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A Love Song to San Francisco [1]

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Date: 2022-11-01

Baseball in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco - what's not to love?

San Francisco has had a rough go of it for a while now. Everyone complains that crime is up (it may be, but that’s also become something of a trope), homelessness remains an intractable problem in a place where it never gets too cold and human decency reigns, and now the city has been the site of a horrible attack on the spouse of one of our most prominent public figures, a leader of national stature and generational importance. San Francisco could use a love song just now, so here is one.

I’m not Tony Bennett, singing about my lost heart. I’m just an old white guy, who moved to San Francisco from the east thirty-plus years ago for a normal job, and down toward Silicon Valley a while after that, to have a little more space to raise, well, a pretty traditional family. But I’ve loved San Francisco the whole time — and really, for years before I ever moved to California. I could rhapsodize about the city’s crazy history, the beauty of its natural setting, and its landmarks — who doesn’t admire the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chinatown Gate? — but what I really love about San Francisco is the city’s life.

I don’t get to participate directly in San Francisco life as much as I used to, but I still enjoy one activity that brings me to the city regularly, and keeps me tied into the idiosyncratic city life I love so much. We call it the Mission Baseball Club. it isn’t really a team, or even a formal club. It’s just a regular, Sunday afternoon pickup baseball — yes, baseball — game, year-round in San Francisco. In winter (the rainy season here) in recent years, we’ve often hoped for a rainout just to relieve our ongoing drought, but if it isn’t raining, we play. It’s never too cold, though there is a thing about playing baseball in January — the sun can be awfully low. But we deal.

We don’t actually play in the Mission District very often, and nobody remembers exactly when we started calling it Mission Baseball. The name is an homage the Mission Reds, an old Pacific Coast League minor league team in San Francisco. Our club began around 30 years ago, with a core of members, mostly professional musicians, who just got tired of playing in leagues where too many players’ competitiveness exceeded their abilities. Several of that early core still play regularly — one of the original stalwarts just resumed his accustomed station behind the plate after a hip replacement — but we’ve had a rotating, maybe kaleidoscopic, cast of characters come through the club over the years. The group is as diverse, and as open, as San Francisco. We have a wide range of ages and abilities, too, from a couple of people that have played pro ball, to good college softball players that like to play baseball with us, to superannuated amateurs like me. But everybody wants to play, and we all realize that if we can’t put nine into the field, we can’t really play baseball. So as long as that old guy in right can at least catch a fly ball hit right at him, and get the ball back into the infield, well, at least we can have a game.

There’s pickup baseball all over, I assume, but I like to think that a few aspects of Mission Baseball make us uniquely San Franciscan. The only reason we have uniforms (and we only have visiting grays) is that 15 or 20 years ago some of the members of the group started playing as visiting teams at the California State prison at San Quentin, where, as they say, every game is a home game.The SQ program want their visitors to look like a team, with uniforms, so, well, now many of us have Mission uniforms.

In over 20 years of playing Mission Baseball, I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how we form teams for the games. Whoever shows up, plays. We warm up for a while, and at some point there’s a sort of organic movement to start the game. Some people go out into the field, and some go to the bench to hit. If we don’t have 18, one or two from the hitting team will fill in for the fielding team. If we have extra players, some on the fielding team will sit. But really, we just sort of look to make sure that each team has enough pitchers and catchers, and that the big sluggers aren’t too concentrated on one side, and away we go. Everybody just tries their best. We’re careful to be sure we always know the score, but nobody’s Monday mood is going to depend on who won on Sunday.

We have an annual double-header some time around the Fourth of July, with a barbecue between the two games. Not surprisingly, the second game is often a little sloppy. This is when we give our annual awards, the most important of which is the Asshole of the Year award. Near as I can tell, the main qualification is that that AOY is never actually an asshole — it’s usually someone that did something hilariously injudicious during the year.

Mission Baseball even has an offshoot. Over the years enough of our players have moved to New York to form the core of a seasonal Brooklyn offshoot, the Ramblers, who play on Saturdays in Prospect Park. Some of our Mission regulars play with the Ramblers when they’re in New York, and it’s always fun to welcome Ramblers back to our game when they’re in San Francisco.

Like all vibrant institutions, we also have newcomers. In the last year or so, a pickup band has joined us. They basically just sit in the concrete stands behind the city park fields and play mostly dixieland and gypsy jazz, with varying degrees of skill. We never know who will show up — this past Sunday a new player with a melodica (one of those keyboard/recorder instruments) livened things up quite a bit. We try to remember to tell them when we’re starting the seventh inning, so they can play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch. I hope they eventually learn to play it well. We awarded the band our Rookies of the Year award at this year’s double-header. The pickup band, at the pickup baseball game, in the fog in Golden Gate Park, may be about as San Franciscan a thing as I can imagine.

It’s easy to run down San Francisco, and these days parts of San Francisco look pretty run-down. But it’s the life that makes any city, and for my money, there’s no place like San Francisco. Mission Baseball may just be one reason I feel that way.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/1/2132737/-A-Love-Song-to-San-Francisco

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