Big Grumpy Barry Bonds steps up to the plate just as I pass to my social death. As the Chinese like to say, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with one small embarrassment. Well, make that 3,000 miles and a fat red face and you have the feel. Three-thousand miles looking for the sweaty soul of America. A fearless, gruelling exploration of a nation's sporting heartland (or a glorified holiday, depending on who's signing the expenses slip) begins with baseball. It begins here in Pacific Bell Park, San Francisco, the ritziest, shiniest cathedral to America's most pastoral game.

Why here? Well, we happen to be here anyway and, besides, I am excessively fond of quoting the Frenchman who remarked that he who wants to know America should first know baseball. This is the most baseball, the most nostalgia that $330 million can buy, the most America you could know.

Forlorn, windy Candlestick Park, where the Giants played their frigid baseball for decades since abandoning the Polo Grounds in New York, has in turn been abandoned for this downtown wonder, this mecca for the frappacino generation. Pacific Bell Park is the first privately-financed Major League stadium to have been built in 30 years.

For their money, investors and those who bought lifetime rights to the 16,000 best seats get a view of the bay and Bay Bridge so good that home runs really splosh into the water. They get a view of the past, with endless bricks and a hand-operated scoreboard, and a reminder of the present with sushi bars and snacks that leave no change from a $10 bill. Where better to begin? This is the new wave of sports facility. Dot.com sports. You walk to here after work, eat here, hang out.

You want retro? You want old-fashioned but comfy? You want brick walls and racing green interiors? You want instant character? Pac-Bell Park has got it. You want crowds? Got them too. In drafty old Candlestick the Giants attracted over two million fans in a season on just two occasions. In Pac-Bell they'll shoehorn in some 3.1 million punters this season.

Just as well. Having borrowed $170 million, which gets repaid at a rate of $17 million a year, the Giants could have bought their way out of ever having a decent team. They need crowds to watch the ballplayers, guzzle the microbrews and scoff the sushi.

It's working. After a poor start, revenues are up. Build and they will come, the Giants said. They were right. Another surprise: right now San Francisco has one of the hottest teams in baseball too. The Giants have quit their lowdown ways and won 16 of the last 17. Pigs are flying carelessly over Golden Gate bridge.

Speaking of . . . The roadtrip itself is to be a mythic, nostalgia-laden trek, if not from shore to shining shore then at least from coast to cornfield, from shore to shining sheaf. It starts here and finishes in the midwest in Dyersville, in the cornfield which was home to Field of Dreams and which has become a place of pilgrimage for Americans seeking the lost innocence of sport.

Idyllic. On the road, sweating down through California, getting sunburned through New Mexico and the red heart of Texas and taking a bickering upswing into the midwest, great questions will be answered. Whither American sport? Has money corroded the innocence out of sporting life? What is the nature of modern heroism? Does your garage have toilets? Will there be a mileage allowance?

Anyway, we are outside Pac-Bell Park, the Miracle on 3rd Street, wherein the local Giants and the visiting Texas Rangers are about to do battle on this summer's evening. Sold out. We three, Les Miserables (aged six and eight) and I, being beat poets on the road to sporting enlightenment, will buy our tickets from a stringy black scalper.

"How much?" "Sixty dollars man," he says.

"For three $10 tickets?" I ask.

"Yeah man," he says.

There is a stand off. He looks at me edgily. I look at him imploringly.

"Okey Dokey!" I say triumphantly, and hand him three twenties. I turn to wink at the Les Miserables and catch them exchanging rolled-eye looks with the other scalpers.

Inside, the stadium is filled with grazing spectators. Speciality food counters are everywhere. Just like Parnell Park. We are seated at centrefield. Since I became a journalist I'd forgotten that it was possible to sit this far away from the action and still be technically part of the attendance. I am distracted. In Chicago and New York this area of the stands is for the bleacher bums, drunk, loud and often menacing. In San Francisco it's for the dudes. There's one sitting next to me now. He says everything in that Californian way, hanging question mark everywhere.

"Heh dude?" he says, "you got Harry and Jason's seats?"

"Yeah, Row 19 Seat 1," I say to him in my middle-aged, "let's have no guff from you sonny" way.

"You know Harry, dude?" he says.

"Harry? No."

"Yeah? Harry? Makes hats?"

"No."

"Hats?" Pause. "Harry totally loves the Giants dude?"

"Uh huh."

