I seldom go to SI.com for information about the Giants. but this article was tremendously fun to read.
From SI.com
These Lovable Giants
Baseball |
SAN FRANCISCO — Here’s the thing that makes these San Francisco Giants different: They’re lovable. These Giants won the National League West title on Sunday with a 3-0 victory over San Diego, and it had been seven years, going back to 2003, since the Giants made the postseason. But a LOVABLE Giants team in the postseason? For that, you have to go back a long time… a long, long time.
“Somebody GIVE ME A HUG!” Giants reliever Sergio Romo shouted in the clubhouse as champagne splattered all around him. “Why am I standing all alone here? SOMEBODY ON MY TEAM GIVE ME A HUG!”
For all those years in the 1990s, in the early 2000s, the Giants were all about one man standing all alone… one brilliant, moody, thrilling, haunted, indomitable and often ticked-off man named Barry Bonds. He was so good at playing baseball, so preposterously good, that the San Francisco fans had to try and embrace him. They tried hard. He was the Charlie Parker of baseball, the Billie Holliday of baseball, the Marlon Brando of baseball, a pure genius, a force of nature, and San Francisco was awed by his magnificence. It is worth noting that for four years in a row, Barry Bonds’ on-base percentages were .515, .582, .529 and .609 — these happen to be four of the top nine in baseball since 1900. Yes, awe was the only viable response to Bonds’ genius as a baseball player, and so awe was what the Giants were about for the last couple of decades.
But this Giants team… no, this team isn’t about awe. This is a “somebody give me a hug” kind of team. Their best hitter, Aubrey Huff, has been on five different teams the last five seasons. Their closer, Brian Wilson, wears a tuxedo-black beard. Their ace, the pitching dude, Tim Lincecum, was asked on Sunday if he had thought about pitching on Monday — had the Giants lost the game, he would have had to pitch the one-game playoff for the division title. His response: Yeah, he thought about it. And because he thought about it, he didn’t have to think about it anymore. And that way he could enjoy the game. There’s a brilliant logic to it, if you think about it (but don’t think about it too much).
How can you not love this Giants team? Matt Cain? He just turned 26 and yet he’s like the anti-Lincecum. Everybody will tell you he’s an old soul. Nothing — NOTHING — ever seems to distract him. He has thrown 190-plus innings every year since he was 21, and every year has been almost exactly like the year before. When he was being interviewed after the Giants’ victory on Sunday, teammates were pouring champagne and beer over his head, down his back, but his facial expression never changed, not even a little bit, and he answered the questions like he was being interviewed in a soundproof chamber. He was like the William Hurt character in Broadcast News — utterly unflappable.
This is a Giants team with a third baseman nicknamed Kung Fu Panda — and fans still wear the Panda outfits to games though Pablo Sandoval has had a down year — this is a team with a thrilling young catcher with the thrilling-young-catcher name of Buster Posey, and this is a team with a Bay area native whom many had written off, Pat Burrell, who is back to pulling home runs over left-field walls again.
“This team is just so much fun,” Giants broadcaster (and my childhood hero) Duane Kuiper says, and he’s right. There’s a baseball line that goes, “It’s always fun when you win” — and that’s probably true. But after all those exciting but tense Bonds years, maybe this team has filled a different place in San Francisco’s heart. Maybe this team and this city are having a different kind of fun.
“The connection with the fans here is amazing,” says Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt, and sure enough, after Sunday’s game, the players and coaches and manager Bruce Bochy all made a full lap of the field, high-fiving all those fans leaning over the fence. The game was pretty typical of the Giants this year. They squeezed out three runs, one sparked by pitcher Jonathan Sanchez’s triple, the second coming when Freddy Sanchez scored on Huff’s double, the third on Posey’s solo home run.
And those three runs weren’t just enough, they were two more runs than the Giants needed. The Padres were overwhelmed by Sanchez and the Giants pitchers. The Padres didn’t just lose on Sunday, they expired. It was a remarkable year for San Diego baseball, too — but on Sunday it became pretty clear early on that the Padres were not going to score any runs no matter how long the game stretched on. They only got one runner to third base — that happened in the third inning, when they moved Chris Donorfia from first to third on two bland groundouts. He was left at third when Ryan Ludwick struck out. That was the closest thing the Padres had to a rally, though it really didn’t quite live up to the word “rally.”
The Giants’ offense has been only marginally better than the Padres’ this year, but in the end that margin was enough to give San Francisco the National League West title. And though the race came down to a shaky last day, it does seem, now that the Giants are in, that they are a scary team to face in the playoffs. They come at you with three tough starters — Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez, who showed again on Sunday that he can be overpowering. Their bullpen is so good that, as Affeldt says, “there aren’t enough innings for everybody.” The Giants are the one team that, at least from a pitching perspective, seem able to match up with the Phillies.
Of course, the baseball playoffs are a roulette wheel, and there’s no real science to predicting what will happen. What we do know is that the Giants play Atlanta here, Game 1 on Thursday, and AT&T Park will be shaking and thumping. Often at the park they have the voice of Tony Bennett singing that most ubiquitous and inescapable of Bay Area songs, I Left My Heart In San Francisco. The song never really fit when they played it for the Barry Bonds Giants. But it does seem to fit now. Climb halfway to the stars! It really is a love affair in San Francisco.
