How I spent my summer vacation

The penultimate pitch; the next one would loft weakly to centerfield
to end the game …

The A's beat the Dodgers 5-2. That's an important detail.

Not the most important, but a satisfying denouement.

It was a win-win for Rob and me: The Oakland A's won (he's happy) and the Los Angeles Dodgers lost (I'm happy).

The Giants didn't gain any ground, losing later that day to the Cardinals. We heard the bad news over the radio on the drive home.

The most important detail is we were Doing Something Out of the Ordinary — not going to work! In the middle of the week! To a ballgame!

An A's game! Quite out of the ordinary for me, not an A's fan.

(I could have been, in an alternate universe. Were I an adult while the A's were winning back-to-back-to-back World Series in the early 1970s, in their garish green and yellow uniforms, retro handlebar mustaches and wild muttonchops dripping from their faces, I would have found them inviting and refreshing.

But I was a kid adhering to inexplicable kid logic in liking the San Francisco Giants, and decided the A's were piratical and anathema.*#

That feeling has stuck, all these years hence.)

In an alternate universe, I would have loved the A's ballpark, now called the O.co®™ Coliseum (naming rights are not always pretty). It feels small inside, close in, intimate. As a kid, I would have lost my breath at first look of the emerald grass, glass flat and carefully brushed by optical illusion to different shades of green, and would have picked the A's for life, just as I had with the Giants on first sight of the grass at Candlestick Park — Giants vs. Cubs doubleheader, almost 43 years to the day before yesterday's game.

Nearly 25 years ago, I sat almost opposite the vantage point of this image, high in the upper deck, now blocked off by great green tarps. My brother-in-law had invited me to Game 4 of the World Series. The Cincinnati Reds swept the A's in four games. A National League fan, I had to sit on my hands that game and withstand the gnashing of teeth around me.

It was the last time I had been to the coliseum.

This was a happy return. Rob had bought some great seats, as you can see, just to the third base side of home plate, about 10 rows back. I have never sat so close; the players appeared actual human size, and strangely not heroic. They loom in closeup on TV, their twitches and mutterings and hard stares and wild shouts writ large. In person this close, their strikeouts and hard groundouts and even their curving rocketed home runs seem ordinary, as if a bunch of fans had climbed down from the stands to play a game of pickup.

Rob and I had hung around in the journalism department back in college, and re-met a year or so ago through the miracle of facebook®™, learning we had migrated to the same city. He reminded me yesterday that I had even taken his place in an apartment with another friend after he went off and graduated.

We were playing hooky in the least delinquent manner, planning ahead, notifying bosses, warning family, changing our out-of-office messages.

"We look exactly like we're going to our one game for the year," I said. We had our wide-brimmed sun-blocking hats, our street clothes like we were going to an after-work mixer (if we were after-work mixers kind of people), our sunscreen to be applied later.

Weekday ballgames used to be called businessmen's specials, and we fit the yesteryear profile, even if our office was two hours back northeast.

We had not a stitch of league-approved baseball gear on, and probably looked out of place joining a sea of jerseyed and hatted fans — overwhelmingly Dodgers' fans — salmon-running into the stadium.

It was the second to last jam we sat in, getting to the ballpark, interstates 80 and 880 having clogged on the way into Oakland. For the briefest moment in our planning, we entertained taking public transportation, and the nostalgic notion of hopping the train from Sacramento right to the porch of the ballpark.

The price quickly put us off. Memo to Amtrak®™ and other purporters of public conveyance: Really?! If you want us to use your ride and ease the traffic mess and reduce our carbon footprint, wouldn't you make the price somewhere approaching reasonable?

The slow jam didn't bother us. We got to catch up. We got to see the architectural details of buildings on the side of the freeways in Oakland, the massive Star Wars™®-inspiring white loading derricks of the Port of Oakland.

Twenty bucks to the attendant at the entrance of the Coliseum parking lot, and after that we were on our own to find a way around the lot without getting hit.

Twenty-two bucks and change for two beers, which tasted good; something about the ballpark. The woman who poured the beers was cheery and genuinely glad to serve us. The beer tasted better.

You don't want to know how much for the sweet Italian sausages and drinks, served by another friendly woman who seemed to know the best way to combat the frustration fans feel over the traffic jam of humanity at the hot dog counter was to greet them warmly and make them glad they bought lunch at her window.

