This weekend was a wild ride at Oracle Park, and not just on the field. Here’s a round-up of what happened at our favorite ballpark over the weekend.
Good morning, baseball fans!
This last weekend was quite an eventful one for the San Francisco Giants. On the field, things were great! They swept the visiting Atlanta Braves and are back to being one game behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the standings (as of the time this is being written).
Good stuff!
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing going on at the ballpark this weekend. So let’s talk about it. Firstly, there was a fire at Fuku’s Spicy Fried Chicken Sandos concession booth before Sunday’s game. While there were no injuries and it was able to be put out fairly quickly by the fire department, it was serious enough to prompt the park to be evacuated, including players and other staff being evacuated out onto the field.
Wild. But not the most unheard of thing to happen at a ballpark. Unlike what took place during Friday night’s game when a fan threw a baseball onto the field during a play, nearly hitting home plate umpire Andy Fletcher in the process.
Well that’s a first pic.twitter.com/yHtdJ6T2Ft
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) June 7, 2025
Mike Krukow appeared on KNBR’s morning show “Murph & Markus” on Monday to discuss the incident, noting that he had never seen anything like it in his time as a broadcaster and a player, noting his disgust with the person who did it and his expectation that it won’t happen again.
The fan has so far not been identified, unfortunately. Manager Bob Melvin told reporters on Saturday that it was not caught on the cameras because the fan was seated higher up in the park than the cameras were shooting.
I’d like to think we’re all on the same page about how absolutely dumb it is to throw anything on the field. Let alone hurling a baseball from the upper decks. But just in case anyone needs a reminder:
DO NOT THROW THINGS ON THE FIELD. DO NOT THROW THINGS AT PEOPLE IN GENERAL.
My goodness.
Sunday featured even more chaos than just the fire. The Giants had a scheduled promotional giveaway for a Hello Kitty themed jersey. This promotion overlapped with the park’s Girl Scouts Day special event, which resulted in quite a sizeable attendance figure between the two.
However, the organization seems to have underestimated the Sanrio appeal and according to multiple reports from the crowd, really mishandled the giveaway due to a lack of crowd control and available quantity.
While the team did announce the available amount of the jerseys (15,000), I did not realize until reading this piece by Gabe Fernandez of SFGate just how much the quantity of giveaways had gone down since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and just how much of a difference there is between the amounts available at Oracle Park vs. the team’s division rivals, as Ferndandez points out in the piece.
Sure, it’s just a free giveaway but the Giants run so many ads for these things that it’s very often a huge motivating factor in people’s decision to attend a game. I’ve attended a lot of games purely for the giveaway item, and I never had a problem getting one. But they also used to give away a lot more.
Many fans who arrived at Sunday’s game hours before the ballpark opened still walked away with nothing due to what some claim was a lack of crowd control and too low of a supply of items in the first place.
What a wild weekend. If you were at the park over the weekend, let us know how it went down in the comments.