With tickets going for at least $400 apiece (complete with free nose bleeds!) for the World Series at AT&T Park, a chance to see the action live and in person is a heavy price to pay for many. Luckily, AT&T Park sits next to a body of water called China Basin, a slough that runs out of San Francisco Bay. The spot in that slough beyond the right field wall, McCovey Cove, is one of the greatest fan areas in not just baseball, but in all of sports. Since the days of Barry Bonds smashing homer after homer into the water, the Cove has become a staple of the fan experience at AT&T Park and is free for anyone who can take their water-based vessel into the area beyond the wall.
My parents are big sailors and decided that considering it was the World Series and they hadn’t done it the last two times the Giants were there, it was time to venture into the Cove. They went Friday night for Game 3 without me since I had a high school football broadcasting commitment, but I was not about to miss Saturday’s Game 4 at all. So I drove to meet them at the guest docks at the legendary Pier 39, where we would motor the 3 1/2 miles into the Cove on the mighty Seawalker, a Newport 30 sailboat.
(Quick story on the boat itself: My folks bought it about a decade ago, and if that name makes you think it’s some Star Wars ripoff, you’re somewhat correct. Its original owners were indeed related to the Star Wars franchise. After The Empire Strikes Back came out and a few of the workers at LucasFilm realized it was going to be a hit, they went in on a boat together to go and have fun in on the weekends. After a few years, they sold it to the owner my parents bought it from. As you can see in the picture below, the previous owner paid homage to the original owners in a pretty awesome fashion.)
So off our three-person crew went along the eastern coast of San Francisco, staying no more than about a half-mile or so offshore as we made our 45-minute trip. It’s a very scenic trip, taking you along the legendary San Francisco Embarcadero with views of Alcatraz, Treasure Island, the very impressive San Francisco cityscape, and, of course, the Bay Bridge.
Once you get under the bridge, it’s a short trip around one more bend before the ballpark gets in full view, and from there, you make your way into what ends up being one crowded body of water. We arrived just after 3:30 local time, an hour and a half before first pitch, and even getting there, there were at least 50 vessels in the water. After settling into our spot, we dropped anchor and listened to the local radio broadcast, the sounds of which were plentiful in the cove.
The foursome of Jon Miller, Dave Flemming, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow are local legends; rock stars that act as the beacon of the team. Way more than just broadcast voices, they’re looked upon as almost deities to an extent by the fanbase, and even with some boats showing the game on television due to not being able to see the action from the water, the radios were up all around the cove to hear their favorite foursome call the action.
And that was important because as the game began, the sounds of the crowd of over 43,000 fans that night were as loud as you’d expect them to be. Every strike thrown by a Giants pitcher was met with raucous cheers, and the silence was even palpable once the Royals took the early advantage. The crowd sounds, the radio sounds and the televisions matched up to create quite the fan experience. The audio calls would line up with the action quite nicely, and since it takes a while for sound to travel out into the cove, you’d actually hear the radio call happen before the crowd reaction, almost like they were confirming what you had already heard. As the crowd reacted, horns would blare from the surrounding boats, joining in on the fun when the home team made a big play.
Once the excitement ramped up, you’d look around to some of the surrounding boats that had TVs set up to catch a glimpse of the play that just happened. So after a while, there would be a pattern for all the big moments in the game: Hear it on the radio call, hear the crowd react and then after you celebrate, take a look around to see if you can see what happened on the TV feed. Most of the time, however, it wasn’t even worth looking for the visual representation. As you can see from the picture above, the shape of the ballpark makes that upper bowl into an amphitheater-like setting. All that sound bounces off the stands and out into the cove. It evokes memories of the great neighborhood ballparks like Wrigley, Fenway, Yankee Stadium…there are very few places in baseball nowadays where you can sit and listen to a game without being in the ballpark and still feel the excitement, which is a major contributor to what made baseball America’s pastime in the first place.
Even on the water, you rode that rollercoaster, too. And not just from the wakes churned up by ships out in the bay. When the Royals chased Ryan Vogelsong in the third with four runs, the complaints were audible out on the water amongst the fans, and the silence at some points made it very unsettling. Some fans were wondering aloud why they even went through the trouble to head out to the cove if this was how the game was going to go.
Luckily, what happened afterwards rewarded the fans for sticking around. The Giants would turn things around against Jason Vargas and the Royals middle relievers, tying it up before Pablo Sandoval’s two-run go-ahead single sent the crowd (and the cove) into hysterics. It was as loud a reaction as I’ve ever heard at a sporting event in my life, and it kept going as the home team scored five more runs after that.
When the seventh inning came, my parents talked about how they wanted to turn the radio off to hear the crowd sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” That lost its luster since “God Bless America” got sung right beforehand, and the fans weren’t nearly as into it, but when the eighth inning rolled around, the familiar tune of “Lights” was played in the stadium, and even louder than that were the fans singing along in unison. The song is beyond played out, but hearing an entire stadium singing like that, as I said on Twitter when it happened, was hauntingly beautiful.
Once the delirium had passed, you could hear people talking about how they wanted the game to end quickly. People in kayaks or canoes had been out there for at least four hours, some closer to five or six to make sure they were closest to splash zone where baseballs are prone to land. But it didn’t matter once Hunter Strickland got the final out, as the elation felt in the ballpark was shared out with everyone in the cove. Fireworks went off in celebration of the Giants evening the series at 2-2.
By the end of an exhilarating night, the adrenaline was still flowing through many of the fans in the cove. While the smaller vessels were quick to leave, many of the boats stuck around to celebrate some more as fans left the stadium. Our boat was quick to raise the anchor and be on our way, but it still allowed me to take in the setting one last time before heading back to Pier 39 with a simply stunning view of the San Francisco skyline at night.
It’s weird. Watching a big game on TV has become so regular for me that being outside of a stadium where said big game is going on seemed like an odd proposition. But at the same time, McCovey Cove has become as synonymous as the Green Monster or the Wrigley Ivy, and that’s with a 25-foot-high wall obscuring your view of the action. So you take in the sounds and you take in the other visual elements to produce something truly unique, and when you add in the importance of the World Series, you get an atmosphere unlike any other, and an event you will remember for a lifetime.
(All photos within the article were provided by the author.)
