Fathead Blog

The San Francisco Giants and Texas Rangers square off Wednesday in San Francisco to start the 2010 World Series. It’s expected to pull in some of the lowest television ratings in the history of the Fall Classic, but you wouldn’t know it around these parts. The Bay Area is atwitter about the Giants and whether or not their pitching can shut down a Rangers offense that includes Josh Hamilton, Vladimir Guerrero and Michael Young.  And even more chatty about how the average ticket to the series ticket is fetching $800.

When I moved to San Francisco in the year 2000,  I had every intention of following the Giants. As a Detroit Tigers fan, it made perfect sense to me. The Giants were in the National League, which would avoid any conflict of interest (except for a potential World Series match-up that would certainly be played on an icy field in hell). And the Giants had just moved into a spectacular new stadium down the street from my new job. However, that plan disappeared faster than an 85 mph fastball from Kirk Reuter to Kevin Elster .

It’s true that the stadium is beautiful, but the diehard fans had been priced out of it. Corporations and soon-to-be bankrupt dot-coms controlled the bulk of the season tickets. The couple of times I was floated tickets from the construction company I worked for, I was surrounded by “fans” who were only vaguely aware that there was a baseball game happening. It was a constant parade of people moving through the row to the concession stands for garlic fries. Or the guy on the cell phone, who, just as the pitcher goes into the wind up, pops up, turns around, and waves his arms so his friend can spot him. Where’s Harry Callaghan when you really need him? That stuff alone was enough to stop going to the new park, but mix in an aging team built around Barry Bonds and I was definitely not interested.

I never would’ve guessed it beforehand, but I found myself regularly driving over the Bay Bridge to Oakland for the exact opposite experience. The Oakland A’s were a scrappy team that seemed to genuinely enjoy playing together. Most of the games were sparsely attended (and they still are). But the people were there for a ballgame, not to be seen and definitely not to impress clients. The shared feeling inside the Oakland Coliseum was essentially “Sure, it might be a dump, but it’s our dump.” Yes, the luxury boxes added in 1996 to entice the Raiders to return from Los Angeles, had destroyed any sort of baseball ambiance that existed, but let’s be honest… it wasn’t that good to begin with. But tickets were cheap and you could basically choose your own adventure once you got inside. Hey, you wanna slide past an usher and sit in the good seats near the dugout? No problem. You feel like getting rowdy and mixing it up with the bleacher creatures? Go right ahead. Heck, if you felt like having a quiet night out with your lady, it was usually wasn’t difficult to find an empty section or two in the third deck that could function as a romantic hideaway. If only I could’ve figured out to a way to recreate John Candy’s picnic with Ally Sheedy in Only the Lonely during an A’s game, I could die happy.

Fast forward 10 years later and things have substantially changed for both franchises. The A’s closed off the Coliseum’s upper deck and have been in a holding pattern of mediocrity for the last few years. Meanwhile, the Giants have produced exciting young players like Tim Lincecum, Pablo Sandoval , and Buster Posey to help propel them to the World Series. The corporate grip on AT&T Park also seems to have loosened a bit. If only Brian Wilson weren’t so obnoxious, I might’ve considered jumping on the Giants bandwagon for the playoffs. Instead, I’ll be pulling for the Rangers and their manager Ron Washington who was an Oakland fan favorite during his time as a coach for the A’s.