A Victory for my Mother

Today, the day after the San Francisco Giants won their first World Series since moving to California from New York in 1958, I began to reflect on why this team means so much to me. The Giants are the only professional sports team that I really follow intimately and that have the power to influence my mood when they win or lose. This game played with a stick of wood, a ball of yarn wrapped in stitched leather, and a piece of a cowhide wrapped around one’s hand has captivated me since my childhood. It’s the one sport that I had any special skill to play growing up (my career peaked at age 11).

I watched the Giants in 1987, the year that I seriously began following them, as they reached the playoffs, but fell short of the World Series. I watched two years later when they reached the Series against their American League neighbors from across the Bay only to lose four straight, halted for two weeks midway through by a devastating earthquake. I eagerly watched again in 2002 only to see “my” team choke in Game 6 and lose it a day later.

Today I realized why this game and this team excite me. My mother was my hugest fan when I played little league baseball. She attended all my games. She was also a lifelong Giants fan. In 1986, she was diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time. The prognosis was not good.

Over the next few years, I saw my mother’s body slowly deteriorate. To ease the pain of seeing her in such great physical and emotional pain, I immersed myself in my schoolwork and baseball. It was about this time that I really fell in love with the Giants and my favorite player, Will Clark (shown above with my new favorite, Buster Posey). Perhaps baseball was my way of dealing with my mother’s condition and the imminent reality of life without her to cheer me on.

As 1989 winded down, I saw the baseball playoffs developing into a fairy tale. My Giants were set to play the Oakland A’s in the World Series, a perfect Series for my mother to witness as her last from a hospital bed in our home. To make it even more exciting and meaningful, an anonymous person had generously given my parents two tickets to Game 5 of the World Series. Unfortunately, that game never was played as the A’s won the first four games. The dream series, marred by the terrible earthquake, didn’t end the way my family had wanted. But it did provide some excitement in our home in a time that had its fair share of somber tears.

Less than four months later, my mother passed on, never having seen her Giants win a World Series.

2002 came and passed. Still no championship.

So when the Giants defeated the Rangers last night in five quick games with me watching with my wife and two young daughters nearly 800 miles from the placed I once called home, I was excited and exuberant. I let nearly 35 years of waiting show itself in shouts and exclamations of joy, something I have never been known to display. Last night I celebrated this win by a team of no-names, misfits, and castoffs in a perfect display of teamwork and selflessness and today I thought of my mother, whose memory I try to cling to over 20 years later.