Long time no see!
So sometimes I’ll be talking to a friend I haven’t seen in a while and a look of concern and confusion will pass over their face as they realize how much baseball I have on my mind these days.
Sometimes, I’ll be talking to someone I don’t know that well and will end up finding out they’re a baseball fan themselves and suddenly we have a lot to talk about (recently I stayed at a place in Ojai where the shuttle driver was a white man named Jamal who was very interested in discussing whether the Dodgers would re-sign J Turner).
It is hot stove season after all.
Which, by the way, when I said it was hot stove season to Lydia and Brooke the other day, they both were like, what are you even talking about. And when Brooke valiantly attempted to engage with me on Aaron Judge meeting with the Giants in San Francisco before Thanksgiving, she mentioned Judge had the “real” home run record, at which point I promptly took her head off about it. Barry Bonds is the home run king, 73 is more than 62 and anyone who disagrees is entirely welcome to argue with a wall (love u Brookie).
Or ask Buck Showalter.
This is kind of about dads
If it isn’t obvious, I am a San Francisco Giants fan. And I thought it was because I lived in Stockton, Calif. right when Pac Bell Park opened. I thought it was because of the emotional and mental overwhelm of the Bonds era. So imagine my surprise, 20 years later, discovering that I am a Giants fan because of my grandfather, Dick Richard Hilton, who was born, raised, and only left southern Virginia for any length of time to serve his country in a world war.
Granddad died in 1997, and I don’t remember ever talking to him about baseball. (Mostly I remember him being quite stoic but seeming to take great pleasure in regularly trudging down to the basement where the coal was kept and shoveling it into the furnace so that the tiny family home in Roanoke stayed 80 degrees all winter.)
But through my dad’s memories of his own childhood, and some recent “wait what?” conversations with Keith O. Hilton, I have learned that my Giants fandom was never really a choice. Things to know about Granddad: he was born in 1919, he played amateur baseball, he was a fan of the Giants when they were in New York, he transferred that Giants fandom to SF when the team moved in 1958, and he was such a fan of the great Puerto Rican player Pedro Cepeda that he gave my dad the middle name “Orlando.” Yes. Dad is named after Perucho’s son, the Baby Bull. No, I literally didn’t know that until this year when I mentioned to KOH how nice it was to see 85-year-old Orlando Cepeda at a Giants ceremony* honoring Hunter Pence.
Dads.
So here we have a newsletter. Like many people, my fandom was pretty much: go to games a few times a year and put on whomever was playing while ironing. But I tuned back into baseball last season during the Giants historic 107-win season. Then I got really really really really into it† this year partly because the world felt extremely scary and what’s not scary? Letting Dave, John, Kruk and Kuip make gentle jokes three hours a day while you watch men play a game that is simultaneously comforting and extremely exciting.
Then there’s the fans, and the beat reporters, and the commentators. There’s the group chats with friends where you do a tiny little sigh of relief that okay, someone else is also obsessed with details like sock height or has also noticed the number of odd errors Trea Turner makes. The thing that brings us all together is all the data and history and how it all intersects with the absolute characters who populate the major leagues.
That’s why this isn’t strictly going to be a Giants fan newsletter. The most profound pleasure to be had watching last season was not tuning into SF baseball (it was a minor miracle the team won 81 games, let’s be real) — rather, it’s been in watching a bunch of teams, mostly in the National League, and checking out the whole landscape. My favorite non-Giants player this year had to be young Cleveland pitcher Triston McKenzie and not just because his parents are Jamaican. This also isn’t going to be a fantasy GM newsletter (tho, Lisa Tozzi if you’re reading this, if we can’t have Rodon back, hope the Mets enjoy him), or a stats head newsletter. It’s gonna be stuff that I text Katherine and Max and Matt and my dad about. Like It’s gonna be theories developed while microblogging on my secret Twitter account. It’s gonna be fun/dumb/obsessive.
As was mentioned above, it’s the hot stove. And I’m wrapped up in a Skims duvet robe begging: Aaron, please come home to the team and fandom where we don’t boo our own players after they carried us on their backs for a month. I’ll buy you a pretzel at Weberstown Mall.
Who am I?
If you were forwarded this and read this far and are like, who is this person? I’m Shani O. Hilton. I used to be extremely online until I took a break from Twitter in 2018 and forgot to reactivate my account before they deleted it, tho my handle @shani_o does still exist out there. I work at the local Los Angeles newspaper, and have basically been in journalism forever, and I have two cats and a deep love for Christine McVie.
Anyway, there’s a lot more to say, I think, about the sport, what it’s like to love it as a black woman in her 30s in the 2020s, and how it intersects with my own personal history. If you’re interested in hearing more, please write back. If you know someone who might be interested in subscribing, please share. I don’t have any other social media. This is it.
Thanks for reading, more soon.
Shani
*This team freaking loves its ceremonies.
†I do actually keep score in a scorebook for most games. This one and this one. The title of this newsletter comes from a funny joke Candy and Lydia made.