The great ballpark on San Francisco Bay opened its regular season home schedule in spectacular fashion Friday afternoon.  Under bright sunshine, Giants starter Matt Cain threw a one-hit, complete game shutout before a spirited crowd that was almost fully assembled an hour before first pitch.

The manner in which Cain lost the no-hitter will likely cause him at least a little festering regret. After mowing down 17 straight batters to start the game, Cain got behind in the count while facing the pitcher James McDonald with two out in the sixth. Cain’s two ball, one strike offering was a meatball over the middle, allowing McDonald to swat it hard through the hole between short and third.

That was the only blemish on Cain’s stat line for the entire day. He was absolutely brilliant. Working without the dilly or dally you see from most starting pitchers, Cain struck out 11 and walked nobody. He threw 106 pitches, 73 for strikes. His fastball topped out at 92 mph.  The game was over in two hours and ten minutes.

A lot of baseball fans reacted with surprise when the Giants re-upped Cain to start the season for six years, $127.5 million.  That’s a lot of money.  A lot of commitment and a lot of risk.  But perhaps the Giants (backed by the assessment of their longtime pitching coach Dave Righetti) believe Cain’s fluid mechanics are such that he’ll return fair value for the length of the deal.

Attendance was announced at 41138.  The team called it their 85th consecutive sellout. It wasn’t a true sellout since an entire section in the upper deck was half empty.  My Dad and I sat in the left field bleachers.  We entered about two hours and fifteen minutes early and walked the open circumference to soak up views unlike any sports venue I‘ve been to.

13-year-old Tyler Stow threw out the ceremonial first pitch.  Tyler is the son of Giants fan Bryan Stow, the man who was viciously beaten a year ago in the Dodgers Stadium parking lot.  A live video uplink showed Bryan Stow offering a few words of encouragement to his son.  Stow sat in a wheelchair.  His wife said an intense rehabilitation regimen made it impossible for Stow to accept the Giants’ offer to attend the game.  Significant brain damage from the attack has left the elder Stow with grave impairment.  Many in the crowd cried at the real-time sight of a life destroyed in the aftermath of something that should be all fun and no despair.

The happy celebration of opening day continued once the game started.  But it’s clear Stow has a long way to go before he thinks about getting in the middle of a baseball crowd.  The live pictures of this once strong and healthy young man to construct an audible sentence serve as an unfortunate exhibit of the senselessness of violent fan conduct before, during and after a sporting event.

After the game, we closed out the trip with dinner at Hog Island Oyster Company in the Ferry Building at the Embarcadero.  We sat outside and had a dozen of the home-grown Tomales Bay Sweetwaters.  My Dad got the chowder and I had the cod with asparagus.

My trip home Saturday didn’t go very well. I failed to find an empty seat on a San Fran bird bound for New York despite a day-long effort to do so. Late in the day, I got on a Cleveland flight but then couldn’t secure lodging there because of festivities associated with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. I spent Saturday night in the airport and finally caught a Newark flight Sunday morning. It was first time in all my standby flying days that I did an all-nighter in an airport terminal.

The rock and roll radio/television personality Matt Pinfield was on the flight to Newark out of Cleveland.  He held court with admirers in the rear of coach.  His distinctively raspy voice could be heard audibly even as airplane engines hummed on the taxi for takeoff.

It’s nice to be back home but I love visiting the Bay Area.  The leftist majority there manages to blend feisty outspokenness with civil, well-organized living.  It all works really well from a visitor’s standpoint.  The Bart is great and the sports fans are fun.

I’ll be back as often as I can get there.