(This guy sometimes seemed to fall asleep while playing in the OF)
I developed my love for baseball over long summers sitting inn the upper deck at Candlestick Park, where Willie McCovey seemed to stand a few city blocks away, a miniature figure among other miniature figures in a massive, mostly empty stadium. As my fingers would dig into my sandwich bread, McCovey’s presence at the plate seemed ominous, a graceful giant whose swing seemed to stir the winds in the ballpark. His was always a homerun swing, one of the few memorable ones on a San Francisco Giants ballclub, a once powerful team that slowly unraveled to become a revolving door of farm prospect who would spend a few weeks being exciting before fizzling out while on the big league roster.
The Giants were not winners when I was a child, especially during that slow, disastrous month of June when the team seemed destined to fail miserably. There was no avoiding the “June Swoon”, which descended upon the team like a bad spirit. I would listen to pre and post-game interviews, wondering if the players would offer insight into this monthly curse. The answers were always stock, starting with “…we are trying to look for faults…” “…we are working at it..,” ending with something punctuated with spiritual verbage.
The truth is, no one understands June Swoons. Perhaps it is May that overwhelms, and June where the body hits that first wall. It might be a case of realizing that the baseball season still has many more months left, and that exerting all excellence too early into the game might result in a flat lining at the finish line. Or maybe it is just happens.
June Swoons, for its cursed string of losses and incessant eye rolling, never stopped me from loving the San Francisco Giants. I continued to tune in, weathering out the month until the arrival of the more favorable July and the All-Star Break. They could continue to lose in multiples, and I would still want to go to games, even when the team could only draw a tiny crowd that would yawn between pitches and imitate the umpire Dutch Rennert with such gusto that the husky strike calls would echo throughout the near empty stadium.
I was not the only child who never lost interest. There were thousands like me, San Francisco Giants fans who weathered season after season of terrible baseball, only to come out of it at the end of September, a bit sad that we would have to wait another many months until Spring Training. We loved our team and would watch them, preferably at the stadium, where we could send our hot dog wrappers into the wind or eat cold malteds on a windy night.
The San Francisco Giants are no longer that tragic team that sits at the bottom of the NL West standings, far too behind by the All-Star break to catch up to the standing leaders. As fans, we have experienced incredible success that has bred a demand for winning baseball. While this sort of expectation is shared by every fan in every sport, having been spoiled with two recent championships has spoiled most our fan base. For some, or at least most on Twitter, it makes fellow fans lose their perspective on just how difficult it is to come up with two World Series wins in three years. The San Francisco Giants have made winning look fairly easy, drawing talent from a successful farm system that carefully cultivates players while also making key mid-season transactions to bring the missing links to the ball club.
It is all, however, not as easy as it looks.
Baseball is a game that dips, dives, plunges and emerges through a very long season. Games are played everyday, with little break in between. Any fan whose team gets to sit on top starts thinking too far ahead into the post-season. This makes baseball both fun and stressful, because we learn to live and die with our expectations. Every roar of a win is soured by a loss, and the injuries that pile up make us reach for a strong drink, a antacid or a fellow fan with whom we can bury our sorrows. This is the essence of baseball, that our highs and lows waver from day to day, as opposed to once a week or every few days.
Baseball season is also quite long, and to hinge your support of any team on games that are played during the month of June is folly. Love and loyalty to a team go hand in hand, and there is always a reward for a fan that endures baseball season through its duration. Even when failing, your favorite team can play with September call-ups, instilling more hope again for the next season.
You can be like millions of San Francisco Giants fans like me who grew up watching a subpar team. We were not the people marching out of the ballpark early. We sat in our cars staring at the radio, listening for the next pitch and crossing our fingers if the bases were loaded. We never wore beads and did dances in between innings, because other people sat too far away. We just sat in our seats, without kiss cam or dot racing, watching inning after inning, hoping that we enjoy a happy ride on the Ballpark Express. To sit and embrace a game when your team is rewarding you with year after year of losses may not seem so appealing to a mind that is set on cheering a perennial winner. However, remember that our “…wait until next year…” did finally come in glorious fashion.
You will never experience any of this, however, if you give up in June.
(c) 2014 Slow Suburban Death. All rights reserved.
Be First to Comment