|
Giants 8, Brewers 1
Tonight I took Adrienne to her first Giants game. I'd scored tickets from a fellow in my fantasy baseball league a while back for this night, and it seemed natural to invite Adrienne along. We ended up being slightly late to the game, because CalTrain took longer to get to San Francisco than expected (or than their Web schedule claimed, actually!). But we only missed the first inning, and nothing happened during it.Adrienne was taken by Pacific Bell Park! She said it helped that it's largely colored green, her favorite color, plus we had seats near the front of the upper deck behind home plate, providing a panoramic view of the park and the San Francisco Bay beyond. It was unusually chilly tonight. Candlestick Park was always cold and had thick fog many times, but Pac Bell is much more temperate, so I wished I'd brought my jacket. We even had some sporadic fog, but not enough to really spoil the view. Adrienne had a sweater and was still chilly. I found that I could handle it a bit more as the evening wore on, but still; must remember this for my next Pac Bell night game. Livan Hernandez pitched for the Giants, and the Giants kicked some ass, pounding the Milwaukee Brewers starter, John Snyder, early and often. The key blow came when Hernandez himself was up at bat with the bases loaded, and he delivered a two-run single. Hernandez cruised through the first seven innings carrying a shutout. In the eighth inning Livan faltered, and I figured he would be pulled for the ninth, with an 8-0 lead. I hadn't reckoned with manager Dusty Baker's old-style desire to leave his starter in to try to get the complete game shutout. Despite having thrown a hefty 130+ pitches, Livan came out for the ninth inning, and quickly gave up a run. Dusty finally pulled him, and Alan Embree took care of the last two Brewers batters as the Giants won 8-1. Midway through the game, Adrienne and I got up to walk around the park. We stopped to see the view of the city at night from the top of the stadium, which is something to see! (The view of the Bay Bridge from the other side is also pretty impressive.) We walked down to the right field wall where we could look out at the Bay and get the view of the field from all around the outfield. While getting some more food we missed Rich Aurilia's home run, but big deal. Adrienne had admitted that she wasn't all that into the game, but she enjoyed the trip anyway. There were some nice folks around our seats, including an elderly lady in a wheelchair who came by to watch from our vantage point briefly, and who was very pleasant. We got back pretty late and Adrienne was bushed. But all-in-all it was a wonderful time at the old ballpark, more than making up for Saturday. And yeah, the company was a big part of it, in this case. (Baseball aside: I'm not sure what I saw tonight that I hadn't seen before. I nearly saw my first complete game shutout, but not quite. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pitcher go 2-for-3 in a game, like Livan did. Hmm.)
 It turns out that yesterday was the three-year anniversary of my journal. Hard to believe it's been that long! I remember starting the journal after discovering CJ's journal three summers ago, and having a lot of free time at the time I decided to start my own. And I'm still keeping it up, albeit not quite as regularly. I'm creeping up on 30,000 hits to my journal page since I started it, which is probably a slightly low estimate. That works out to probably around 30 hits per day, which is not bad at all. Maybe next year I'll do what CJ did a few years back for her anniversary and solicit comments from my readers to be included in my anniversary entry. Obviously not this year, though. But, as always, I welcome and enjoy feedback from my readers. I try to respond to all my messages, though I don't always succeed. But I keep plugging along...
|
||