"You gotta splurge every once in a while," said Rob, and he was right.

We sat in the sun, I in my completely sun-blocking camping hat and long-sleeved shirt.

"Aren't you hot?" said the young Dodger fan next to me, wise despite the error of his allegiance. I was, but I wasn't going to tell him. I sat still except for helping the fan in front of me who, along with his mother, started some timely "Let's go, Oakland! (CLAP CLAP clap clap clap)" rally cheers.

The son was wearing a Rickey Henderson No. 24 jersey, old school. Mom swooned for current player Josh Reddick, he of the long auburn locks, and wore the rightfielder's jersey.

Reddick went 0-for-3 yesterday, but it didn't matter. Despite a two-run homer by Dodgers' waning shortstop Jimmy Rollins (who I was sure would die a Philadelphia Phillie), the A's put together a couple of innings of bat-'em-around baseball to cut down the Dodgers and quiet their fans, who left without incident.

Reed-thin starting pitcher Jesse Chavez held the Dodgers to that home run and one other hit over eight innings, striking out Rollins as his final act.

The A's have the worst record in Major League Baseball, but it didn't matter. They beat the leader of the National League West division.

The Dodgers had lost the night before too, the A's winning in a 10th inning walk-off base hit, which I commend highly.

Crawling out of the stadium, on the freeway at 30 mph up I-80 until past Vallejo, we didn't care. We got the chance to talk about everything and nothing. Jon Miller and Duane Kuiper on the radio narrated the Giants' tenuous lead against the Cardinals, then the sad news that the Giants had lost, unable to keep one more home run from escaping the field.

The day flew by too soon, the game ending too fast, as did that one good beer. We were not quite ready for work the next morning, but we'd muddle through.

Just the way summer vacation should be.

* piratical and anathema, two words I didn't use as a kid, and barely know how to use now.
# really good name for an alternate universe alt rock band …

Aftershocked

Un-editorial cartoonlike, this one went entirely unlabeled. The pancaked Cypress Freeway in West Oakland had
become an icon of the Loma Prieta earthquake by then, and I thought I'd drawn Gov. Deukmejian and his
Jimmy Durante nose and Dumbo ears often enough without tattooing him with "Duke." But I had also run my quota
of cartoons for The Stockton Record, so this one never ran.

Twenty-four years ago last week, Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's at Candlestick Park. ABC was showing highlights (lowlights) of the A's beating the Giants in Game 2 when the screen went yellow, then screen-test splotchy, then black.

In a few seconds the living room of our suburban Sacramento home, 93 miles away from the ballpark, hopped up and down a couple of times. I walked fast into the next room to warn of an earthquake, where Nancy, pregnant with our son, thought she was just getting nauseous.

Measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale, the earthquake killed 63 people, injured nearly 4,000 and left 12,000 homeless. A section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, as did a long stretch of the elevated Interstate 880, called the Cypress Freeway. Fires spread wide through San Francisco's Marina District, old buildings falling over in the street and breaking gas lines. In Santa Cruz county at the earthquake's center, houses and churches and stores toppled.

Game 3 resumed a week later. The A's swept the Giants in four games.

We in Sacramento escaped the destruction, but two jobs connected me to the aftermath — commenting on it as a freelance editorial cartoonist and writing about its effects on California agriculture as a farm reporter.

On the former, my cartoon commentary followed the arc of a temblor.

First was happy complacency, life being to laugh, the only care in the world the conflicted loyalties of Stockton-area fans as the two Bay Area baseball teams met for the first time in the World Series. Thus:



Then the quake hit. Editorial cartoonists are at their worst in times of natural disasters, with no one to blame and no point in blaming while so many suffer. Often cartoonists play the God card — God or an angel weeping for the loss, or a giant arm dropping from the sky to comfort or smite. Or cartoonists lionize rescue workers, or isolate a suffering child, trying to commiserate or share the blow. This is what I did:

Probably no one saw it, or those who did thought, "Yeah, so?" or didn't know I had tried to render a seismograph's depiction of a quake. I might have been better off just scribbling the Red Cross phone number.

After the shock wore off came damage assessment. The earthquake raised questions about policy and procedure. Blame. Particularly over whether the state's infrastructure, the collapsed freeways, may have suffered from frugality and inattention:

By the time I had hit my stride and angst over the issue, I had also run out my quota of cartoons The Record, so the cartoon at the top, the one I'd preferred over all I did on the topic, didn't make print.

