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Hac Man
VETERAN POSTER
Registered: 02-2010
Posts: 62
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
quote:
chefjuan wrote:
In 1992 my dad got an offer to move from Baytown, TX to Benicia, CA. We moved in January of 1993. Three weeks before we moved, that LF from Pittsburgh beat us to the Bay.
I assume that if your family moved from Texas to Benicia, you Dad must have worked for Valero.
Did you graduate from BHS?
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3/2/2010, 10:13 pm
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chefjuan
HALL OF FAME POSTER
Registered: 04-2006
Posts: 3718
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
quote:
Hac Man wrote:
quote:
chefjuan wrote:
In 1992 my dad got an offer to move from Baytown, TX to Benicia, CA. We moved in January of 1993. Three weeks before we moved, that LF from Pittsburgh beat us to the Bay.
I assume that if your family moved from Texas to Benicia, you Dad must have worked for Valero.
Did you graduate from BHS?
Yup (but it was Exxon at the time).
I didn't go to BHS. I went St. Pats in Vallejo.
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"If the Pilgrims had landed in California the East Coast would still be wilderness"
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3/3/2010, 10:23 am
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SFMinors
ROOKIE PHENOM
Registered: 03-2010
Posts: 14
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
It was my dad's fault. He was born in Oakland in 1938 and was a Oaks fan as a boy. When the Oaks left for Vancouver and the Giants came to the Bay he adopted them. I had an old wool Giants cap that I believe I got as a newborn. If not, it was soon after as I always remember having it. I wasn't much of a sports fan as a young kid, but we scored free tickets to Mother's Cookies baseball card day in 1986 and I was hooked. After moving to South Dakota in 1987 I didn't get to see as much baseball as I'd have liked. My dad and I took a couple of baseball-centric roadtrips in my teens. We drove from South Dakota to the Bay area in 1990, taking 12 days to drive there (three days in Montana, a couple in Calgary, Spokane, Seattle, Portland and then into California). We saw a game in Billings, and a Mariners game plus a lot of Giants games and I had a cousin in the A's box office, so we got nice seats vs. the White Sox and I got to sit next to Robin Ventura's wife and sister.
A couple years later we went through Dyersville, Iowa, where I played ball on the "Field of Dreams" field, and later that night we saw the Clinton Giants play the Waterloo Diamonds. We then dropped into KC for a game vs Texas (Ryan facing Brett...unfortunately rained out after 3 innings).
The old man is still kicking and we talk Giants often.
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Neglect of the feet can cause jungle rot and make you a casualty.
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3/10/2010, 2:01 pm
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SFDog
TOP PROSPECT
Registered: 03-2010
Posts: 4
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
I grew up an A's fan as a kid. I played 1B and wore number 25 in little league because of Big Mac. But as a kid I never really followed MLB or the A's too much, football and the 9ers were more of an interest to me, and I didn't understand the game. I really lost interest when the A's got rid of all their big name players. Around middle school I started following the Giants in there last season at the stick. After the 2000 year when they come back from 10 games down at the All-Star break to win the NL West over the DBacks I was hooked.
Favorite players since then have been Vizquel and JT. Love solid hitters with great gloves.
Last edited by SFDog, 3/24/2010, 12:50 am
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3/24/2010, 12:19 am
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Hipple
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Registered: 08-2010
Posts: 1
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
I must be the original San Francisco Giants fan. I was born on opening day in 1958. That morning at 3:30 a.m., my father had to race my mother across the Golden Gate Bridge from Strawberry Point to Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, where I was said to be in a big hurry to be born! The doctor who delivered me must have been trembling with excitement about the big game to be played later that day. That day was to be the first regular season game ever played in California by the Giants after moving from New York.
I went to my first game when I was around four or five-years-old - in 1962 or 63. There was a minor problem getting to that first game though, because I hysterically refused to go. After more than an hour of tantrums, my family finally talked me into going. Not long after the game started I was having a fantastic time to which my father asked me, “Norman, why were you so upset about having to go to the game?” My response was “I thought I was gonna have to play!”
It wasn’t long before my family realized that my sister’s birthday was the same as my idol Willie Mays, and from there my Giant connection continued to grow. After years of suffering through Giant failures, and of course collecting the occasional Croix de Candlestick button, one day I turned on the tube to see a kid named Will Clark first at bat facing Nolan Ryan. This resulted in a straight-away center field homerun.
It was only a couple of years later that while driving my truck on 880 in Oakland, I noticed a little Asian girl in a car next to me feverishly going from looking at me to writing something down in her lap. Moments later, the girl suddenly thrust a piece of paper up onto her window that said, “Are you Will Clark?” It didn’t end there. On another day in a restaurant in San Francisco a little Cub Scout kept on staring at me, so I finally looked over at him and said, “Kid, there in Pittsburgh!”
The last straw was when I was on my way to the playoff game against the Cubs in ’87 where a group of kids at the Montclair Bart station asked me to autograph there baseballs. Of course I assumed they knew I wasn’t Will, but they wanted to just pretend anyway.
