¡Adiós pelota!

The Giants are dead. Long live the Giants.

Yeah, I don't know what that means either. Maybe an Elizabethan form of "Wait 'til next year!"

With the Giants these days, I don't know what anything means.

Except that they're dead. Of that I'm certain. I'll call time of death 9:43 a.m., July 30, 2013, in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love.

They died long before, of course. I'm just being charitable. What fans see now are the undead, going through the motions, pantomiming hitting the ball and fielding grounders and running bases with regard for rules.

The wake will commence tonight and continue through Sept. 29, the last game in the regular season. Undead but twitching, the Giants will put on as good a show as they can muster until that time.

They are a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a wasted scoring opportunity.

Most mysterious is how the 2012 World Series winners (the very same team, save for some parts and pieces) could be so horrible this year.

It's greedy of us fans to want three World Series titles in four years. But it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the Giants to rattle contenders, to hum along in second or third place, raising hopes of a dynasty.

No chance of that. After many many days of Manager Bruce Bochy telling reporters "These guys are really trying hard," and sports commentators saying, "Maybe now they've reached rock bottom," the Giants have in fact reached rock bottom. They've become the lowly Chicago Cubs.

Worse, they are lower than the lowly Cubs, who swept the Giants in San Francisco over the weekend.

This time it wasn't the pitching. Matt Cain (the workhorse!) threw 115 pitches deep into the game Friday, good enough for the win. Then a ball skipped through the usually sure-handed first baseman Brandon Belt in the ninth. The Cubs won 3-2.

Madison Bumgarner pitched eight shutout innings Saturday! Cubs still won 1-0, on a ninth-inning homer by former Giants Nate Schierholtz.

Tim Lincecum struck out 10 Sunday, 30th 10-strikeout game in his career! And got the Giants' best hit! Cubs won, of course, 2-1. Was it this year Lincecum threw a no-hitter? Good God.

But pitching had faltered before. Also, players got injured; center fielder Angel Pagan is gone for the season, having hurt himself May 25 in the Giants' last truly great moment this year, scrambling for a game-winning inside-the-park home run.

Then hitting failed, then once-solid fielding. Then all these together, for game after harrowing game.

Twice in the last three days, Giants loaded the bases with no outs — and couldn't score. Saturday, after loading the bases with no out in the eighth and failing to score, the Giants loaded the bases again in the ninth with one out — and Tony Abreu grounded into a game-ending home-to-first double play.

None of the Giants' hitters, including the powerful Buster Posey, Pablo Sandoval and Hunter Pence, could hit the ball out of infield. Most Valuable Player Posey hasn't hit in the last six games.

Hunter Pence, trying hardest of all — accounts are widespread of his prodigious pre- and post-game workouts, his paleo diet, his quirky intensity — still has popped up on the first pitch to blow one scoring opportunity against a tired pitcher, then swung at three pitches in the next county to blow another opportunity.

Like commentator and former Giants second baseman Duane Kuiper said, the right guys were up at the right time all weekend and couldn't get anything done.

What's going on? Even the players don't know. More in sorrow than in anger, everyone has a theory.

A San Francisco Examiner writer calls it the curse of The Dawg, when a longtime Giants fan, so nicknamed, was told he could no longer roost along the outfield fence after he interfered with a fly ball that an Atlanta Braves fielder might have caught.

Feelings hurt, The Dawg left and didn't come back and the Giants fell out of first place.

Well, The Dawg finally returned to AT&T Park over the weekend, but he did the Giants no good.

Within the spectrum of possibilities, I'll even accept that the Giants are throwing games for some reason, or that nefarious forces are threatening their families if they win. My guess is as good as yours.

My guess is that if the Giants can somehow play for love of the game, rather than for countless unrealistic expectations, they'll improve. 

Of course, fans are angry. Talk shows tingle with recriminations and simultaneous demands and denunciations of trades. The trade deadline is today; we'll see. I hate baseball as business.

To the old saws of firing Bochy and General Manager Brian Sabean, fans have added calls for bringing in the fences at the Giants' ballpark, because so many of the Giants' long fly balls would have been home runs in just about any other ballpark.

Maintenance crews could have pulled the fences in front of second base and still not helped the Giants this weekend.

