Thoughts about last night's baseball game of baseball
It was between the Giants and the A's. That's not a thought per se, so consider if a freebie.
Hey, there was baseball last night! Real baseball! Well, it was an exhibition game, so it was more like real-ish baseball, and all the KBO games I watched a couple months ago (before the combination of their schedule and my going back to work made it too tough to keep watching) were actual real baseball, and…you know what? Let’s try this again.
The San Francisco Giants played a full-on baseball game on television last night. It was the first Giants game against an outside opponent in more than four months, and sure, it didn’t count in the standings, but maybe it counted in the standings in our hearts?
Standings in our hearts? Is that something?
Before the game, Gabe Kapler told the team that he would kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, and if I’m being honest here, I didn’t expect my negative reaction to Kapler’s hiring that I held for months to be reversed a few days before the start of the season. There will still be inevitable bad decisions in retrospect and bad decisions in forespect and bad decisions in spect, but this was a good decision, and it speaks well of him as a person.
Kapler was joined by several members of the organization. Antoan Richardson, the once-prospect and now-coach, was one of them, along with Jaylin Davis, who wrote a piece a month ago on the racism he’s experienced in baseball (as well as the players who’ve had his back). Brandon Crawford put his hands on the shoulders of both Richardson and Davis to indicate his support.
Also kneeling were Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater. Yastrzemski was a bit of a surprise to me — not to say I expected him to be aubronian or anything, but I’ve never seen any indication that he stands out among white baseball players in his opinions on racial inequities. Slater made a little bit more sense, I thought — he’s always thoughtful in his comments, and pays attention to the issues facing baseball, so it makes sense that he would also pay attention to the issues facing society.
Slater gets many kudos for his work as a person yesterday (which he explained to the media after the game), but he also gets a few more for how he performed as a baseball player. He had 3 hits and 2 doubles, with the first double being a rope down the left field line and the second a well-hit fly ball that found a gap in right-center field. Slater’s 2019 was great until September, when he crashed hard, and a team that can either (a) maintain his production throughout the year or (b) hide the flaws in his offensive game by playing him in a strict platoon will be in good shape.
Also in good shape: Gabe Kapler, who knelt during the anthem to prot…oh, I already covered that? But it was such a good segue. Dammit.
Some other notes:
-The A’s ended their half of the sixth inning by hitting a one-hop seed to Crawford at short, which he casually snagged and tossed to first in plenty of time. The whole game was an eerie facsimile of real major league baseball, like watching it from the bottom of a lake, but that I saw that Crawford play after I surfaced. I don’t know how many times he’s made that play during his Giants career — I would conservatively estimate 520 million — but something about it tonight, with cardboard in the stands and crowd noise pumped in through the speakers, really hit home.
To Crawford on one hop…he snags it and throws to first for the third out, and that’ll be the inning. Something about that felt right in a way that nothing else in the game did. Giants baseball was the way it should be.
-Playing in the middle of a pandemic is still really stupid, though.
-In the late innings, Chadwick Tromp hit a double, and as he was taking his lead off of second, the light hit his jersey just wrong and it looked like his name was Trump. I did not care for this turn of events.
-Alyssa Nakken coached first base for several innings last night. The Giants won last night’s game. I think the correlation is clear: the Giants win every game where their first base coach is a woman. You can’t argue with math.
-I wouldn’t say I missed the Heffernan commercials, but they’re as sure a sign of baseball season as anything else. Welcome back, insurance guys! Because I am different.