San Francisco: See the World Series for free

The soundtrack of San Francisco right now consists of 10,000 lunatics war-chanting “LET’S GO GIANTS!” outside your hotel until 3 in the morning. There were so many airhorns and sirens Wednesday night that at one point, I swallowed my pillow. This being Frisco, I chased it with a nice Chardonnay (some locals hate it when you call it Frisco, so I do it at every opportunity).

The visuals? Two of the most common sights during this World Series season are scraggly black beards (an homage to Giants pitcher Brian Wilson) and thongs worn on the outside of a pair of jeans (a tribute to another local ballplayer’s lucky underwear). I know what you’re thinking: That’s just another day in San Francisco. But, no. This is obsessive, even for an obsessive city.

But here’s the real inside stuff: Want to see the World Series for free? Yes, in person.

There is a stretch of gates outside the right field wall of AT&T Park that offers ground-level viewing of the action inside the stadium. Perfect? No. Free? Completely.

It’s even legal. Stadium workers put up barricades Wednesday to control the crowd. Each gate allowed 24 fans their peek into the biggest baseball show on Earth. Every three innings, those fans were asked to move on to allow another set of fans to get a peek.

Meanwhile, World Series T-shirts and caps aren’t free. They start at $32.

The town’s hottest items, though, are the fake beards that pay tribute to Wilson. They look like bad bank robbery disguises and are going for $6 apiece at shops around town.