This is a view of a San Francisco Giants fan at last night’s Giants vs. Padres game from lovely Petco Park in gorgeous and beautiful San Diego, CA. Like The Skippers clam chowder, San Diego has proclaimed itself “America’s Finest City”. It’s hard for me to disagree.

My wife and I are in San Diego for a few days. A little background…we used to live in San Diego from 1995 to 1999 when I was stationed aboard USS Rushmore (LSD 47), known as “America’s Gator” (again, with the hyperbole…). We loved our time here, but a few things, most importantly, the huge distance from our families, brought us back to upstate NY. I don’t regret that decision at all, but not a week goes by where I don’t yearn for this place.

Yesterday we walked around downtown for most of the day before the 5:30PM game. The area has changed so much since we left here 12 years ago. The stadium has a lot to do with that. The Gaslamp District was a great place to hang out in back in the late 1990’s. Now, with the stadium right there, it has brought the Gaslamp and surrounding areas to a whole new level. On this weekend, with a combination of the nerd/geek/freak crowd starting to trickle in for next week’s Comic Con and the massive influx of San Francisco Giants fans from the Bay Area, with half of them sporting beards in honor of Brian Wilson, it made for some fun people-watching as we ate and drank by the harbor. I briefly thought about asking my wife if we could go to the game with her dressed up as Neytiri from Avatar and me as Brian from Family Guy, but I wussed out.

The game last night was sold out, thanks mostly to all the Giants fans. They clearly made up more than 50% of the crowd. They were somewhat loud, very proud, and completely not intimidated by Padres fans. They had free run of the place and that’s no surprise to me. Padres fans are a perfect analogy for the city in which they reside. Nothing really bothers them. They have beautiful weather, breathtaking scenery everywhere you turn, and activities galore. “If the Padres do good, cool. If not, cool. We live in San Diego.” They are at the game simply to enjoy themselves. It’s not a contest to them because they’re already winners. They live in “America’s Finest City”. Being a Yankees fan, this is an absolutely foreign concept to me and makes no sense on so many levels, but, oddly, I get it.

This Giants fan you see here, is Exhibit A in our little case study of last night’s crowd. Again, a little background…last year, the Padres had a sizable lead in NL West over the Giants, but blew it as the season wound down. The Giants ended up winning the division on the last weekend and rode that momentum to a World Series title, their first since they moved to San Francisco in the late 1950’s. Now Giants fans come to Padres games with signs like this.

A Giants fan bringing this sign to a Padres game is the equivalent of a benchwarmer from an average high school basketball team playing a pickup game with a bunch of 5th graders and destroying them. It’s weak as shit. Look at the Padres fans. They could give a shit about this guy. No one really said a word to him the whole game other than fellow Giants fans. A couple guys got into him a bit late, but it was harmless. He, and his buddy next to him in the Oakland A’s gear (I’m still trying to figure that one out), just drunkenly roamed around our section all game, holding the sign high and proud, amusing themselves.

Like a benchwarmer on a high school basketball team, if this guy would have brought a sign like that to a Yankees game, or a Red Sox game, or a Phillies game, he would gotten every shot rejected and his ankles broken on defense. Yankees fans would have ripped the sign out of his hands, Red Sox fans would have shoved it up his ass, and Phillies fans would have puked on him. Padres fans just ignore him, sip a cocktail, and enjoy the game.