No Giants story as long as this one would be complete without my having gone with my sister to the World Series game on October 17, 1989, which due to the Bay Bridge section falling down resulted in the longest trip to Oakland from San Francisco I have ever taken.
Of course, as this isn’t my epitaph, this story is still in progress… could there be a World Series victory for me before someone writes one?
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8/17/2010, 3:52 pm
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LTR
HALL OF FAME POSTER
Registered: 08-2010
Posts: 1014
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
Hey gang, new here and thought I would tell you a little about me and why I became a Giants fan. I am the son of a coach and scout who played college ball in RF until i tore my shoulder to shreds and never got a concrete answer as to what was wrong with it so i never fixed it. My father was a high school coach for 36 years and half of that he was a scout for the Angels. My college coach was a scout for the Giants and I was personally scouted by the Reds and Dbacks. Enough of the glory days !@#$. I am a Giants fan because of one man, Barry Bonds. My father was a fan of the game and not of any team in particular but did favor the Cards because we lived in Cardinal country. So i too grew up with just being a fan of the game but did favor certain players over teams. I was also a huge collector of baseball cards growing up. One day I discovered Bonds and I shared a birthday so I followed his career. Then I started to notice that he was good and became a Pirates fan until the Braves and Francisco Cabrera broke my heart. Then Bonds signed with the Giants and I started following the team. Then I started to really get into the history of the game and especially the Giants. Thats when the love affair truly took. That 93 season was a disappointing one for sure but it is when I became a Giants fan. Rod Beck, you are missed!
Last edited by LTR, 8/23/2010, 2:00 am
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You can't help but to laugh at theclash. Hypocrisy at its finest!!
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8/23/2010, 1:58 am
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lldoyle
HALL OF FAME POSTER
Registered: 10-2006
Posts: 2998
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
Not sure why I haven't put something here before, but trolling through these things, I was struck by stretch's line about how being a Giants fan means he's taken several standing 8 counts, and how he's got a few left in him.
I grew up in southwest Virginia, and at age 8 had never been to a baseball game when the family made a cross country trip in 1966. The Dodgers were on a road trip when we got to LA, so my brother and I saw our first game at Candlestick a few days later.
Juan Marichal pitched. And that was that.
It's interesting how your immortal soul can be saved by something as simple as the schedule.
My second live game wasn't until 12 years later. SF was playing LA in a big night game in 1978. Candlestick was sold out, and it seemed like more than half of the fans had lit up. Someone was waving a Dodger pennant that was on fire. It seemed arctic to me, like a late November football game. The place was buzzing from start to finish.
In the bottom of the first, McCovey came up with a runner on and two out and the scoreboard noted that McCovey had hit more HRs against this pitcher (Sutton) than any other save one (probably Drysdale). McCovey then hit a titanic home run and the place exploded. I so completely lost my composure that a nice 60 year old woman in front of me asked if I was OK. That was extremely embarrassing.
The Giants blew the lead late (Larry Herndon caught a ball but was knocked unconscious; the ball eventually rolled out of his glove and LA was awarded an in-the-park HR), but then won it at the end, I think on a hit by Darrell Evans. The atmosphere was electric.
If I end up in an advanced state of Alzheimers, that 1978 game might be one of the last sports things forgotten, along with a couple of Stephen Curry Davidson games.
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9/1/2010, 12:15 pm
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byco42
HALL OF FAME POSTER
Registered: 10-2006
Posts: 4056
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
My avatar is my team of choice; but the Giants have had some allure on me since I first imitated Marichal's leg kick as a wee youngster in the mid 1960's. Mays and McCovey were household names and the now-ludicrous debate of "Kaline or Mays who is better" seemed defensible as a kid married to the Olde English D. Saw all three play together in person in the '71 All Star Game in Detroit as an impressionable 14-year old. The Tigers-Giants connection dates back to the late 70's when Tito Fuentes was the Tigers' first substantial free agent and was maintained by the likes of Milt May, Mike Ivie, Darrell Evans, Larry Herndon, Enos Cabell, Dave Bergman and more. Made an inasupicious debut on the ESPN boards over a two-out bunt attempt with a man on third by one Rich Aurilia, championed an undocumented tradition called Teh Cdoe, questioned Robb Nenn's mechanics, endured the slings, arrows and misfortune of confrontation and eventually settled in as a grateful guest. Thanks.
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"From 1955 to my retirement, the best all-around player in the American League was Al Kaline." Mickey Mantle.
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9/1/2010, 3:46 pm
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58PhxGiants
TOP PROSPECT
Registered: 06-2010
Posts: 2
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Re: How did you become a Giants Fan (and Who played a role)?
I became a Gians fan on the backside of a double header at a Phoenix Giants Game in 1958. We had just moved from Seattle and my brothers and I were Rainer Fans until that day. The Raniers won the first game 4-2 but the Giants won the nightcap 20-2. I switched at that moment. The 1958 Phoenix Giants were
one of the best PCL teams of all times.
With players like Felipe Alou, Willie Kirkland, Andres Rodgers, Ernie Broglio, Tom Haller and of course Willie McCovey.
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10/13/2010, 4:19 pm
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