The only good news in all this: Such a shockingly impotent performance only elevates the brilliant pitching, hitting and lattice of lucky breaks that enabled the Giants to win the National League in two do-or-die series last year, then sweep the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.

How rare and precious such feats!

As long as fans continue to clad themselves in the gear of their heroes and put their butts in seats, even this malaise is profitable, entertainment so bad it's good.

Thousands of other fans commiserate, some faring better than others. Multiply that by the thousands of fans of at least 20 other miserable teams, and a strange kind of comfort blankets the continent.

While the Giants floundered Sunday, my mother-in-law asked if was praying for them. God has better things to do, I said.

Besides, I understand zombies are popular these days.

Now is the summer of my discontent …

… made bleak midwinter by this four-day break from baseball.

Fie! you say. 'Tis the great American game's greatest night: The All-Star Game®©™, vainglorious showcase of the best and brightest.

To quote my wise daughter once again: Meh.

The All-Star Game©™® is like a dress rehearsal, a walk-through for some big event that never takes place.

It's a cream puff, enticing at first look and lick, but souring the stomach and melting the mind with regret.

It's all way, way too much talk and half-speed action. It's a popularity contest, comprising some players who deserve All-Star®© honors, and most who don't. Oh yeah!? Who says?!! Says me!

And that's the point: Countless worthless arguments about who should be an All-Star®©™, which generates hot air, which lofts the hype, which inevitably leads to someone somehow taking your money.

I'm not watching, in other words. I'm stewing instead, waiting for baseball to resume Friday.

(Stew stew stew stew.)

Better the All-Stars©™® get a nice banquet in their honor, a free suit, a trip to Disneyland™©, and let's get on with the season already.

I'll make it, though. Don't worry about me. Friday will come eventually. Meh.

I'll survive on the memory of how the San Francisco Giants retrieved their championship play right before the All-Star®© break, including a no-hitter by the fans' favorite Freak, Tim Lincecum.

Nearly two years of flabbergasting performance by the little ace vanished in one gutsy game, the two-time Cy Young award winner with the 812-step pitching motion somehow putting all 812 steps in perfect synch to pitch a nearly perfect game.

So many games Tim Lincecum has looked lost on the mound, his eyebrows upturned in supplication, his little mouth opening and closing like an aquarium fish, throwing right into batters' swings with fastballs that have become less and less fast in a blindingly brief time.

On Saturday his mouth was still going but his eyes were hard and unmoving, and three innings after he had lost his best stuff, he kept baffling San Diego Padres hitters. No no-hitter happens without a lot of help, and after third baseman Pablo Sandoval speared a bullet deep up the line and threw out the batter with a laser throw to first in the seventh inning, right fielder Hunter Pence dove to catch a line drive off the grass to end the Padres' eighth.

Pence looked like he was going to cry running back into the dugout, so grateful to have preserved Lincecum's big night.

Now, of course, the people who ruin baseball for me — the money people — talk about how the no-hitter raised Lincecum's value for the possibility of a trade.

I hate those people. Let baseball be baseball.

After weeks and weeks of horrible baseball, the Giants walloped the Padres over two games.

Sure, the Padres walloped back in the third game, the last one before the loooooooooong All-Star™© break. Sure, the Giants broadcasters resorted to their horrid habit of  wishful broadcasting:

(As the Padres' rookie call-up Colt Hynes comes in at the top of the ninth to close down the 10-1 drubbing Sunday:)

Broadcaster Mike Krukow: He's gonna have a rough debut …

Kuiper: You mean a 10-run comeback?

Krukow: That's what I'm talking about.

Sheesh.

Friday is so far away …

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 …)

What the what?

OK, I peeked.

In a moment of weakness and a paucity of interesting TV, I checked in on the Major Leauge All Star game Tuesday — the one I said I never cared for and wouldn't watch.

Bottom of the first, National League 5, American League quickly out and scoreless.

What the heck happened?

Then, like finally seeing clearly into the living room darkness on Christmas morning, I learn that Pablo "Panda" Sandoval, the Giants' third baseman, had hit a bases-loaded triple to right field, 10 feet short of a grand slam (how is that the first bases-loaded triple in more than 80 years of All Star games?) to contribute the lion's share of the five-run inning. He scored on a single.

