After second baseman Jeff Kent left the San Francisco Giants in 2002, he deeply offended the city by questioning our fashion sense (he chided the home team's "French vanilla" uniforms). Then, last year, he donated $15,000 to the Prop. 8 campaign -- proving that, yes, you can be a fashion critic and a homophobe ... and thus enraging San Franciscans all the more.The 40-year-old tearfully announced his retirement today, testing what Abraham Lincoln referred to as "the better angels of our nature."
If the media hyperventilates when this guy shows up at a ballgame -- your city might have an inferiority complexWhen a spokeswoman for San Jose's mayor last week told SF Weekly that Gavin Newsom didn't belong on a Washington, D.C. junket along with the boss men of San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego -- this was a trip "for the major cities" -- it was a true Cinderella Moment. After years of smoldering in San Francisco's shadow, San Jose was off to the capital ball to beg for state funds from Pr
The San Francisco Giants are a hell of a team. Only a few games into the nascent season and they've already got me feeling like a naive jackass for writing that "Hope Springs Eternal on Opening Day." Perhaps, with this team, hope really is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. And yet, the best line to describe the team may emanate from the unlikely source of Dennis Green -- who hysterically bellowed "They are who we thought they were!" after a maddening Monday Night Football loss seve
The Boy Who Lived, Jonathan SanchezWhen the Giants' Jonathan Sanchez powered a devastating slider past a prone Everth Cabrera for the last out of his masterful July 10 no-hitter, two storylines were hatched almost simultaneously. The first, naturally, was: "Holy crap! The first Giants' no-hitter in 33 years!" And the second, which followed perhaps a nanosecond later, was "Can you believe a guy who'd been pitching like crap all year tossed a no-hitter?" In retrospect, that second storyline was bo
And if the lights are still on six hours later, you can blame a country musicianThe longest nine-inning game in National League history took place right here at San Francisco's AT&T Park back in 2001; the Los Angeles Dodgers outscored the hometown boys, 11-10, in a heart-breaking, ass-crack-numbing four hour and 27 minute Wagnerian opera of a ballgame. Even still, the game would have been over by "just" 11:45 p.m. So it was confusing to see the lights of AT&T Park blazing away at 1 a.m.
Say what?Remember, in England, Benedict Arnold is a hero. That helps put one in mind for the just-unveiled exhibition at the Burbank Central Library -- enemy territory, sports-wise -- "Love to Hate: The Dodgers-Giants Rivalry."Library-goers can be treated to memorabilia like the signs illustrating this story: One reads "The stinkin' Giants -- Give Em The Big Blue Finger -- Put Em in the Fog" (no clue) and the other says "Baghdad By the Bay ... In the Past They Stole Our Signs -- Back to Alcat
Before he was a pizzaiolo, Darsky scouted talent for the KC Royals.Go ahead, call Jon Darsky a pizzaiolo, though the Flour Water pizza maker really prefers "dough guy" instead. Since opening last May in the Mission (2401 Harrison at 20th St.), the restaurant has stayed smoking hot, and Darsky's prowess with a peel has made it as far as the pages of the New York Times (a recent piece called him a "skilled operator"). Still, the 30-year-old dough guy has kept a profile practically on par
The other day, your humble narrator had a sporting experience that flummoxed him. After Bay Area local Jimmy Rollins doubled home the tying and winning runs for the Philadelphia Phillies over the Los Angeles Dodgers with two outs in the ninth, a clatch of L.A. fans in the corner actually booed and jeered me for having the temerity to root against the Dodgers in a bar located in the heart of San Francisco. I was also razzed for "wearing a button-up." Evidently working for a living earned me de
Larry HalprinIt's always a jarring thing to pick up the paper and see an obit for someone you know, and that was the case yesterday when I read about the death of architect Lawrence Halprin at age 93. It's not as if I was a friend or close associate of the family. But Halprin was just about the most intensely interesting, sociable, funny, erudite, uplifting interview subject I've ever had in my journalistic career. I wandered over to Halprin's Levi Plaza office back in 2005; as I later put it
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