I attended the Giants game on June 26 against the Athletics, the second game in the Bay Bridge Series and the second game of the Giants’ Welcome Home Weekend, their first series with the ballpark re-opened to full capacity. This was my fourth game of the year, and I went with my brother and our mutual friend. Our seats were as far away from the field as you could sit (i.e. the back row of the upper deck), but there’s no such thing as a bad seat at Oracle Park, and I’m not just saying that to be cliche.
My plan was to take BART to the Embarcadero station and take MUNI from there to the 2nd & King station, which I did, and despite initially taking MUNI in the wrong direction, I arrived at the 2nd & King gate a few minutes after it opened. I always try to get to the park right as the gates open so that I can try to catch a batting practice home run, which I’ve never actually done.
After picking up my Mike Yastrzemski bobblehead, which actually said 2020 on it, I went straight to the left-field bleachers, which were the most crowded I’d ever seen them in batting practice. It was hard for me to find a place to stand that wasn’t blocking the aisle, but I eventually found a spot a few rows behind the Chevron cars. No baseballs came too close to me, and after watching almost exclusively maskless people walk by while waiting in a very long line to buy my go-to ballpark food, garlic fries and a hot dog, I found the escalator to the upper deck and climbed the stairs to the back row.
Before I talk about the game, I’d like to talk about my experience with the Bay Bridge rivalry. The A’s are my second-favorite team, and prior to this game, I’d attended three Bay Bridge games: a night exhibition game in San Francisco on April 2, 2015, a day exhibition game in Oakland on April 1, 2017, and a day regular-season game in Oakland on August 25, 2019. In the exhibition games, the fans were pretty chill toward each other and understood that the games didn’t count, but in the regular-season one, there was a full-fledged brawl between Giants and A’s fans one row in front of me because two drunk Giants fans were being very loud and refused to tone it down when asked. I can’t say I was expecting more fireworks in this game, but I got them, and it was just as entertaining.
Before the game started, a trio of A’s fans sat down one row in front of me, and one of them, who had a jersey that said Powell on the back, said something along the lines of “Oh, I’m surrounded by Giants fans, I’ll be civil if you will!” But similarly to that 2019 game, the Giants fans weren’t very civil. One Giants fan, whom I’ll call Karen (because she was one), was sitting about ten seats to my right, and she started yelling at the A’s as if they could hear her from the back of the upper deck. Some of the things she yelled around the start of the game were that the A’s’ record sucked (it was 46-32 prior to the game), that the Giants didn’t have to share their stadium with a football team (neither do the A’s), and something about the Coliseum and sewage (that happened one time). I found it very funny because of how stupid and inaccurate she was being, but the A’s fans clearly didn’t feel the same — they’d yell something back every time she made a dumb insult.
This was a back-and-forth game, and every time the A’s scored a run, instead of celebrating the team’s success, their fans’ priority was to stand up, look back at all of the Giants fans, and yell at them and flip them off and act like the game was over. This was the ignition for a lot more arguments between Powell and Karen. And just like that game in 2019, the adults got more and more drunk as the game went on, so they became even louder and more irritable. I don’t remember the specifics of what was said, but I do remember that later on in the game a bunch of Karen’s friends got in on the act, and their baseball knowledge was also lackluster. One of them just said “At least we’re not in Oakland!” and when asked, couldn’t come up with a reason why Oakland was bad. Another one told an A’s fan that she would sue him for filming her, which was something I’d heard of happening many a time but never actually seen it happen.
I was having a fantastic time, but like I said, I took BART to the game, and it was my only way of getting home. The last train left at 10:30 pm, so I started to leave the stadium at 10:10, and was walking down the ramp to exit as Donovan Solano hit the game-tying home run. (I had actually stepped out onto a balcony to watch the previous pitch, but my brother was paranoid about missing the train and made me hurry up.) I could hear the foghorn going off from where I was, and I was really irked that I couldn’t watch it happen. It would’ve softened the blow if I could watch on my way home, but my phone died long before I left. Anyway, the BART train was waiting at the platform, and either the rest of the spectators had another way to get home or they just weren’t aware of the BART schedule, because there were only about a dozen other people in my train car, one of which had a very bloody elbow and was going around telling everyone in the car about how he met Khabib’s cousin. I’ll certainly never forget him.
It would’ve been fun if the train was packed and had a Finnerty’s-type vibe, but again, there were only about a dozen other people, and again again, my phone was dead. The only way I knew what was happening in the game was because people would yell out score changes, but all I could think about was how great it would be to be witnessing it in person.
After I stepped onto the sidewalk outside my local BART station, I borrowed my friend’s phone, which was at like 90% (I wish I’d known that sooner) to follow the play-by-play on MLB.com, and the first pitch I saw was the one that Curt Casali won the game on, and I announced that Casali had walked it off to the other people waiting for their rides home, but they didn’t really seem to care. However, a much bigger influx of fans exited the station a few seconds later, and one Giants fan clearly hadn’t lost his ballpark energy, as he started yelling at an A’s fan about the end result.
In summary, as someone who doesn’t play into the Bay Bridge rivalry and can just enjoy the banter between drunk fans, this game was very fun to be at. I just wish BART ran later, because I imagine it would’ve been beyond amazing to watch that game’s ending in person.
Oracle Outsider 