"Harry's gone to Italy?"

"I believe it's lovely there."

"Harry's seat's all sticky dude? Like? Totally sticky? Right?"

Indeed. I shift my buttocks. Harry's seat is totally sticky. I have made an airtight bond with Harry's seat. Totally airtight. Harry's is an end-of-row seat and it has been covered meticulously in old beer and cotton candy. I am adhered to it. Bonded with it. Melded with it. Fused. I have a relationship with it that is illegal in 43 states. I am the Brian Keenan of Pac-Bell Park. I will still be here when Harry The Hat Dude gets back from Italy. Totally here, dude. From behind me the chisellers are agitating for candy floss and a trip to the kiddies area. To buy time, I purchase two large bags of blue and pink candy floss from a vendor who has ripe bags of the stuff hanging like fruit from a cane. The kids can rot their teeth while I manoeuvre off the seat.

Eventually, in the fifth inning, the Giants make a double play and the crowd rises to its feet to watch the Rangers batter be thrown out at first. I use the diversion to press my palms down on the seat and propel myself upwards from the goo. Free! Thank Gawd Almighty! Free at last! I have bad luck with San Francisco. The first time I ever went there was on an early morning flight from New York. I snore like a 747 engine but without the rhythm, erupting like a geyser of snot and dribble every now and then before subsiding into deathly silence for a minute or so. On planes, trains or in automobiles it's embarrassing.

So I took measures. I chewed up a huge wodge of Juicy Fruit gum and literally gummed my treacherous mouth shut by creating the sort of sticky bond between jaws which now exist between my buttocks and the seat of Harry, The Hat Dude. Awoke on the west coast. Usual sour mouth and doubtful looks. No chewing gum evident until I attempted to, in the vernacular, deplane and I found Juicy Fruit smeared attractively from the back of my knee to upper thigh, holding my right leg fast to the seat. Suave. Harry the Hat Dude should have such luck.

Enough digression. Back in Pac-Bell Les Miserables are restless. The centrepiece of the kiddie attractions is a gigantic CocaCola bottle which contains two long children's slides called The Twist Off and the The Guzzler. There are better things to do, like video consoles and batting cages, but not if you are six or eight and have inherited the reflexes of a tree.

The kiddie park is adorned by a massive baseball glove into which players are encouraged to hit home runs, and there are a couple of areas wherein kids can bat and pitch. Recognising the futility of battling against their cackhanded genes, the kids opt for the slides. Good old gravity. We join the long, snaking, queue for The Guzzler, keeping one eye on the game as we move nearer and nearer the mouth of the beast.

We are second from the top when I realise that accompanying adults are expected to submit themselves to The Guzzler along with their kids. Californians have absolutely no sense of dignity. I turn to beat my way back through the crowd. There's no point. Mr and Mrs America in the queue look ready to call social services. "Coming to the plate," crackles the PA, ". . . Barry Bonds."

And coming to The Guzzler . . . The chisellers have slipped gaily down the dark intestine, vanishing with cheery whoops to reappear seconds later at the bottom. Ah. Rosy-cheeked overachievers fresh from the family production line.

How hard can it be? I duly sit in and launch myself with a mumbled joke and some cheery embarrassment, but my sticky transom is working against me now. The young lad supervising the take-offs looks at my red face in alarm. Oh no dude, gravity has failed. Or perhaps I am stuck and he requires a compressed air device to blast me out of The Guzzler and into San Francisco bay beyond. I am going to explain about the sticky ass but think better of it. "You okay, dude?" he says. "It's cool, dude," I gasp jocularly, and begin working my way frantically down The Guzzler, pushing myself along with my hands like a legless mendicant in a Calcutta street. By the time the breathless beat poet on his way to sporting enlightenment emerges at the bottom of The Guzzler, most of the queue up at the top of the Coke bottle is peering anxiously over the railings, hoping to be present for something grizzly and Jon Krakeuer has the grim opening of the book written. By now the bay winds are whipping up cold and the chisellers are campaigning for Giants sweatshirts. I remind them of their beloved Cubs back in Chicago, but Frailty, thy name is kid, and they threaten tears, pneumonia and social services unless black hoodies are purchased at great expense.

The Giants win 5-3 with a flurry of business in the eighth and ninth innings. By then I am $160 poorer and can feel the bespoke quesadilla forming a recalcitrant ball in my stomach. Will there be mileage? There had better be.