Foul Ball

Foul Ball

By Matthew Snyderman

The mid-1970s edition of the San Francisco Giants tended far more toward the mediocre than the awesome and their home, the fog-shrouded Candlestick Park, made people shiver more with cold than anticipation. Still, I was devoted to my team and found myself at many a sparsely attended game where kids could get in on the cheap and then sneak down to some vacant box seats for a few innings until a fossilized ballpark matron shooed them back to nosebleed territory.

My parents used to reward good grades and deportment by allowing me to skip school and attend Opening Day. I was a 9th grader in 1976 and could think of no finer way to spend a spring afternoon than watching a game versus the hated (but admittedly superior) Dodgers. So off I and another equally lucky truant went, tickets in hand, having been excused from school because of phantom illnesses.

Little did we know that a strike was in progress involving Candlestick’s concessionaires. The men—and they typically were men in those days—who sold beer and pennants and those disappointingly unchocolately chocolate malts would not be prowling the aisles, calling to potential customers at the tops of their leathery lungs like a pod of signaling whales. But it didn’t take long to realize that this labor dispute would mean more than a dearth of lame snacks.

Taking our seats, we noticed the powers that be had, either intentionally or through oversight, allowed adults to bring their own booze into the stadium. I’m talking about the hard stuff, not the Zinfandel and Chardonnay out-of-towners insist on associating with sports fans around here. I saw more hip flasks and half-pints in the stands that day than during two future trips to the French Quarter. An old college roommate recently told me about someone who boasted of spiriting a pony keg through the turnstiles in a stroller, bundled up like a baby. This congregation was well lubricated long before the first pitch.

Around the 5th inning, once the Dodgers had taken the field, two bearded fellows with stringy blond hair ran onto the field wearing nothing but blue jeans and sunburns. Their wobbly trajectory carried them into shallow center field where, after acknowledging their captive audience with Papal waves, they proceeded to drop their pants and give their skinny asses some air. The crowd didn’t exactly discourage them, cheering wildly as they fled toward the left field fence just ahead of a phalanx of security guards. Their fifteen minutes of fame came to an end twelve minutes early when the pair, too intoxicated to scale their way to freedom, were carted off. They might have found some solace while sobering up in the drunk tank that their ovation had probably been the day’s most enthusiastic.

The men’s room offered an even more colorful image when I went to relieve myself several innings later, one I never saw repeated at numerous drugged-soaked rock concerts at The Cow Palace or Cal-Stanford Big Game bacchanals. Desperation was spreading relentlessly as the lines stretched far beyond what one usually endured at Giants games of that vintage, and there was not enough space at the troughs to accommodate overflow demand. It was piss in your pants while hopping from one foot to the other or belly up to one of the beckoning sinks. So accountants, carpenters, cops, lawyers, and a kid who should have been in school did just that, three at a time.

Our G-men ultimately emerged victorious, a rare occurrence during that year’s campaign. But it hardly mattered. In fact, I had to look up the outcome to write this piece. Simply being there transcended what happened on the field in a way that George Will in his bow tie and sweater would never understand, let alone enjoy.

Eight Presidents have since come and gone, and I still enjoy sharing this experience; however, there’s also some melancholy lurking below the surface. I’m not nostalgic for another chance to join some rowdy horde in defiling a public restroom or pining for a BYOB night in place of a G-rated bobblehead giveaway at Candlestick’s handsome successor. Though I would probably get a hearty chuckle at somebody mooning the Dodgers currently patrolling positions that Steve Garvey and Ron Cey once manned with such smug success.

This was a San Francisco when George Moscone and Harvey Milk were still with us, before Jim Jones served his lethal Jonestown elixir, and before AIDS reared its ugly head. It was a time when teachers like my parents owned homes next door to artists and machinists and dentists and City gardeners. Fisherman’s Wharf was still a tourist trap, but one animated by a rogues gallery of merchants who hawked raunchy posters and underground comic books rather than the antiseptic kiosks that dot Beach Street today with their identical, overpriced kitsch. There was too much crime, to be sure. And poverty. And much of the town was a bit frayed around the edges.

Nowadays, the food may be far better than it was in the ’70s, especially at Oracle Park, the new stadium’s current soulless corporate moniker. Same for the beer. And I admit to the guilty pleasure of perusing trendy shops on Valencia and Divisadero streets that were ushered in by gentrification. As for my Giants, they eventually delivered three championships when just one would guarantee I enter the great beyond with a smile. But the San Francisco I knew as a teenager and the off-beat, unpredictable, never boring spirit that made it possible for fans to turn Opening Day 1976 into an impossibly tacky and hilarious Barbary Coast Mardi Gras are gone for good, and that’s too bad.

Matthew Snyderman lives in Northern California with his wife. His work has appeared in The Avalon Literary Review, Dark City, The Lowestoft Chronicle, and The Opiate. When not writing, swimming, or collecting music, he roots for the San Francisco Giants.

Elliot Lin is a college student who spends their free time musing about sports and how they shape or reflect identity. You can find their other baseball-related illustrations here, or on twitter @hxvphaestion and Tumblr.

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