if we just discovered that the “Fall Classic” was a fantasy. Some, like the TV Commentator, keep rolling their eyes.
For those of you who fear another recession on top of your ongoing depression, three more games remain.