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Baseball is a game of routine, of tradition, of the same sights and sounds fans have seen and heard for lifetimes. The deep, syrupy, professorial tones of Jon Miller bringing a game to life; a TV on in the next room for ambiance until the crowd roars, eyes glancing up to see the source of the commotion.
It’s a game and attraction smothered in romanticism. It’s a great deal harder to keep that spark aflame without your partner — or 40,000 of them, in this case.
As a Major League Baseball season attempts to get squeezed in this year, fans likely will not be returning to stadiums rendered much quieter, even if noise is pumped in. The sounds will be muted, the sights replaced, face after face with empty seat after empty seat.
The fans will be gone — except for a few at a handful of ballparks around the country. You can’t keep fans away from their stations if their station is technically outside the stadium walls.
In McCovey Cove, right outside right field at Oracle Park, will be “McCovey” Dave Edlund, a tanned, kayaking, former national underwater spearfishing champion whose speed on the water and diving skills have helped him fetch 40 homers splashed into the China Basin.
Only once has McCovey Cove been capped — some fans turned away at the 2007 All-Star Game — and there is little reason to believe that, if a season gets underway, the kayaks will be affected. For the Giants’ part, they think any social-distancing regulations will be more up to San Francisco than the team.
For Edlund, the face of the Cove chasers, there is hope an empty stadium would lead to more balls to store in miniature cubicles at his Los Gatos home. He envisions much of the scene to be familiar: He positions himself according to the mathematical models that show where a specific batter is most likely to homer, listens to the games on KNBR because he and the other paddlers can’t see when balls are put in play, and then awaits the energy that comes with a broadcaster watching a ball take off.
“And that’s when the race becomes positioning to try to get that ball,” Edlund told KNBR over the phone recently. “It’s honestly going to be very similar to a normal thing except for, during the game, we’re waving to Giants fans on the Arcade and also in the Portwalk that rings it. But those people will not be there on the Arcade walls. More balls are going to come out than normal because … a number of balls basically want to bounce in on one bounce.
“Those balls now, they’re going to bounce once and they’re going to come right into the water.”
They will come, but with an asterisk: They’re not true Splash Hits. Of Edlund’s haul, he says 28 have counted on the Splash counter meter, while 12 bounded past fans in Oracle Park. There’s a certain prestige that comes with a ball that goes directly from bat to water. It’s the top prize for fans in the Cove, who will have some different and, in a few cases, nichely famous company when the season starts.
Edlund has been talking with friends of his who are Dodgers fans, planning to journey up from SoCal to San Francisco. If you can’t see a baseball game in a park, how about right outside the park, working on a tan and your biceps and your ball-retrieving skills? The ballhawk community, too, has taken note of perhaps the easiest stadium to catch a home-run ball outside of.
There are other stadiums outside of which balls can be wrangled, though a few experts in the field have pegged Oracle Park as a top option.
There’s Lansdowne Street outside Fenway Park. Waveland Avenue by Wrigley Field, where fans would wait for a slice of Sammy Sosa history. Minnesota’s Target Field has an opening down the right-field line.
In Houston, “someone could launch one over the train tracks if they have the roof open,” famed ballhawk Zack Hample said over the phone.
“Even Milwaukee, you can hit one that will completely clear the left-field bleachers, land on a concrete walkway back there and then bounce out of the stadium.”
Or Brewers batters can muscle up and not require the bounce.
“There have been four, I believe, home-run balls to leave Miller Park on the fly,” fellow ballhawk Shawn Bosman said. “I have tracked two of them down.”
The hunt for game-used baseballs will continue whether fans are allowed in stadiums or not. Bosman, from Milwaukee and with 102 game-day balls to his name, recently was pricing out flights to San Francisco in anticipation of the season and Cove opening up. Hample, too, is considering Oracle Park in part because you don’t need to be inside it to catch a ball.
If baseball does start up, there will be familiar faces to San Francisco in the Cove. There just also might be familiar national faces right next to them.
“I’ve talked about it with my videographer because he and I are thinking, well, where could we go and do a few videos to just capture the spirit, the weirdness, maybe the lack of spirit?” said Hample, who added Camden Yards and Wrigley Field as possibilities.
As crowded as the Cove can get — Edlund said weekends, especially, can affect the paddling space — there hasn’t been enough noise to generate buzz on the TV in the past; they’re too far removed from microphones. Before he dove into social media, Edlund would hold up signs to communicate when he landed a splashed ball.
Of course, that could change if a network stations a camera and mic to see one of the more unique and active ecosystems of baseball that can’t be replicated inside Oracle Park.
Paddlers in the Cove chasing down balls, albeit while hopefully socially distancing? That’s one of those rare sights and sounds that would not be lost this season.