By many accounts, something had changed with Gov. Deukmejian in the earthquake. Whether the scope of the disaster changed him, or he wanted to tend to his legacy near the end of the term, or something else, is unknown. But he transformed from deflecting blame for some of the earthquake damage by his extreme fiscal conservatism (to which the cartoon at the top refers) to becoming an administrator who could work with both parties in crafting fairly quick and effective earthquake aid.

As a farm reporter, I was writing about the earthquake's effect on agriculture. In Watsonville in Santa Cruz County near the epicenter, I saw a massive tent city set up on the county fairgrounds, mostly farm workers driven from their homes by damage or fear of future damage.

Talking with a grower in an hilly apple orchard, I jumped at what sounded like cannon blast. It was an aftershock that felt like Earth had been kicked, hard. All the trees in the orchard rattled their leaves in one quick shake. The grower didn't even blink.

Whew!

The Giants, or a dim facsimile, stay alive in the National League Division Series.

They beat the Cincinnati Reds 2-1 in extra innings Tuesday, and will play Game 4 today, the Reds leading the series 2-1.

It was do or die, and the Giants did and didn't.

(Likewise for the Oakland A's, down two games, beating the Detroit Tigers Tuesday.)

I'm forming the theory that police are searching for the real Giants, tethered and drugged in some self-search storage closet in Teaneck, New Jersey (I watch too many iterations of Law & Order). It's the only explanation, because these are not the Giants we have watched all season.

Maybe Benson and Stabler (yeah, another Law & Order reference) will soon find the kidnappers' hellhole and release the Giants. We'll know tomorrow, if the Giants start hitting and pitching and playing scary rather than scared.

Even this was not so much a Giants win as a Reds loss. The Giants struck out 10 times to starter Homer Bailey, who had thrown a no-hitter in the late weeks of the regular season. That tells you how well the Giants, one of the best hitting teams during the season, did this game and this series.

The Reds hit a bit better, not much. They made mistakes, the most glaring of which came in the top of the 10th with a passed ball that moved the Giants' two slowest runners (catcher Buster Posey and a hobbled right fielder Hunter Pence) to second and third, and a bobbled infield grounder that allowed Posey to give the Giants the lead.

Whew! Another win. One more day to ask: Why do TBS and Fox baseball broadcasts ramp up the volume every time a pitch reaches home plate? Does anyone else find that excruciatingly annoying? It's some attempt to amplify the sound of the bat on the ball, to make the game more "exciting!" but it sounds like a jet flyover with each pitch.

I miss the Giants' broadcasters on TV … even when color commentator and former Giants pitcher Mike Krukow says, every time, that the catcher is in "the SQUAA-AAT, putting down the signs." Even when he does that.

Tell it goodbye!?

With 10 games left in the season, the San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division and a chance to win the World Series.

Of course, I fear the worst.

The Giants won convincingly, and even though they lost six of the final 10 games (including the season-ending series with the Los Angeles Dodgers) their lone win against the Dodgers was enough to ensure their Southland rivals would not go to the playoffs. As broadcaster and former Giants pitcher Mike Krukow would say, Grab some pine, Meat!

Their catcher, Buster Posey, is electric, having won the batting title and in line to win the league most valuable player award — all a year after getting his lower leg shattered in a collision at home plate.

Their mid-season acquisition, Marco Scutaro, is simply amazing, but most confident hitter I've ever seen. He has swung and missed a pitch only 10 times since joining the Giants. Think of that. Unreal.

The pitchers are, if not on their best, enough to inspire hope. The relief pitchers are many and strong, having carried so many, many games.

Everything is ready as the Giants face the Cincinnati Reds Saturday in the first round of playoffs.

Of course, I'm worried.

This is not the same team as the one that won the World Series two years ago. By most accounts, this team is better.

But the 2010 team was an improbable interloper in post-season play, the one many in the national media dismissed as unworthy to  show up.

The Giants secured post-season play on the last day of the regular season then, needing to beat the San Diego Padres to get in.

Momentum carried them into the playoffs, and magic ensued. The factors that determine a baseball team's success — power from the unlikeliest hitters, crazy streaks from the easy-out batters, and unbelievably stupid mistakes by the opponent — all fell the Giants' way.

