Idiots Write About Sports

The Giants are playing in Tampa (okay, St. Petersburg — should they change the name to Leningrad just to be fair?) tonight. Had things been different, Tampa would have been their home in April of 1993.

Man, those were dark times. I had only recently returned to Northern California from the collegiate embrace of Padreland, and finally I was living within driving distance of my beloved Giants. And then the news came — the Giants would be going. Bob Lurie had sold the team to Vince Naimoli of Tampa, and they would be moving forthwith. So long, suckers.

What would have been my triumphant return to the Stick after four years in San Diego instead turned into a wake. My friend Jeremy and I went to one last game — August 23 against the Pittsburgh Pirates — as a final farewell. The Giants were bad that year, and Roger Craig was on his way out. We sat in the upper deck on the first-base side. I don’t remember much about that game, which the Giants ended up winning 5-2. What I do remember is that Don Slaught hit a home run (off Buddy Black, it turns out).

Jeremy, my red-headed compatriot from high school days, found it amusing that the awful Slaught had jacked one out of the yard, one of four homers he ended up hitting that year. So he threw up his hands and shouted, sarcastically, “Don Slaught!”

And thus began what was fated to be my final Candlestick Moment. A drunken Giants fan a few rows down from us turned around and began to spout obscenities at Jeremy, whom he referred to simply as “Red.” He apparently assumed Jeremy was a Pirates fan, what on account of the alcohol dampening his ability to detect sarcasm.

So that was it. The reign of the San Francisco Giants ends with a drunken fan hurling abuse my way in the upper deck at Candlestick. Fitting, in so many ways, for the place where I once had beer tossed on me by angry Giants fans because I was sitting near three girls singing “We Love You Dodgers,” for the place where I would end up hearing a Giants fan shout “HIROSHIMA!” as a taunt against Hideo Nomo on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped.

Except as it turns out, that wasn’t the end. Yes, George Shinn drew out his pipe and led a parade of children and rats through the loge section of Candlestick, but once he left town, Walter Shorenstein and Peter McGowan arrived with an offer that the baseball owners couldn’t refuse.

And so it came to pass that Giants fans, who really had hit bottom with a spine-severing thud in 1992, were miraculously spared. In came Barry Bonds and Dusty Baker, up went Pacific Bell (now XYZ) Park, and in 2001 I took my daughter to her first Giants game at the beautiful park in China Basin.

Meanwhile, in return Naimoli and Tampa were promised an expansion team. They’re the worst franchise in baseball, led by their terrible owner.

Sorry, Tampa. Revel in your Stanley Cup. Because when it came to baseball, we got the better half of that deal by far.