Melky Cabrera, the Giants' left fielder, had singled in that first inning bombardment, and then hit a two-run homer in the fourth inning to bring the National League tally to eight runs. He won the game's Most Valuable Player Award: a crystal bat (huh?) and a new Camaro.

Whichever National League team wins its championship also gets home-field advantage in the World Series, the only real stakes (besides league pride) in the game. The American League gets nothing. We fans get nothing. OK, memories, conversation. The game otherwise doesn't count. The regular season resumes Friday, teams nursing their wounds or stoking their boilers, depending, racing/limping to the season finish.

Today, another dark day without baseball, is the day to think about starting pitcher Matt Cain's getting the All Star game win with two shutout opening innings, allowing one hit; catcher Buster Posey's first inning walk to contribute to the scoring (and spending the rest of the game in the bullpen helping warm up each of the All Star pitchers); to consider that at the start of the game, four of the nine National League players were Giants. Today is time to wonder what it might mean for the Giants the rest of the season.

Maybe momentum, maybe nothing. Tomorrow, against the Houston Astros, will tell. Saturday, when the wonder-inducing wunderkind Tim Lincecum makes his next start on the mound, will really tell.

By the way, you probably missed out on buying the official bat to commemorate Matt Cain's perfect game June 13. For $99.95 plus shipping, you could have bought it, but the 2,012 bats have already been sold. It's not clear to me why a bat would memorialize a perfect game, the essence of which is the absence of bats.

You can still buy the commemorative ball in its dust-collecting case for $89.95, just 2,012 made. Hurry, operators are standing by!

It's only entertainment … it's only entertainment …

In this long dark tea-time of the soul* — which you might know as the Major League All Star break — I must take a reality check.

With much chagrin, I confess to throwing my arms skyward in the last week — more than once — and shouting at the television, "You stinkin' Giants! Can't hit, as usual! And now you can't pitch!"

I might have used invectives that children shouldn't hear, let alone my dog.

I've let the Giants get to me, and I said I wouldn't. I would enjoy this, win or lose, I said.

Oy, it's hard.

The Giants limped into the All Star break just as the Pittsburgh Pirates pummeled them. Such a hard-luck low-rent team for so many years, the Pirates. Now they hit, and hit hard. Now their pitchers command the game. Now the Pirates put together wins against the big boys, and have become the big boys in the process. Heck, they've become the 2010 San Francisco Giants, who gathered steam and won the World Series.

Good for the Pirates. It's probably their time to succeed. Just not against the Giants, who have just finished a long series playing the leaders in the National League divisions. Promise turned to problems; the Giants swept the Los Angeles Dodgers, shutting them out each game! Not long after Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history! And almost set a new team record for consecutive scoreless innings!

Then the team came loose at the seams with one crack of the bat, the first pitch Matt Cain threw, in his second return to the mound since his perfect game. Cain gave up a home run on that pitch to the Cincinnati Reds' leadoff hitter. The Giants split the series with the Reds, then got swept by the red-hot Washington Nationals, then barely salvaged one out of three against the Pirates.
 
Along the way batters lost their swing — the Giants' flagship station, KNBR, has a retired criminal defense attorney, Marty Lurie, who sometimes spends eight hours a day or more on the air before and after games talking about the Giants, and this weekend said the Giants simply don't hit the ball as hard as opponents.

Along the way the pitchers lost their way, shutting down rather than shutting out. The brightest burnout has been Tim Lincecum, the so-called Franchise, who embarrassed batters with his searing fastball and fool-suffering changeup and quirky delivery that propelled such fire from such a small frame.

Now he's just a guy with a goofy windup whom opponents like to hit. In one self-described lifelong Giants' fan's succinct appraisal, Tim Lincecum is a guaranteed loss. A two-time Cy Young award winner, he's won three and lost 10 this season, and has the highest earned run average among starting National League pitchers.

He's the fuel of sports talk around here, befuddled and even seething fans wanting him sent down to the minors, wanting the Giants to stick him with a phantom injury and put him on 30 days of rehabilitation, wanting him moved to the bullpen.

"We should make him our team's closer," one radio show's caller said. I love it when fans say, "We." I always wanna ask, "How many home runs did you hit for the Giants?"

