Thursday, December 2, 2010

Catchup

Over a month since my last post.  Sorry.  A great many things I should have been posting about since then.  I'll cover a few of them quickly and then get on with my current reason for writing in a second post (these posts just don't look as appealing when they're too long - two short ones will look easier to read).

So as my last post stated I went to the first two World Series with my dad and brother (@gohandrake).  It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.  Beyond amazing.  Day two started out with us catching up with work emails and phone calls and then going up to meet "real life" twitter friends Lynn (@lynnsherwood), Beau (@UCBeau, @Beausbarrelroom), and Monica (@FabOCGirl, @OC_Monica), and "stick" twitter friends Kate (@kateolynch) and Beth (@bethlynch) (who also may be my honorary cousins in the future - shoutouts in my blog: #hlmca), for lunch (that sentence makes a lot more sense when you read it without all the stuff in parenthesis).  Lunch was a blast.  We talked wine, drank tea & soda (it was the middle of the day!) and all around got to know each other more than we would have been able to do over twitter alone.  We weren't smart enough to take a picture of everyone together, but we did get a chance to snap one of the Texas cheering section


Which I thought was beautifully followed up by this one that Lynn took later (or maybe it was before):

Stick #lynchmob then went with Beau and Monica and I think ended up going home with Beau.

Then came the game.  Everything I said in the previous post all over again.  I really felt like I was part of the city.  Matt Cain and my Giants came through HUGE and, as those of you that have followed baseball or my tweets at all this year know, they ended up pulling off the series in 5 games (more on this in a bit).




Here are a few pics from that night. The first is (L to R) my dad, brother, and me. The second is a pic of the bay from our seats that I thought was cool looking, and the third is a pic of Steve with an old college friend who happens to be from the bay area and who happens to work for the Diamondbacks now (from whom we got our tickets through my cousin).

A few days later (on Halloween) I turned 32.  The next day the Giants won the World Series. I need to say that again.  The Giants won the World Series.  The San Francisco Giants won the World Series.  Best birthday present ever.  I'm not going to over exaggerate and say that this was the best day of my life.  I'm a proud dad of 3 beautiful children.  If one were to use crying as a measure of emotion, I cried much more when my kiddos were born than I did when the Giants won.  That being said I cried more for the Giants than I did when I heard that Steve and his wife gave birth to my niece (sorry guys).  Or more than I did on my wedding day (I love you honey!).  It was fantastic. Unreal.  It truly felt like something I had been waiting 32 years for.

A quick note on the Diamondbacks. I'm a born and raised Arizonan.  We didn't have an MLB team until 1998.  I'd been a Giants fan for 20 years by then.  Many people, my father and best friend Dave included, bailed on the Giants and became "hometown" Diamondback fans the minute the D-Backs arrived.  On a scale from 1-100 I consider the Giants 100, the D-Backs a 50 and everyone else 1-5 (except for the Dodgers who are a -100).  I always said that I'd give the Giants my loyalty until they won a World Series, then I'd hang up my Giants "fandom" call it a great relationship and move on to the D-Backs.  In 2003 when the Giants *almost* won it all I knew that that would never happen.  These guess have my heart.  It's not a rational, logical thing.  It's 100% emotional and beyond any control, like falling in love.  My buddy Dave and I were both at game 7 (not together) when the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees back in 2001.  He came down and found me in my family's season ticket seats after the game.  I'll never forget him saying that he made himself cry because his favorite team winning the World Series deserved his tears.  I didn't have tears in 2001.  It wasn't my favorite team.  I cried like a school girl this year.  And I didn't have to "make myself" do it.  I'd been waiting 32 years for this.  I couldn't have stopped myself from crying if I tried.  Sorry D-Backs, but you can never do that for me.  Giants, you have a fan for life.

1 comment:

  1. This is an awesome post! Just stopping by.....thought I would let you know I was here. =)

    ReplyDelete