World Series, Game 5:
Anaheim at San Francisco

Wow, what a game. Giants won 16-4; it was the second-most runs a team ever scored in a World Series game.

Our seats were pretty damned good. Maria got them for us. "When I was trying to get tickets, I was like some weird cyber-octopus, reloading browsers for each of the three available game days, while simultaneously trying to get in via phone. I had no idea what the best strategy would be get tickets, so I just went for whatever was offered up first."

I was amazed she was able to do it. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "A digital tsunami overwhelmed the Giants' online ticket site starting at 10am. The online demand was so tremendous, it made Internet history, setting new records at MLB.com for the busiest hour ever, and at at Tickets.com, for the highest ticket demand ever, surpassing bids for the most popular concerts and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Even though Tickets.com added more servers to handle the load, its Web site wsa swamped with millions of hits. The onslaught left all but a handful of fans getting error messages instead of tickets."

Misha said, "I think this is where Maria's many years of eBay sniping experience came in handy. Maria discovered something that hadn't occurred to me when I was trying to buy the tickets; she essentially discovered a way to bypass their half-assed congestion control mechanism. She basically discovered a way to push herself up the queue. Evidently it worked."

Misha and Maria.

Misha and Colin

If you put a ruler down across the first base line through home plate and up into the stands, we were directly on that line. Second row of the box seats. I thought this would be an advantage, but the people in the first row were carrying big signs and kept rising to hold up the signs, hoping for TV coverage, thus blocking my view of the field. The person directly in front of me was a young woman with three cubic feet of luxurious black curly hair, and she leaped to her feet to dance after every on-field event, and wouldn't sit still otherwise, so I spent the game maneuvering to try to see around her.

Jets flew over the stadium at the end of the national anthem.

All eyes were on Barry Bonds, of course, and he came through with a single and two doubles despite the defensive overshift the Angels put on against him.

JT Snow rescued 3-year-old batboy Darren Baker in the fifth inning. The kid came out to get the bat at home plate, but the play was still under way. Snow scored and then grabbed Darren by the jacket and pulled him out of the way of another oncoming runner barreling toward home.

Usually when a game is over I sit back and wait for the crowd to dissipate instead of fighting the crowd to get to the door, but after a few minutes I realized nobody was leaving. It was the last Giants home game of the year, and the True Fans did not want to let go of this season.

So we headed for the exits and encountered little traffic for a while, but then we were in a sea of orange & black-wearing fans, all yelling LETS GO GI ANTS (THUMP THUMP of Thunder Sticks), LETS GO GIANTS, THUMP THUMP.

It took us about 12 minutes to get out. I told Misha how the 54,000-seat Tiger Stadium was famous because at full capacity it could be emptied in five minutes after the end of a game. But at Pac Bell Park, all the levels and tiers concentrate into a single vomitory, and the ramp became more and more crowded, and the fans never let up in their chant, sheesh. We were lucky enough to have a drunken guy with one of those four-foot plastic trumpets blasting away as we walked down the ramp.

Then finally we were down to the street, and the fans were still chanting, and the streets were unprecedentedly taken over by the fans. We paced down 3rd street, something you could ordinarily only do at 3am. Misha said the only comparable thing he'd encountered in the streets was Mardi Gras.

It was the best World Series game I've ever been to.