Distillations: Big Game Hunting at The Taco Shop at Underdogs 

Here's what I like about sports bars: They're comfortable. They're predictable: They don't suddenly decide to infuse vodka with kale or throw a spoken word poetry night run by the world's angriest law school dropouts. And, in the opposite of an actual sports venue, the food and bar snacks are often first-rate and cheap.

The Taco Shop at Underdogs, on Irving, where I watched the Giants kick the crown off the Royals in Game 5 of the World Series, fits that bill perfectly. It's a cozy space that has mastered the fundamentals and has a great kitchen. I'll go there just for the fish burritos or the street taco happy hour.

Here's what I hate about sports bars: big games.

Mass crowds make enjoying a bar as a bar impossible. Bars that otherwise wouldn't have security suddenly need it. Underage kids try to sneak in at a much higher rate. It's that much harder to meet a fascinating stranger — or to be one — when all eyes are glued to the screens and a drunk guy's root root rooting for the home team at the top of his lungs.

That describes Underdogs that night, packed to the gills with passersby standing at the windows, holding slices, looking in to see if we were still playing a shutout game. But it also describes any sports bar, anywhere, at that moment. The more raucous and crowded a bar gets, the more generic it gets, resembling every other crowded bar of its type. Which is exciting in the way getting caught up in a crowd always is if you surrender to it, but tedious if you don't.

Sports fandom is a movement towards ecstasy through uniformity, and that's fine if that's your thing, but it's never been mine. The qualities I appreciate in sports bars for their own sake are intended to help lubricate this process, to make sure that the basics are covered as smoothly as possible so that people can focus the entirety of their attention on the common ritual happening on wall-mounted screens.

Underdogs does this better than most, from the picnic-table-style seating in the back to the fact that all the TVs are on the same wall, so that the crowd is committing itself to a more communal experience than when everyone looks in a different direction. That's a good thing — though I can't help but feel like all that effort is wasted. I mean, every fan in every bar across the city is having the exact same experience and doing exactly what they'd be doing in any other bar. What's the point?

I know, I know ... that is the point. The bonds of shared experience. It's beautiful, or something. You tell me: I avoid it. I am a rootless man, and so the idea of rooting for the home team is absurd.

The crowd cheers as the Giants snatch another ball out of the air and continue their shutout game. Maybe, at this very moment, two strangers are connecting over their shared love of the team — two people who would otherwise never talk are noticing one another and even embracing in the excitement.

I admire the power that sportsball has to move people so, to whip them into ecstatic frenzies. It's what I look for, even try to create, in other contexts. Art is surely jealous of sports.

But I can't see it. Is the world better off for San Francisco having won? Is it worse? Is it anything? Does this win represent truth, or beauty, or justice, or a principle ... anything at all? Is my understanding deepened by watching this struggle? Will I live my life differently?

Until I can see victory in victory, defeat in defeat, I can't join in.

Instead I have to close my eyes and pretend that it's the off-season. Pretend that I'm in the mood for a Tecate or a margarita and some damn fine Mexican bar food at pretty good prices. My friend Aaron's pickup soccer team has just finished a game in the park, and we're all sitting at a picnic table having a good time, and instead of rooting for something we're talking about everything, and making jokes about the stupid things we're saying, and suddenly it's last call and we have to leave even though there's still so much potential and we'll probably never get together like this again.

All of which really happened once at Underdogs when the Giants weren't playing. That's a good bar.