A PAIR OF GIANTS BALLS

A few weeks ago, I told you the strange story of my virgin cricket ball’s one glorious day in the sun*, despite my long-maintained desire to protect its honour from the rigours of just the sort of activities for which it was originally fashioned, and how such a simple thing as a tapping on my door on a blissful summer’s day took my principles and flung them headlong into the bin in the pursuit of self-indulgent happiness. Sadly, during those years, my own principles were never similarly tested with regards to protecting my own virtue, as my own person was never called upon for the purposes of unexpected lustful slaking by any of the terribly distracting young women that lived on that campus coming a-rapping upon my door in similar vein, but when you go through life resembling a potato, and a surly potato at that, then you come not to expect such things and find other means to get through your empty days.

It was only after I’d shared my experiences of the many long years that cricket ball spent sitting all pristine in my various hovels that I made a small connection in my mind and realised a couple of things. Firstly, it is something that I still do, and secondly, I may very well have got worse.

Sitting behind me on a shelf, amid all the other paraphernalia and ephemera cluttering up my environment are a pair of baseballs inscribed with the word “Giants” in the sort of blocky typeface that is probably most appropriate for such things. The text is black with an orange edge, no doubt because those are the colours that the team itself plays in, and is set on an arc in front of an outline drawing of a baseball, which gives the effect of a baseball on a baseball, but luckily that’s its limit when it comes to infinite regression. The rest is, I imagine, much the same as with all baseballs, a white leather ball with that distinctive iconic stitching pattern holding the thing together.

The significant thing to my thoughts today, of course, is that I’ve had them now for five years, since our last trip to San Francisco in 2006, and they are still pristinely sealed in the cellophane wrappers they were sold in. Once again, a couple of bits of touristy souvenir tat have become elevated to a level of importance that they really shouldn’t merit. Many is the time that t’beloved has suggested releasing them from their tiny plastic prisons only for me to resist this development, hoping that the cellophane wrapping barrier will somehow protect these clean, fresh objects from decaying if exposed to the ‘rigours’, ‘perils’ and general gathering of dust that makes up our day-to-day life here in Lesser Blogfordshire.

A right pair of Charlies

That trip in 2006 could in some small way be known as the ‘baseball trip’ because, not only did we visit the Charles M Schulz museum in Santa Rosa which has a fair few baseball connections, but, upon our return to San Francisco, one of the things we arranged to do was to do the tourist ‘behind the scenes’ tour of AT&T Park, the new(ish) home of the San Francisco Giants, a venue which has so far had three names already in its brief history having already been known as both Pacific Bell Park and SBC Park prior to this. Tsk! The wonders of corporate sponsorship and takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, eh? Having worked in that industry myself once, I know from my own experience how often these companies swap their assets around. It makes keeping your C.V. up to date a nightmare, I assure you. Some fans still call it by its original name, apparently, which proves, I guess, that these things do kind of stick no matter how ungainly or naff they might first seem to be. Others call it the ‘phone booth’ for obvious reasons connected to the various telephone companies it has been named for.

A phone booth of dreams

The Giants moved there from the infamous Candlestick Park, where The Beatles played their last official commercial live gig and Richard Nixon pitched the first ever pitch, but I guess time marches on, and other iconic moments will one day play out in their new home. When we dropped in, around about the Autumn of 2006, it had only just had its squeaky new refurbishment for its grand rebranding the previous March and a very pleasant elderly gentleman and baseball fan took our group on our tour all around and through and over the stadium, and we looked it over, took our pictures, asked our questions and laughed at his jokes before ending up, as seems inevitable with these things in the gift shop.

Now, I’ve never followed baseball. It is after all, a sport, and therefore unlikely to have leapt to the top of any list of interests for me, but a few weeks or months before this, one of the more high flying of m’colleagues had been on a business trip to ‘New Yoik’ and had bought back for his friends (so not me, obviously) and colleagues (if the two aren’t mutually exclusive) gifts of baseballs for them and I’d found these things endlessly fascinating as they sat upon the various desks around me, and, as I’ve been known to fidget when I’m feeling nervous (and I always felt nervous when having to talk to people in that job…), every so often I would pick one of these balls up whilst I was blathering away, trying to make my pointless point, and I found that it kind of served the same kind of purpose as those ‘stress relief’ squashy things that you occasionally see on people’s desks.

So, when we mooched around the gift shop and t’beloved was buying the usual bits of souvenirs and presents for her family and friends, and I was busy getting another souvenir T-shirt that I’ll  never actually wear, and my half-size replica baseball bat which I would then fret about having in my luggage in these security-conscious days, I spotted a great big barrel full of souvenir baseballs and just had to get one. Actually, we ended up getting one each, neither of which are ever going to ever fulfil their proper reason for being on this sad planet, but both of which look quite impressive perched up there and reminding us of happier days spent in faraway places with corporate sounding names.

* "A Cherry in the Sun" http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2011/01/cherry-in-sun.html (January 28 2011)