The season in capsule form …

The same thing must happen for the Giants, or whoever wins it all this year.

This year's team worked through its own adversities, steadily, patiently, and won just when they wanted to. So I worry they'll go into the playoffs a bit soft, a tad entitled … kinda like President Obama in the last debate. I'm afraid the Giants might be measuring for World Series rings already, and that would be the end of it.

I hope the Giants show up hungry.

The hungriest team is across the Bay, the Oakland A's, who did the 2010 Giants one better in their playoff quest. The A's finished the season with six straight wins, sweeping their division rivals The Texas Rangers, and spraying their locker room and each other with champagne twice in three days — once when they secured at least a wild-card place in the playoffs (wild-card teams play each other for one game to decide who continues to the division series) and the second time when they took first place from the Rangers and consigned Texas to the wild card.

They did it with the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball, despite injuries that should have put the team down, and with a bunch of rookie pitchers who didn't know they weren't supposed to win the West.

I watched exactly one inning of A's baseball this year — the last inning of the regular season, when the A's battered the Rangers 12-5. I hate the A's, and have since I began following the Giants at the same time the A's and their gaudy green and yellow uniforms and handlebar mustaches won three straight World Series, 1972-74.

Were it not for my wife pointing out the A's improbable progress (with the loss of three key players to injury — one pitcher took a line drive to his head, fracturing his skull — one pitcher to substance abuse, and crushing failures), I wouldn't have watched even that one inning.

Tuning in was like peeking in on an alternate universe. A roaring, standing capacity crowd seemed to bend the decks to bursting, wearing their neon yellow and green (instead of Giants black and orange). Fans waved their posters boasting inside jokes (Giants fans point out they're Gamer Babes, or exhort Posey for president, or wear fuzzy halos for Angel Pagan or giraffe caps for Brandon Belt or panda caps for Pablo Sandoval).

The A's do the Bernie Lean, after a rap song (after the cult comedy "Weekend at Bernies," in which friend must make a dead guy appear to be alive) which is played when Coco Crisp (great name!) steps to the plate. It was teammate Brandon Inge's song, but Crisp took up the mantle when Inge was injured, and the fans went nuts.

The A's closer is an Aussie named Grant Balfour. Fans go into a wild "rage fest" dance as he comes in for the last inning. He throws hard, stares down batters and occasionally yells at them during an at-bat. He's the equivalent of the Giants' Brian Wilson, but with an extra edge, a real rage.

The Giants have a tough battle to the World Series, not having done well against the National League Central leader Reds (won three, lost four) and worse against the National League East winner Washington Nationals (won one, lost five).

The least of the Giants hitters have to get hot. Opponents have to screw up at the right time. It's always the way.

Even if the Giants win the National League, I most fear the A's, who carry that rage into the American League playoffs.

Eh. It's only entertainment. It's only entertainment … it's only entertainment …

(Which reminds me suddenly, the annoying downside of having your favorite team in the post season is not being able to watch the game with your favorite broadcasters. Now we get a steady, stultifying diet of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, and it's disorienting to listen to the radio broadcast because it's as many as 10 seconds ahead of the TV coverage. It's only entertainment …)

'Cuz I'm the panderer, yeah, the panderer …

Baseball bits and pieces, Part I:

While the rest of the world snoozed, the Bay Area went simultaneously orgasmic and miasmic as the Oakland A's played the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series. It took an major earthquake to bring the Fall Classic to the country's attention.

The 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta quake shook the Giants more than folks and fans had figured, and once the ballparks were approved again for human habitation, the A's steamrolled their National League foes in four straight.

I played it both ways in this cartoon, pandering to The Stockton Record's readers who might be either Giants or A's fans. Fans used to be able to buy custom hats with the Giants logo and colors one one side of the crown, the A's symbol and colors on the other; I don't know if they can get 'em anymore, except from eBay hoarders. Fans bought them for the novelty and a lovely expression of conciliation, but the hats weren't big enough to hide their black hearts.

No one was truly a fan of both teams, nor can anyone be a real fan of two teams in the same sport. It's impossible. Sports fans grow up loving their team, and hating the other teams. It's a sport hate, not a true hate (though we all know how it can escalate), kind of like loving HBO over Showtime, Ford over Chevy. Kim over Khloe.

