RMJ 201 September 4

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 ● San Francisco, vs Giants

This Wives Gala is getting to be a headache. The date is September 11, and the crowd is swelling.

At first, I thought it would be Judy and me, and that we would invite Ashley and Craig. Then I went to get my tuxedo, and I invited Dick Hite, and he mentioned that his partner, Phil Ditto, would like to go.

Ashley and Craig told her aunt Sharon and uncle Chris, and they wanted to go. Then Judy decided that if Ashley was going to go, Julia and her boyfriend Chris should be invited. Then our friends Bill and Karen Greif called, and they said they would be coming in for the weekend. We invited them to go.

We learned that their 10-year-old son Jordan would be with them — after we had already made arrangements for Ryan to spend the night with a friend. We didn’t think we could impose Jordan on Ryan’s deal, so we told the Greifs that Jordan could come to the gala and check out the memorabilia in the auction.

We now had 14 people. We had only one table for ten.

Because tables go for $1,500, I did not feel like buying two of them. This made for a delicate situation. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to sit at the table with the manager.

No one minded paying their own way, but I didn’t feel like asking people I had invited to pay. Sharon and Chris came to the rescue by offering to buy a table themselves. This solved one problem, but not the other; I still have to finesse the seating arrangements.

I hope everyone will understand that we can all spend plenty of time together, no matter who sits where. There are cocktails before dinner and cocktails-and-dancing after. We can be one happy family, if we can be sensible about who sits at which table. This should be easy, but I am not sure it will be.

The guys won’t care, but the women … well, let’s put it this way:

I have always been a little clumsy with women. When I was young and foolish, I thought they were just men with different body parts. Now I know that the thinking and feeling parts are different too. I still feel a little clumsy, but I don’t step in my own mess as often as I used to.

I am going to pay for one table, and be friendly to everyone. I am going to act blissful in my social ignorance, and dance with all of them.

It’s the way of Sluggo.

I doubt it would serve me well in high society, but I’ll stumble across that bridge when I come to it.

 

Speaking of bridges: Drayton came into my office yesterday, upbeat as usual. I know he is concerned about all the losing. The crowds have been dwindling; his friends have been asking him what he is going to do about it; some of the other owners like to tweak him now and then.

But through it all, he has been great to me. This is what he told me:

Can you imagine a two-lane bridge, a mile long?

“Sure.”

Have you ever driven across a bridge like this?

“Yes.”

Did you ever hit the railing on the side?

“No.”

What if there was no railing on the side? What if you had to drive across it at 70 miles an hour? What if you knew you would have to pass ten cars going the other way at 70 miles an hour? Would you do it?

“Only if I had to.”

“Now, see,” he said. “That is what separates the people who have courage from the ones who don’t. You know you can drive across at 70 miles an hour; you’ve done it before.

“So why do you need the railings, if you have courage?”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

I could not help thinking, however, about a time when I almost ran into a railing on a high bridge.

I had been on a fishing trip with a friend, and his van broke down on the way back at about 11:00 on Sunday night. We could get the van towed, and spend the night in a small town about an hour from Houston, or we could lock it up and hitchhike home.

We stuck out our thumbs, full of courage.

 A young man stopped to pick us up. When we got in, he peeled out, burning rubber down the highway. He turned the radio up full blast, and soon we were traveling about 90 MPH. He was weaving back and forth. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic.

He was still weaving when we crossed the Liberty Bridge, and at one point I grabbed the steering wheel to make sure he didn’t careen into the railing.

After that, he settled down. He stopped for gas about 20 miles from Houston. We thought he would be all right, so we did not exit the vehicle. While the attendant was still pumping the gas, this courageous young man pulled out, slinging the gas hose and nozzle away, with gasoline still gushing.

He blew through a stop sign, narrowly missing a Winnebago, and raced down the on-ramp and back onto the highway.

We made it home safe-and-sound. The guy took me right to the door of my house. I laughed nervously as he pulled away.  

I suppose you could say that I was courageous that night; I tend to think we were stupid. But then, we were also young. I suppose I would have driven across that hypothetical bridge with no railings when I was 25, whether I had to get to the other side or not.

 

I have a lot of arrangements to make here in San Francisco as well.

Several of my high-school teammates live here now, and they want to come to the game tomorrow. My old Astros roommate Bob Gallagher is coming tomorrow, as well. On Saturday, I am leaving tickets for Darryl Brock — the author of one of my favorite baseball books: If I Never Get Back — and two of his friends, both writers. They are coming again on Saturday, and we are having dinner afterward.

I have offered tickets to my winemaking friends, but they are in crush time now, working double shifts to keep the customers jolly. They are good fans, but business is business.  

I wish I could be there to help them. With my size-13s, I could crush with the best of them.

 

The game with the Giants was bittersweet. We scored five runs in the first and never looked back, winning 14-2.

I decided to rest Bagwell, and he was distressed. I told him that I felt he was expanding his strike zone, trying to do too much, trying to end his slump and make up for the team’s slump every time he came to bat.

“They need to know they can win without you,” I said. “And you need to know it too. As long as they keep looking to you every time we’re in a slump, we’ll never make it.  We just can’t expect you to do it every time.”

“I know,” he said. “But this is my favorite place to hit. I need to get my own confidence going, and this is the perfect place.”

He had a great point, and I knew it to be true. He is right; I am right. The bottom line for me is that we still have three more games here to get him going. He hasn’t hit Mark Gardner all that well, so my instincts told me tonight was the night.

“I just want you to chill out,” I said. “If they can win without you, it will really help us as a team.”

He left, shaking his head. I knew he didn’t agree with me, but I also knew he wouldn’t make a scene.

Billy Spiers played first, and he had a good night with the bat. It would have been one of the most uplifting wins of the year — but for one thing.

Tim Bogar got hit on the wrist in the fourth inning, and he had to leave the game. He went for X-rays, and in the eighth inning we learned that it was broken.

He is lost for the year.

I wasn’t really that happy after that. We still have 22 games left, and we don’t have a dependable shortstop. If we make a deal, it will cost us a good prospect, and we still won’t be able to use the shortstop we get in the playoffs — if we make it.

For me, it was more bitter than sweet, but the players still seemed jubilant in the postgame clubhouse. Even Bogey was smiling.

Perhaps that is the difference between being 25 years old and 50. At my age, the glass is half-empty; at theirs, it is half-full.

If they are courageous and I don’t get stupid, we might keep winning.