Funny how things work… I found myself yet again shut out of a Pixies show – and yes, I was ready to head to Minneapolis on a Tuesday, because at least it’s not Winnipeg – so on a mostly unrelated note, I decided to get tickets to the Oakland A’s game Aimee and I have been planning to go to when we’re in SF next month. I hadn’t gotten around to it because tickets.com insisted on only FedEx-ing bleacher seat tickets, and I didn’t want to pay more for shipping than for seats (because not every team prices their seats like the Sox). But I decided better to have the tickets in hand, so I went for some better seats that tickets.com would send USPS. Who knows.

Buying A’s tickets then made me wonder, whatever happened to those Giants tickets I bought the day they went on sale? The answer was waiting at home, where I found the tickets in the nametagged mail cozy that my landlady set up a few weeks ago. The guy who no longer lives here still gets more mail than the rest of us.

I opened up the ticket envelope, and to my dismay, the location read “SBC Park.” Now I haven’t really been paying attention to the Giants’ offseason moves, but I was pretty sure I bought the tickets for PacBell Park. I tried to figure out how “PacBell” might fit into “SBC,” and also had a brief thought of a day-long dash to San Diego, in case I’d accidently bought Giants-Padres tickets for San Diego instead. But “PETCO” doesn’t fit into “SBC,” either, so I checked online, and sure enough, PacBell Park is now SBC Park, to keep in line with PacBell’s corporate name change. And this change has sparked more than a little anger, as evidenced by this now sadly defeated-looking Keep It Pac Bell site. “PacBell Park” rolled off the tongue really nicely, like “John Paul Jones.” “SBC” is more useless alphabet soup, worse than most corporate names I can think of. Too bad. I’m still excited to see the park, whatever they call it.