As ridiculous as my reasons for loving the Giants, so are my reasons for hating the A's: They were too good. They dominated professional baseball just as I was becoming a baseball fan about fifth grade, and I remember thinking that those neon yellow A's uniforms and all those walrus mustaches could not possibly be the meaning of baseball.

The A's dominated as I re-upped as a Giants fan, going to the World Series in 1989 and 1990. Somehow my brother-in-law had an extra ticket to game four of the A's-Cincinnati Reds World Series in Oakland. Somehow, he gave it to me. Such sustained surreality, sitting through that entire game, unable to utter a peep as the National League Reds carried out a sweep against the hometown team I hated so much.

(Trivial aside: Both those names, José Canseco and Will Clark, are still present in baseball. The charismatic former first baseman with the sweet swing, Will Clark works for the Giants as a community liaison. Canseco, he of the gigantic muscles whose Bash Brother was Mark McGwire, is still trying to play professional baseball, after all these years.) 

2013 nightmare

I run this cartoon now because the Giants just took two out of three games against the A's last weekend in their first meeting this season of interleague play. About this time of year, for wobbly marketing reasons, National and American league teams play each other throughout a month, and then resume sanity and finish the season against teams in their own leagues. The Giants will play the A's again, this time in Oakland, in June.

It works in the Bay Area, Chicago and New York, where fans in those areas and cities love their teams and hate the crosstown(Bay) rivals. Other interleague matchups are artificial, and I guess fans buy tickets just for the novelty of seeing opponents whom they would never see otherwise. But the Arizona Diamondbacks vs. the Seattle Mariners? Why?

Big changes await next season, when the Houston Astros will move to the American League, and each league will have 15 teams. Two equal but odd-numbered leagues will require National League teams to play American League teams throughout the season, wearing out the novelty and imperiling the National League's position as the Keeper of the Pristine Game: We may see the designated hitter rule apply to both leagues.

Next year, the cursed rule will have been in effect for 40 years. The American League uses it (in fact, I understand that every professional baseball league in the world, except for the National League, employs it) to replace the pitcher with a hitter during at-bats. Typically, teams put a power hitter in the pitcher's place, and put the designated hitter in the heart of the lineup; typically, the rule allows aging baseball players to extend their careers in the American League, where all they have to do in their final years is swing a bat.

The National League still requires the pitcher to bat, and pitchers usually bat last in the lineup. Typically, pitchers aren't good hitters, but sometimes pitchers can surprise fans with a liner that can deflate opponents, or will lay down a bunt to advance runners on base. Team managers have to work hard to make a pitcher's at-bat effective.

When American League teams play in National League ballparks during interleague, they can't use the designated hitter rule, which can put their hardly-ever-hitting pitchers at a disadvantage. Conversely, National League teams in American League ballparks can boost their lineups with an extra hitter.

I'm afraid next season the American League will complain about having to do without the designated hitter rule so often, and will try to have it applied to the National League as well. Fans who should know better, who want to see home runs over game strategy, will bark for it too.

Should it happen, the game won't be as much fun.

One excuse after another

A C-minus on the Effective Editorial Cartoon Scale …

The earth shook San Francisco 106 years ago this week, giving me another flimsy excuse to blab about tangentially related cartoons. These follow the day the earth did another number on The City 23 years ago.

The San Francisco Giants were about to play the Oakland A's Oct. 17 in Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, when the TV signal hiccupped and disappeared. Then the ground beneath me in suburban Sacramento gently rippled. My wife, pregnant with our firstborn, and the women with her, planning an event in the next room, simultaneously felt queasy and glanced around to see if anyone else noticed.

In the constant din of news about the devastating earthquake, I drew a buncha cartoons. The Stockton Record ran the one above, which as cartoons go, doesn't go very far. It became merely visual relief on a gray page. "Cartoonist feels earthquake, fumbles the commentary, whelms readers" — that about sums it up.

My more pointed cartoons, about the literal and political fallout of the quake, including the one below, were harder to sell:

Though the Embarcadero is a broad and beautiful avenue again, the elevated double-decker that used to darken the piers along San Francisco's inner bay became a horrendous deathtrap in the Loma Prieta quake.

Gov. George Deukmejian wasn't alone in passing blame for what might have been lax oversight in the seismic stability of all that the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down. But he wasn't at the forefront saying, "We need to fix this!" either. I dunno; maybe my pointed 'toons lacked taste and decorum.

Which is sorta what I was going for.