Like Candy for Chad
by Tom Austin
See, I want, one day, for those little STATS men working the fake Gods of Baseball levers to one day step out from behind their Ozzymandian curtain and, glowering, present the trophy to my champion Bears. Then, whatever happens in the rest of my ribbon-clerk existence, I will forever be the owner, GM, and manager or the World Champion Denver Bears. It may never happen; I'll have to watch the hated Quakes win it year after year. But on that sun-kissed autumn afternoon when it finally happens, it will be so indescribably, ineffably sweet. It will be like bathing in blackberries. With Candy Hotcakes. And I can't quit hoping until it happens, because if I do the world will quite simply have no meaning, and my life will become a pointless Ingmar Bergman film."
-- from my earlier article, The Dangerous Joys of Bill James Classic Baseball.
It's time to let go of that. Let me help you let go by showing you how much it really hurt to lose the World Series last fall. No, I'm sorry, you have yet to experience the full extents of that pain. Your endorphins kicked in about the time Troy Glaus sauntered to the plate and you just KNEW he was going to smoke one to the gap and bring your little world down. You were numb. That was a good thing. Staying numb is not a good thing. Feel the pain. Love the pain.
So where was I? Ah yes, that sixth game.
Up 5-0 and eight outs from the never-before-uttered phrase, "Ladies and Gentlemen, your world champion San Francisco Giants." Bud Selig was limbering up his various facial expressions and cracking his trophy-presentation knuckles. The plastic sheeting was up in the locker room. The fans were in a frenzy. But most important, Candy Hotcakes was doffing her duds and slipping into that blackberry-laden hot tub, there to await her eager swain, a swain who, to that point, had never been aught but an ugly duckling. Giants or Angels, it did not matter to her that neither team had grasped the brass ring since before she was born. All that matters to Candy are winners, and she knew a winner would be approaching her and her blackberries.
You're picturing it, aren't you? Go ahead and picture it. You need to do this thing.
So there you are, the long-suffering Giants fan. It's 5-0 in the seventh inning of the sixth game, and the Giants have it locked. You approach the hot tub in your fluffy chenille robe as Candy gives you her sultriest up-from under look as the purple sweetness burbles around her. Curves, world champion curves you can only imagine, beckon you to slip in there and enjoy. You've been waiting a long time for this, Giants fan. Now the sweet reward is so close you can smell it. The steam is rising, and it ain't all blackberries. It's the steam of long, long, LONG-delayed gratification about to be gratified. You slip off your fluffy chenille robe and step toward the tub --
"Um, excuse me, dude…"
What's this? There's someone else in the room! It's a tall, blonde, lifeguard-physiqued surfer dude named Chad!
"But there must be some mistake!" you sputter. "I had this room, and this hot tub, and this dream woman, and these blackberries! I had them reserved!"
Chad is ever polite and calm. "Well, that may be, sir, but I think there has been some mistake. This room is for the 2002 World Series Champion. And that's me. Says so on this ticket stub right here. Sorry, Dude."
And he's right. You know you could argue, but you know you would lose. And standing there in the altogether, your various human flaws are going to be ever under Candy's measuring gaze. So you do the smart thing: You try to get that bathrobe back on you as fast as you can, mumble some lame apology, and try to get the hell out of there before you hear Chad slip into the tub. Your tub. Your blackberries.
You're too late, of course. You hear him step in, and you hear Candy's impressed gasp. She's such a slut; all it takes is a World Series win to get her juices flowing.
You could, of course, take the consolation prize, which is bathing in prune juice with the naked cast of Designing Women, but you don't. The prune juice is lukewarm, anyway, having sat there for the entire week since THE GIANTS WON THE FRICKIN' PENNANT. You'd rather go home to a dark room and a case of Ho-Ho's. It's bad for you, it's depressing as all hell, and it doesn't do a great deal for your waistline. But it's familiar. It's what you do every year after the Giants lose. You could do this ritual in your sleep. You probably do do this ritual in your sleep.
But this year, you've also got that nice image of Angels Fan Chad quaffing the bubbly, in the bubbling blackberries, with the curvaceous and willing form of Candy Hotcakes preparing to rock his world. And of course, the last expression Candy gave you before turning her full attention to Mr. Southern California Lifeguard: a heartbreaking admixture of pity, boredom, and "you came so close, dude."
