at the old ball game

The London Olympics is over (how I wish I could have been there sketching!), but here in California, baseball season is getting interesting, and we have been to a couple of San Francisco Giants games recently. It’s not a super long drive from Davis, about an hour and a half at most, but the temperature drop can be 30 to 40 degrees. In Davis we have been sweltering in the low to mid hundreds; down by the Bay, however, it has been mid-sixties to mid-seventies (Fahrenheit, not calendar years, though that could be true too). In fact last Sunday, in my shorts and t-shirt, I was freezing. Typical Brit, always complaining about the weather. The Giants beat the Rockies on that day, and I drew the above scene, the section of crowd where new boy Hunter Pence belted his home-run in the 8th inning. AT&T Park is really one of the best stadia of any sport, and located right on the Bay itself the setting is spectacular.  

A week or so before we went to an evening game there, to watch them lose to the Mets in ten long long innings. We sat in club level and I sketched in orange pen and ate mounds of greasy garlic fries with a nice, cold, very expensive beer. In Club Level they have all sorts of Giants memorabilia on display, including the 2010 World Series trophy, and a whole cabinet of ‘bobbleheads’, those giveaways they often give away, depicting famous Giants players. These four are big names at the club, and were all pretty important in that World Series winning season (incidentally, they say “World Champions”, but the World Series of baseball is called that because of the original sponsor of the series, the New York World, not because it includes teams from around the world, but don’t tell them that). Bobbleheads don’t always look much like the person they are representing, but in some cases it’s hard to get it wrong. The guy on the far left is Brian Wilson, aka “Fear the Beard”, the currently injured closing pitcher. Next is another pitcher, Tim Lincecum, aka “The Freak”, holding the World Series trophy. “The Kung-Fu Panda” is next, Pablo Sandoval, a super popular player (people wear panda-hats in his honor, as seen in the top picture), and finally, looking nothing like him, young Buster Posey, the catcher and a mean home-run hitter. Look at me, being all American and knowing all baseball stuff. It won’t last long, the Premier League starts this weekend…

by Pete Scully