Others call Lincecum a pothead and say that's the source of his trouble, or that he hasn't conditioned himself. Others say that even at 28, he's gotten old, that his body can't deliver the heat the way it used to just three years ago, and he has to reinvent himself as a wily pitcher who can throw a lot of junk — maybe even a knuckleball.

It's soap opera, and that's as it should be. Baseball is only entertainment. Though I feel bad for Tim Lincecum and the Giants and anyone who fails in full view of the public arena like these folks — they're getting a lot of money to entertain us. In the last two games, a couple of the Giants players looked like they were getting a lot of money to lollygag in the game for which they're paid to play hard.

Invectives shouted. Arms thrown skyward.

What do we get out of it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Audio-visual salve from the concerns of the day … something to talk about with others who follow the team. Others may gain: The Giants themselves, their licensees, advertisers, should you choose to give them your money. But you get nothing.

World Series champ? Nothing. Cellar dweller? Same thing. It's all entertainment.

All of which, ironically, comes to an end for me these dark days, marked by the All Star game today. For some reason, I've never been interested. Maybe in a sport that truly means nothing, the All Star game is anti-meaning. Popular players make their appearance, do their time, maybe play hard, maybe not. The National League or American League wins, whatever. It's supposed to mean something — lately Major League Baseball has tried to make it mean something by conferring home-field advantage to whichever winning league's team makes it to the World Series — but it doesn't. The home run derby, televised carny acts. Endless talk and meta-talk. Forget it.

Four Giants are starting today, and good for them, but I won't watch. Too much folderol; too many announcers whose inanity I can't stand; I prefer the Giants' own sometimes inane announcers; players I don't care about or care for.

The All Star game is something of a sham, which is evidence of the genius of sports marketing. Fans can vote multiple times — they could even when I was a kid, and even as a kid it felt wrong — and in their zeal, Giants' fans put four on the team. Some so gamed the system that Freddie Sanchez got the fourth highest votes among National League second baseman. Sanchez hasn't played since about this time last year, and he won't play this season either, if ever again, because of injury.

Talk radio buzzes about how much better a year David Wright of the New York Mets has had at third base than the Giants's Pablo "Panda" Sandoval, but the Panda is starting the All Star Game.  Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson said he was surprised Giants' fans didn't figure out a way to elect a "ball dude" — volunteers who snag foul balls before they reach the bullpen — to the All Star team. Giants fans responded viciously that they're tired of East Coast bias and that it's time the Giants got their due.That's the point: People watch, people buy, people talk, more people watch and buy, and so on.

Baseball goes silent for the next few days, then the second half begins. The Giants come home to host the poor Astros, and fans and analysts will blather about whether the Giants can come back strong. Most will wonder aloud and ad nauseam whether Tim Lincecum will pitch like the Tim of old Saturday night, and if he doesn't, what will the Giants do with him? Heck, what will the Giants do if Tim does pitch well?

Stay tuned. After the implosion of the last week, the Giants are still only one game out of first place in the National League West Division. It's only entertainment.

* Thanks, Douglas Adams.

Above the blue and windy sea

Time was — when our first was born — that people could predict my moods by the outcome of each San Francisco Giants game. Wins made me accessible and cooperative and accommodating; losses turned me into a hermit.

(Last night's embarrassing 9-1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, would have meant a bad today for everyone.)

I was ardent. We almost named our son after Will Clark, the hootin' and hollerin' Giants hitting sensation and first baseman at the time, but we employed rare restraint at the last.

Time was that I spent a couple of cold October evenings fixing the water lines to our house (well, "fixing" sounds a lot cleaner and more definitive than what I was doing), and watching baseball playoffs through the living room window, which I had cleaned in the one spot that gave me a clear shot to the TV.

I've tempered my baseball behavior since. In fact, I'm not a baseball fan anymore; I'm a San Francisco Giants fan. The only other baseball I follow is the Giants' current opponent (the Dodgers this day). After the two teams part, I all but forget the other guys. Other sports hold no interest for me.

I try — try, mind you — to see baseball for what it really is: Enjoyable but meaningless entertainment.

