Giants 6, Padres 4

Tonight I took Debbi to her first baseball game at the Giants' Pacific Bell Ballpark.

As you probably know (assuming you care), Pac Bell has developed a deserved reputation as a wonderful ballpark. I've taken friends who don't have much interest in baseball to it, and they've enjoyed the experience for the park and the view of San Francisco Bay, as much as anything else.

And Debbi actually does like watching baseball, although she's not the geek I am!

We met in Menlo Park and took CalTrain up to the stadium. We cleverly did manage to catch the express train that would get us there before first pitch. Yay! (It was completely full, standing-room-only, though.)

Our seats were not so great - all the way down the third base line, right at the bend as the deck turns into the outfield, but actually before the bend so we were facing the right field wall rather than the infield. Still, there are basically no bad seats at Pac Bell, so who's complaining?

The game itself was okay, although Barry Bonds - he of the 30+ home runs before the All-Star Break - was having a day off. Given the pitching match-up - Kirk Reuter for the Giants and Woody Williams for the Padres - I expected a high-offense game, and a good chance of Bonds to hit a homer or two, if he hadn't been sitting.

Actually, the game turned out to be quite average. Williams wasn't fooling any of the Giants early on, and they put up 2 runs in each of the first three innings. On the other hand, that's all they ever got. The Padres started chipping their way back, until Robb Nen came in in the ninth inning and easily retired the three men he faced for the save, and the Giants recorded a 6-4 victory.

But we had a good time anyway. Towards the end of the game we took a walk around the park so Debbi could see the view from the right field wall and the other neat odds-and-ends in the stadium's confines. I got a pretzel, which was good, and garlic fries which were almost more garlic than fries, which was weird, but acceptable. (I mean, you have to take stadium food as it comes. Stadium food is mostly aimed at people who are going to be drinking lots of beer.)

I was hard-pressed to think of what I saw in today's game that I'd never seen live before, though. The best I could come up with was either Ramon Martinez bobbling a ball from his glove to his bare hand, and still throwing in time for the out, or the Padre outfielders converging on a ball hit to deep right-center field when one of them suddenly holds up - apparently concerned about a collision - allowing the ball to fall for a double. Those seem like kind of wussy choices, however.

But it was a good time all around. Now Debbi's trying to persuade me to go to some more A's games with her...