1989 Giants reunion: my first team

Thanks to Clark, and my speed, I was a first baseman. AP photo

Their first baseman wasn't a hulking figure. The left fielder rode a Sea-Doo for exercise, was the grandfather of “grillz,” and crushed baseballs. The players didn't have the physique of super heroes. In fact they looked more like gym teachers than body builders. The game was different. The game that I fell in love with saw players steal 50 bases more often then they’d hit 50 homeruns. The intentional walk was almost exclusively reserved for the eighth place hitter in the NL lineup.

The nicknames weren’t quick derivatives of their birth names; The Caveman, and Big Daddy. Bedrock and Lefty. Hum Baby, Buffy, Bugsy and the Thrill. They carried far more intrigue than A-Rod, J-Roll, and Youk.

Twenty years ago, on the 11th of June, I walked into Candlestick Park for the first time. My eyes struggled to take in the spectacle of the green grass, the damp red clay, the huge spaceship like structure of the park. The crisp white uniforms and the unvarying black hats served as capes for these super heroes.

Walking to our seats, my nostrils filled with the pungent aroma of something I’m familiar with now. It was grey and overcast. Rick Reuschel was on the mound, Mitchell was in left, Clark at first, and Greg Litton was at third? Where’s Matt Williams? (Really, I remember that, I was not happy). Both pitchers threw 9 innings, and gave up single runs. We booed Jack Clark mercilessly, but I wasn't sure why. Litton homered, his first of his 13 career bombs, and it came leading off the bottom of the ninth to tie the game (I knew he had homered, I did not remember it was in the ninth).

The game went to extra innings; 12 to be exact. It ended in the best way possible, a Will Clark walk-off home run (I remember him vividly hitting the previous pitch foul into the upper deck, close enough thought that Roger Craig may have been ejected for arguing the call, but it may not have happened just like that).

The 1989 Giants are the reason I love baseball, write about, devour it, and need it.

At the age of 10 I wore eye-black, and played with a scowl that would make William Nuschler Clark Jr. proud. At the plate I bent my back knee like Kevin Mitchell, and wiped my chin on my left sleeve like Matt Williams. I even learned to hit left handed so I could stand like Clark, rocking back and forth waving the bat, and follow through with my left arm cloaking my face. I grew a pot belly like Don Robinson (no, not really, that’s just a convenient excuse).

Friday, June 13th, the team that spawned my baseball life, reunited at AT&T Park.

There was more grey in their hair, some have a touch more protein padding their midsections. They looked younger than I expected, being that, to me, they were old back then. All in all they’ve aged far less than I have in that time span, or so I felt.

The players all seemed genuinely happy to be there, and a few a bit overwhelmed that people still cared. For many on that team, ’89 was the apex of their baseball lives, maybe lives, period? Roger Craig, who won five World Series in his career as a player and manager, calls his ’89 NL Championship ring his “prized possession.”

Those who got to cover that team seemed to enjoy the reunion also. The two, at time almost adversarial professions, regaled one another with stories about the time when so and so “got pissed at me,” or “you wrote (something bad) about me.”

Art Spander quipped “they thought what we were writing was important!” Twenty years removed, I’m sure they look back on all the attention pensively.

I resisted the urge to ask for autographs, pose for pictures, or at the very least awkwardly introduce myself as the young boy who once looked at these guys like deities. Because, in some ways, I still do, and they still are.

Losing the World Series that season was my first real shock in life. Until then I thought the good guys always prevailed, and at the very least came close. But it was my first season of baseball, I figured it was the Giants right to play for a championship; after all, it seemed it was the Niners’.

No team will ever top the 1989 Giants for me. Nothing will match the excitement of Clark’s walk off homerun, the thrill of beating the Cubs, the shock of the earthquake interrupting a fantasy for real life; partly because I was eight years old.

The fantasy is still there, it’s interrupted more frequently by real life now. But thanks to baseball, and that team, the game still serves as a tremendous distraction. It’s been a subplot that has directed my life, causing pain at times, and ecstasy at other times. But without it where would we be? We get to be frustrated with our teams, their GM’s, and the underperforming, overpaid players; that’s our right as paying fans. But sometimes, we get to remember why, today, we care so viscerally. We get to see the game again through the eyes of a young child, and we remember its purity, its innocence, and its simplicity. Yesterday, for me, was one of those times.