It’s 1996, and I am maybe six weeks old. That does not stop my parents and grandfather from taking me to a baseball game. It’s a clear, cool May night in the Bay Area, and the Oakland A’s are playing the Boston Red Sox at the Oakland Coliseum. This is my very first baseball game. Obviously, I don’t remember it. However, my parents do, and when my dad tells the story, he recalls how I spent the entire game strapped to his chest, wide awake and mesmerized by the bright stadium lights.He also tells me how he munched on a bag of peanuts throughout the game, and how my mom was less than pleased to find her newborn daughter covered in peanut shells by the end of it. There would be countless more baseball games my dad would take me to growing up, most of them in San Francisco to watch the Giants play. But if we’re designating an official starting point for this journey of ours, it would be this.
It’s 2006, and my summer is spent either at the Vacaville, Calif., softball fields, my brother’s Little League games, or our neighborhood park. My dad, Dave Woo, is a fixture at all three. He coaches both of our teams, works as a property manager, and spends whatever limited remaining free time he has throwing Wiffle balls for the rest of the kids in our cul-de-sac. My dad invented a game with our (very understanding) neighbors. If anyone can hit the house across the court, we can all go for ice cream. We made a lot of group trips to Baskin-Robbins that summer, and my dad paid for them every time.
I remember my brother and I waiting for our dad to come home from work each day that summer, bat bags packed and ready to go. When his white pickup truck rolled into view, we would scramble to the front yard and start loading up a wagon to take to the park: buckets of balls, L-screens, tees, you name it, we had it. We would hit for hours, the three of us (and occasionally our family dogs), until Mom called to say it was time to come home for dinner.
After dinner, we’d turn on the Giants game, and my dad would continue teaching me the rules and strategies of the game. He would quiz me on stats, when a team should pinch hit, what each player’s strengths were, and what pitches to throw when. Neither of us knew it at the time, but he was laying the foundation of my childhood — and eventually, my future.It’s 2012, it’s Halloween, and the Giants have just won their second World Series in three years (sorry about that National League Championship Series, Cardinals fans). My aunt, who works for the city of San Francisco at the time, has an office that oversees City Hall — the ending point of the World Series parade. In what was a very uncharacteristic decision, my parents let me skip school for the day to attend. My dad and I catch an early-morning BART train before the sun rises and arrive to find a sea of black and orange flooding Market Street. We make our way to the Civic Center and finally to City Hall, where we have a bird’s-eye view of my childhood icons — Bruce Bochy, Buster Posey, Matt Cain, Hunter Pence, even Brandon Crawford (who I would go on to cover professionally, 12 years later).