And so it goes. Into the dark winter of our continued Giants Fan discontent we go. Many dark months of wondering if you could have said something different, worn a different aftershave, hit the gym a few more times instead of munching Slim Jims while watching reruns of Gomer Pyle -- if you had just not screwed up, you'd have that nice memory of the blackberries to look back on. But no -- instead, the memory of Candy's pitying look, the same one you got when you were insane enough to ask that cheerleader for a date back in high school. And your brain tells you baseball is a game of inches, they fought the good fight, there's nothing you the fan could have done, it's a stupid game anyway. Yes, your brain tells you all sorts of crap, doesn't it? All to cover the real truth: the Giants would have won the World Series, you would have slipped into the purple ecstasy with Ms. Hotcakes, if only you hadn't screwed up somehow. Yes, you. You screwed up. You blame yourself. And what's more, we all blame you, too.
No, don't tell us about how you slipped off to the bathroom after Spiezio's thirty-fourth foul ball. We were there, and we felt you leaving. Felix felt you leaving. Scott felt you leaving. It was you, Charlie, it was you.
There. Now wasn't that nice and cathartic? Here, have a tissue. You might hate me right now, but you needed me to do this. You need to let go of 2002 once and for all, because if you don't, 2003 is going to hurt four times as bad as your normal Giants season hurts. Face, the Giants had their shot. It's over. It's a new team. Dusty is gone, Kent is probably gone, David Bell is gone, Russ Ortiz is soon to be gone. Livan Hernandez we wish were gone, but he'll be back. It's going to be a new team, and by historical markers (1974, 1979, 1994, 1998, 2001) it's not going to be as good, or as lucky, as the 2002 team was. Set your sights for the heart of .500. Savor each win as it comes. Most important, forget how close you were and how you're probably not going to get that close again in your lifetime. Try to forget that if you do make it back in your lifetime, all you're going to want from Candy Hotcakes is a sponge bath. Let it go.
Sorry, I had to slip some more pain in there. That's the way life is, unfortunately: most catharses are false and premature. I had a dream a couple of weeks after the series where the Giants really won. I'll bet you did too. Nope, they really lost. L-O-S-T. Ladies and Gentlemen, here's Chad and the 2002 World Champion Anaheim Angels. And that frickin' Rally Monkey. Look into the face of evil and deal with it.
For no particular reason, I'm thinking back to a conversation Gregg and I had before the sixth game, before the craziness turned really mean. Gregg, of course, called it exactly: if the G's don't win in six, they don't win. And they won't win in six. That Gregg had the power of prophecy. I blame him.
No, but really. Gregg said something deeper than baseball. He said "I have decided that if the Giants win this thing, they are the World Champions FOR ALL TIME and I can go on with my life." The idea here is that maybe, just maybe, intense fanhood of a professional sports team is, shall we say, a childhood thing (and if sports fanhood is a childhood thing, exactly where on the arrested-development scale does repeatedly fantasizing about a fictional character, based on a bikini model, in a big vat of fructose-enhanced liquid fall? Don't answer that -- please.) And that, just maybe, being able to leave all this behind in favor of leaf blowers and adjustable-rate mortgages and colon exams is a good and mature thing to do.
As if. Look, I might wax Halberstamian about sports as a grand metaphor for life, and I might bikini-wax Steinemian about perpetual adolescence and inappropriate objectification of unattainable female body types, but convince anyone to give up being a Giants fan? What are you, nuts?
No. We continue in our Quixotic quest. We will continue to wear the black and orange, and continue to discuss the merits, or lack thereof, of Marquis Grissom. We continue to suffer, exhort, plead, and, above all, hope. Why? The same reason as before: because of how good it will feel when the Giants finally win. Yep, that's the time when all the decades of pining and hoping and "oh please"-ing and blaming ourselves and saying "Why couldn't McCovey have hit it TWO feet higher" were not for naught. "Because the Giants were the champs, see Mr. Rothstein? We were the champs. And can't NOTHING take that away." Plus, we'll get to hop into that blackberry hot tub.
But we all know life isn't like that. What, you were hoping for an upbeat, hope-filled ending, were you? Not paying attention to the Giants-fan zeitgeist, are you? Mr. Rothstein doesn't see, and Abe Atell is just another crooked ex-pug. And Chad gets Candy instead of you. And Gregg, and myself, and you, need to crank up that hope machine and fill it with another few million "oh please"-es and wait for another forty years before we can get on with our lives. Because if you don't, you're just a ribbon clerk in a pointless, depressing Ingmar Bergman film. No -- do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the Anaheim Angels and the cruel, vindictive Gods of Baseball. It's what you do. You're a Giants fan.
Hey, you said you could handle the truth.
Former Big Bad Baseball Annual contributor Tom Austin, in addition to his aduous writing tasks for EEEEEE!, is also a guitarist for Nine Mile Skid, playing now at a watering hole near you.
Copyright ©2002 by Tom Austin
Last updated 12/21/02