Last year the Giants blitzed us with the All Star Game and Barry Bonds’s home-run pursuit. This year’s marketing distraction is the team’s 50th anniversary in San Francisco, a fine milestone that reflects a rich history but is marred with one gaping hole: no World Series championship.
We’ll have plenty of time to reflect all year on the past 50 years of San Francisco Giants and spend money on garish T-shirts. (I can’t wait for the Hall-of-Famer reunion-slash-barbeque-slash-cockfight that Juan Marichal will host.) Problem is, thinking about the golden anniversary and the two near-misses in 1962 and 2002 can devolve into an exercise in self-pity, recrimination, and trigger nightmares of 85–year-old Red Sox fans who died just before their team finally won it all.
But let’s start with something warm and fuzzy: tell us one of your earliest memory of being a Giants fan: your first game, your first radio broadcast, your first mad dance around the kitchen after a game-winning home run, your first heartbreak.
I’ll lead off: Sitting in the center field upper deck bleachers at Candlestick on a sunny May Sunday against the Dodgers, watching Mike Ivie’s pinch-hit grand slam sail over the fence. A month later, Ivie hit another pinch-hit slam. To this day I get chills from the drama as a pinch-hitter steps to the plate with the bases loaded.
(Photo courtesy of Sobriquet.net under Creative Commons license.)
