Game Two

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: two — one said he'd "circle back," the other turned out to be a churro vendor. Status of the itinerary: revised.

We arrived in San Diego for the series. The Diablos hosting the Detroit Assembly Line, first homestand of the year. Petco Park sits in the East Village downtown, and the thing you notice first is the Western Metal Supply Co. building — a four-story brick warehouse from 1909 that the architects didn't demolish but absorbed, so that its southeast corner serves as the left field foul pole. A yellow stripe painted down the brick is the foul line. The building is older than the team and the league, and they built around it. Best architectural decision I've ever seen made about a wall.

Tonight's game was a night game, and we sat in the bleachers. From out there you can see the downtown skyline beyond left field, the bay behind it, and Gallagher Square past center — a grassy commons where people who are technically at a baseball game are walking dogs and eating things on sticks. There is a statue of Tony Gwynn on a raised terrace, and across a walkway a statue of Trevor Hoffman in mid-windup facing Gwynn, so that the two of them are frozen in an at-bat that never happened and will never end.

The craft beer situation is serious — a hundred taps from thirty breweries. I had a Ballast Point Sculpin, which is an IPA that tastes like grapefruit and poor financial planning, and which I can report pairs well with bleacher seats. By the fourth inning the outfield sounds like a restaurant where everyone is celebrating something, but it wasn't the home team this evening.

Tate asked once, early, why we were sitting in the outfield. I said the bleachers are where you feel the park. He squinted toward home plate, four hundred and some feet away, and said: "You can't see anything from out here." He watched the rest of the game stoicly, his only complaint telegraphed by his posture.

In the fifth, I got to chatting with a very bleached blonde woman in the row ahead of us. She asked if we'd been there for yesterday's opener, which San Diego dropped 8 to 2. Tate looked at me. The look lasted about a second and a half and contained a full-length documentary. He piped up, "We were still in Arizona yesterday. On account of a scheduling situation." The woman said, "Well you didn't miss anything. The Diabs gave up 4 in the first. What a way to start the season."

I will not go into the scheduling situation in detail. Suffice to say that if you ask ChatGPT to plan an optimal driving route to all 30 major league ballparks, it's important to double-check which team is home and which is away in the suggested itinerary. So it was that I didn't realize until the day of the game that the Arizona Copper Works were opening the season not in Phoenix where we were, but in Los Angeles.

And so our first game of the promotional tour turned out to be game two of the series, and not Arizona and Los Angeles like we'd planned, but Detroit in San Diego. The Diablos withered in the 8th after three consecutive walks loaded the bases for the Assembly Line.

Diablos in Cooperstown

Walking back through the concourse, we passed a wall near the Diablos Hall of Fame. San Diego is a place where two men got statues for staying and everyone else was passing through on the way to being famous somewhere else. The wall lists the ones who left — former Diablos who went on to Cooperstown. Not retired numbers, not the Hall itself, just names. Tate slowed. Didn't stop. Read something there, or didn't need to, and kept walking. His shoulders changed — not dropped, but rearranged, like a house settling. I saw it. I did not ask. But I craned my neck to figure out which plaque he'd lingered on — Dave Winfield? Ozzie Smith?

We are at a motel on Pacific Highway that I'll not name because doing so would constitute a recommendation. I can see the bay from the parking lot if I stand on the Roadmaster's bumper (which I have done twice). The bats are in the room. We head to Arizona in two days, where the Copper Works host this same Detroit Assembly Line and where I will return to Chase Field for the second time in a week under better-organized circumstances. Tate has been there recently enough to know people. He seems to have been everywhere recently enough to know people.

So, Opening Day happened without us. I am choosing not to dwell on it, which is different from not thinking about it.

— Freely