The San Francisco Saloon is a lonely place these days. Far
from the bastion of frenzy it became last summer, when the Giants were on their
way to winning their second World Series in three seasons, this August the West
Los Angeles bar attracts only the most devoted of fans, as their last place
team plays for little more than pride.
One such fan is Kevin Pavlik, an LA-based attorney who hails
from Northern California. Pavlik, 33, stopped in on a recent Saturday for a
couple beers and to catch some of the Giants-Orioles game – a game which his
team is, predictably, losing. I ask him how he is digesting this disaster of a
season, especially living in Los Angeles, while the first-place Dodgers play
some of the best baseball in modern history.
“It creates kind of an empty feeling,” Pavlik says.
“Especially with the stretch where, it kind of occurred during a time of year
when there’s no other sports...and Dodger fans aren’t quiet, so you have to
deal with all this. And I kind of have an empty feeling, because I have nothing
to respond with.”
Pavlik still watches the Giants pretty consistently,
sometimes even streaming games on his phone via MLB.tv. He cited injuries, of
course, as contributing to their downfall. But he also suggests that their very
success of playing deep into last postseason is also a factor. “The problem
with our pitchers is that they’ve pitched so deep into what should have been
the off-season, they didn’t get their usual rest,” he says.
Kevin is quick to cherish what the Giants have accomplished
in recent years; the magic has not faded. “I’m grateful that I got to see two World
Series championships in the last three years,” he says. “It’s easy, especially
after last year, to start going into seasons with the expectation that you’re
gonna win. I kind of started sympathizing with Yankee fans, who must be
disappointed every year, because they can’t get excited over a playoff run. At
the same time, my dad was a (Giants) fan all his life and didn’t see a championship
until he was 60.”
Still, isn’t it a bitter pill to swallow, living in
Dodgertown during this disaster of a season? Pavlik waves his hand, dismissing
the sincerity of the baseball fever that has swelled around him. “LA fans love
a winner, so it’s not even the Dodger fans that you sort of knew about,” he
says. “Now they come out of the woodwork. You see Dodger hats everywhere, and
people are really excited about the team who wouldn’t have been saying anything
the last couple years. But I guess that’s to be expected.”
I ask Pavlik if he disdains Dodger fans, even hates them?
There has been a lot of bad blood between the teams’ faithful in recent years,
even boiling over into violence. “I wouldn’t say I hate them," he muses. Dodger Stadium "is certainly an interesting place to watch a game, and they certainly have a
lot of aggressive and intimidating fans. But in the last couple years I’ve seen
a lot of the same type of fans up at AT&T (Park). I think it’s everywhere.
People go to games and think they can just yell out whatever they want. It just
seems kind of unnecessary.”
When asked about the Dodgers’ recent signing of former
Giants closer Brian Wilson, Pavlik is similarly objective and understanding.
“It doesn’t feel like a defection,” he says. “It feels like a guy who’s kind of
struggling to keep playing and had to find a home somewhere.” And even if he
did sign with LA in part to spite San Francisco for not picking up his contract
following Tommy John surgery, “every time he looks at his World Series rings,
he has to look at the Giants emblem.”
Does Kevin hope Wilson fails as a member of the Dodgers? “I
hope the Dodgers fail,” he says definitively. “So if he has to fail for that to
happen, then yeah, I guess so. But I wouldn’t mind seeing him pitch well and
still have them lose, and then maybe see him get an opportunity to go somewhere
else. But I certainly don’t want to see him close out a World Series in a
Dodger uniform.”
When I ask Pavlik if the Giants’ season has him looking all
the more forward to football season, he smiles broadly. “So excited about the
49ers. That’s the thing: in past years, when the 49ers were terrible, the
Giants had a couple years where they’d pick up the slack, make the playoffs,
lengthen the season and it took some of the sting off football season starting.
And now I guess it’s sort of the opposite, where football will take some of the
sting off the Giants’ season. So it’s pretty nice to have two teams like that,
where every year we get to watch legitimate contenders.”
Overall, Pavlik isn’t bitter about how this season is gone.
He’s ready to turn the page, and is optimistic about next year. “When you look
at the Giants, even when they’re losing, you still got guys like (Brandon)
Crawford, who’s learning how to hit. (Brandon) Belt’s starting to pick things
up. As opposed to some of the teams the Giants fielded when (Barry) Bonds was
around, and if you were losing that year, watching a team that was built for
one year, it was frustrating.
“But now, you’re losing watching a team that’s not just
built for this year. They weren’t rebuilding,
but at the same time, next year could be a perfectly good year without having
to make too many changes because we have some good young guys. We’ve just been
unlucky. They’re not untalented, they’re just having a bad year.”
Above all else, Pavlik remains a loyal Giants fan, even in
the buzzing hornets nest that is LA. “It sucks being in last place, especially
with the Dodgers winning, living in Dodgertown,” he concedes. “But I’d still
rather have our team than the Dodgers.”
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