When Barry Bonds hit No. 756 on Tuesday, I was about 10 rows away. I didn't join in the pile for the ballI didn't want to spill the beer that I had just spent 30 minutes obtainingbut several people much farther away than me did. The homer was a bit of a line drive and seemed to bounce a couple times once it reached the packed stands; long after Mr. Mets jersey was shepherded away by police, people were walking by holding their hands and bitching about their rotten luck.
Getting tickets to the August 7 game between the Giants and the Nationals wasn't exactly easy, but it was still less complicated and cheaper than getting into any game at Fenway Park. I knew where I wanted to sitleft-field bleachersand after a few minutes on Craigslist, had my tickets. When I bought the seats on Sunday, ticket prices were about triple the $13 face value. Knowing that we would miss history (and that the seats would be worth far less) if Barry homered on Monday, I found myself rooting against him the entire game.By Monday evening, bleacher seats were going for $125 a pop. I briefly thought about selling my four-pack and making a quick profit, but I figured my wife might be madit was her birthday, after all.
While most of the media likes to pretend that San Francisco fans have a weird mancrush on Barry, it's really less complicated than that. San Francisco fans aren't really fanatics at all. Right before we were chanting "Barry! Barry!", pretty much my entire section was lustily booing that other overpaid Barry on the Giants for his subpar pitching. Booing a home player at other parks ain't cool, but in San Francisco, even the drunk guys in the outfield bleachers joke about the size of Bonds's head.
After the home run, one guy wearing a Giants shirt in my section held up a giant asterisk. He wouldn't tell me his name because he claimed he was afraid of the other fans, but it seemed to me that the people coming up to him were more interested in being next to prime television material than in threatening him. After Bonds checked himself out of the game, the guy with the asterisk left, as did a large chunk of the fans in the left-field bleachers.
(Photography tip: To get appropriately misty shots of historic events, simply combine crappy cellphone camera with 1/2 cup of Bud Light.)
Comment Rules
The following HTML is allowed in comments:
Bold: <b>Text</b>
Italic: <i>Text</i>
Link:
<a href="URL">Text</a>