8/50: The San Francisco Giants
Seventh inning stretch
“In baseball, you can’t kill the clock. You’ve got to give the other man his chance. That’s why this is the greatest game.”
And… we take a break from the intensity of theological reflection to talk about baseball.
My grandmother began cheering on the New York Giants when she was a young girl in South Dakota, and so in 1957, when the Giants moved within 100 miles of her new home in Lodi, California, they were forever her team.
Out of the seven cousins on my grandmother’s side, I was the only one who didn’t play sports growing up. But that didn’t leave me out of watching them. There were sports running constantly in the homes of my grandparents and parents. Hearing baseball on TV or the radio is one of my comfort places and a way that I reconnect with the best parts of my childhood.
To be a Giants fan that long is to know season after season of loss and heartbreak. So, when the Giants won their first World Series in 2010, we took the girls out of school, dressed head to toe in orange and black, and went into San Francisco for the victory parade. We did it for ourselves and the girls, but we also did it for my grandma, who by that time was too frail to make a trip to San Francisco. We experienced euphoric and generous community in the crowd of more than a million Californians who flooded the streets of the city. We were about 3 deep in the rows of people lining the streets and the folks in front of us saw our kids and pushed them up to the front of the line so they could have a front row seat. Everyone was family that day in San Francisco.
Sports has a way of pulling threads of our lives from the past to the future and of giving us a way to connect beyond our divisions.
Last night, I attended the best game in the park I’ve ever seen. Before the game had even started, my dear friend Jay, who is a lifelong Dodger fan visiting us from Oregon, had decided he would cheer for the Giants in honor of my 50th birthday. (Every Giants and Dodger fan understands what a tremendous gift this was!) And Jay was rewarded with a splash hit, a homer in the last moment of the 9th that tied the game and then a pinch-hit sac fly in the 11th that won the game for the Giants. For a moment, the world seemed right again and we were connected beyond all that divides us.
Baseball is just a game, but I think for those of us who love it, it is also a practice of Sabbath. It’s a break from our routines that opens a space in our reality for something new and unexpected. It helps us remember that as my grandpa always said, “Any given team can win on any given day.” We live in the possibilities of this present at bat and know that whatever happens, there will be another game tomorrow.