Wins bring pleasure, but so — I've come to discover — do losses. It's the pleasure a good book brings as its drama unfolds. The games are daily serials. My heart races, my face reddens; I hoot at a good play and curse at a bobble. The game ends, I listen to the the radio analysis for a while, then it's over. On to life.

At its height — when the Giants won the 2010 World Series — I shared the elation with, what, maybe 2 million fans who follow the team from game to game? I didn't buy the commemorative sweatshirts or license plate frames or bobbleheads or any such thing, but I was happy to have watched with others as the improbable season unfolded, and wistful when it ended. And life went on.

The Giants this year are a torturous lot — "Giants baseball: Torture!" had been a catchphrase the last two seasons and it's an evergreen — so I now share the angst and wary hope of those 2 million other fans. Just a month into the six-month season, and the Giants have lost their closer, the weird-bearded marketing genius Brian Wilson, for the season because of a bum elbow, and are not sure when or whether they'll ever get their clutch hitting second baseman, Freddie Sanchez, who has been out since the middle of last season with a shoulder injury.

The deceptively powerful third baseman, Pablo "Kung Fu Panda" Sandoval, went down last week for six weeks to repair a broken bone in his left hand — the same bone that broke in his right hand this time last year. Their catcher, Rookie-of-theYear Buster Posey who missed more than half of last season when a home-plate collision crushed his ankle, is back and doing sorta kinda OK. Their aging first baseman Aubrey Huff fled the team in a panic attack, and is back now, tenatively. And this week their effective middle reliever Guillermo Mota got kicked out for 100 games allegedly for taking performance-enhancing drugs.

This list of woe is incomplete.

Even among the healthy, the roster evokes grievous tension. Ace pitcher and two-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum, who embodies "must-see TV" because of Koufaxian bow he makes of his body to throw the ball, is like a thoroughbred who must have perfect conditions and mindset in order to succeed. Veteran Cy Young winner Barry Zito, whom I admire for his work ethic and his service to wounded military veterans, comes to the mound as a different pitcher each time, bedeviling hitters with his magic-trick curveball one game, walking a conga line the next. Fans regularly rag him for the multi-million dollar salary they say he doesn't deserve.

I'm leaving out the good stuff, like usually dependable starters Matt "Hardluck" Cain (so many times the Giants have failed to give him the runs he needs during his mostly masterful performances) and youngster Madison Bumgarner. Shortstop Brandon Crawford is acrobatic in the field, though a victim of the youngster yips. Trade acquisition Melky Cabrera wows the crowd with his bat and with a frighteningly accurate arm from the outfield; speedy Angel Pagan was on a 20-game hitting streak (snapped, sadly) as of last night. Rookie Gregor Blanco brings speed, and the infield usually comprises first- or second-year players these days.

The result is hit-and-miss, with more errors than the Giants usually commit. Not much different than most teams. The season, as we tell ourselves, is early yet. Plenty of games left.

The "pleasure" in all this is watching to see if the Giants can finagle small miracles en route to the playoffs — or succumb to more than a century of statistical likelihood and common sense, finishing a respectable third or stinky fourth place.

Win or lose, the Giants will have entertained me. That's my game plan.

It helps that the Giants have the league's best storytellers (Vin Scully is the best alone, but the Giants broadcasters have him outnumbered.) On the radio, it's butter-voiced Hall of Famer Jon Miller and the Boy Wonder, Dave Flemming. On TV, most of the time, it's Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper, two former Giants (the former a one-time 20-game winner and All-Star) whose greatest value to the team is being former Giants who talk fan-to-fan with Giants viewers.

Some of summer's best moments are catching the Giants on the radio. Baseball games weave their tendrils into daily life, slyly. Just when you're lost to the drone of the day, the sudden barking narration of a double in the gap returns you to the game in progress. More than one long family drive was made shorter by extra-inning games of heartstop and heartbreak and derring and stupidity until, suddenly, resolution.

The best part of a Giants home win is the tradition of playing Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," over the public address system as fans file out. Radio listeners can hear the ending crescendo echo through the stadium as the broadcasters return from commercial for  for the post-game recap:

"Above the blue and windy seeeaaaaa …
When I come home to you, San Francisco,
Your golden sun will shine for me."

One-hundred thirty-four games left.