Dynasty: 21 Years of Giants Baseball

[caption id=”attachment_1734" align=”aligncenter” width=”600"]

Marco Scutaro celebrates the San Fransisco Giants World Series victory in 2012. Photo courtesy of Diariocritico de Venezuela via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.[/caption]

My dad likes to tell the story. I am eight years old and we are at a Giants night game. In those days the Giants’ brand-new stadium was called PacBell Park, a romantic name that oozed San Francisco — the seagulls which circled around the seats in the eighth inning, drawn by the departure of fans, the Bay visible over the right-field wall and the kayaks that circled, forever waiting for a splash hit. Pacific Bell. It sounded like a dream.

I have fallen asleep in my seat under piles of blankets. It’s the eighth inning, or the ninth — it hardly matters. The Giants are behind, they are in the heart of their 50-year slump. The front office is in the process of remaking the team, starting with the $350 million stadium which seats over 40,000 and has two posh club levels, intended to cater to the Silicon Valley tech elite who are streaming into the Bay Area. It hasn’t paid off yet. Next October, the Giants will face off against the Los Angeles Angels in a Norcal/SoCal fall classic that they will eventually lose, heartbreakingly, in games 6 and 7. The Giants’ three-year World Series dynasty is another decade or so in the making, and will require the departure of Barry Bonds and the arrival of Bruce Bochy, the taciturn and beloved manager whose faith in his players will be his greatest weakness and greatest strength.

My dad is watching the game. His presence is the result of years of slow-growing affection for the Giants. His childhood in Gardena, California, taught him to adore the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Giants’ biggest rival. My father is a third-generation Japanese-American. When my father was a child, my grandmother offered him a choice: play baseball on Saturdays or go to Japanese language school. My father chose baseball. He still speaks no Japanese, but now at least he is a Giants fan.

The stadium announcer, Renel Brooks-Moon, the only female announcer in all of baseball, is trumpeting the Giants’ line-up. “Now batting…” she begins. There is an endless quality to her voice, a kind of purity that seems to go beyond the brash male announcers of other stadiums. “Andrés Gallllllllarraga!” She booms. The “L” seems to go on for hours. Years later my father and I will repeat this call to each other, like something between a litany and an inside joke.

Galarraga is almost in his 40s, a native Venezuelan famous for his large, enthusiastic smile. Despite his age he has been known throughout the season for hitting home runs. Tonight, he does not disappoint. He swings beautifully, and the bat cracks. My father, sitting with me along the left-field line, jumps to his feet. The ball is making a slow arc towards the center field display, and my father swoops me up by the armpits, holding me Lion King-style as the crowd, numbed by the evening cold and a one-run deficit, begins to wake up and stand. I open my eyes, bleary, just in time to see the ball disappear behind the center field wall.

***

That baseball is boring is repeated and re-repeated by fans of almost every other American sport. The games are 3 to 4 hours long and span 54 outs, assuming no extra innings. The more offense, the longer the game. But some of the most exciting and nail-biting moments in baseball are impossible for non-fans to identify as moments at all: I’m talking perfect games and the history-eclipsing World Series performance of Madison Bumgarner, in which he shut out the Royals over five innings in game seven as a reliever. During those innings, almost nothing happened — and that was the beauty of it.

The aggression present in many pro sports is missing in baseball. The players rarely touch, and when they do it’s either an accident (outfield collision) or some sort of slide. This is no American football, a crashing, teeming mass reminiscent of war. It’s no basketball, where the sweaty contact between tall and lithe players is a staple of the court.

It’s a finesse sport that unfolds slowly in each game and slowly over the 160+ game season, an exhausting succession of away and home games that culminates in differences in win-loss records that seem trivial. The best teams in baseball can win maybe 60% of the time, the worst maybe 40%. You cannot reasonably expect your team to win all the time, or even reliably make it to the playoffs. If your team is in the World Series once every five years, let alone wins it, they are phenomenal.

Baseball, as many writers have pointed out before me, is long-form. Its narrative unfolds over long humid summer months, and encompasses numerous injuries, offensive slumps, and trades. In 2014 the season started on March 30 and, for the Giants, went until October 29. The team that stood on the field in mid-April was hardly recognizable as the team that stood, poised for a final victory, on that fateful Wednesday.

Following a team, especially in the era of television, means seeing up close each player’s quirks and failures. You can see the pitchers sweat in high-definition after they’ve just loaded the bases. You can see the outfielders repeatedly punch the soft leather of their gloves. You learn the ins and outs of each player — Pablo Sandoval and his hefty, high-speed cuts which sometimes result in frequent and devastating strikeouts. Other times he hits multiple home runs in a game. Hunter Pence with his wild-eyed, flailing swing, and enthusiastic rally speeches in the dugout. The stoicism of North Carolina’s own Madison Bumgarner, who once, when the Giants’ travel bus broke down, climbed out, popped the hood, and fixed it.

The greatest stories in baseball are the comebacks, some unfolding over years. Andres Galarraga, who hit the home run my father and I would discuss on-and-off for years, was forced to sit out the 1999 season after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. On opening day for the Atlanta Braves, at his first at-bat after chemotherapy, Galarraga smacked the ball into left field. The crowd roared. He rounded the bases smoothly, worshiping the moment, his stride mimicking his nickname which was displayed on signs around the ballpark: “Welcome Back/Big Cat.”

Baseball may be more epic than short story. It may be more narrative than battle. But it is anything but boring.

[caption id=”attachment_1740" align=”aligncenter” width=”475"]

Photo courtesy of Bleachers via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.[/caption]

Every Giants fan has moments of pure victory, instances of success that are somehow deeply quintessential to the team. For me:

October 9, 2012: Joaquin Arias, a player who rarely starts, is batting with two outs. Top of the 10th. The game is tied 1–1, but if the Cincinnati Reds win the Giants are out of the playoffs. Buster Posey is standing at third, Hunter Pence at second. I am in my living room on one couch, my father on the other. Cincinnati fans in the crowd are holding brooms, hoping for a sweep. The Reds have won the last two games.

Suddenly, Arias hits a bouncing ball to third. It is certainly an out, but for a second the third baseman drops it. It bounces immediately back into his glove, but he has lost half of a second and that is all Arias needs. He is the Giants’ fastest baserunner, and as he crosses first base he claps his hands and pumps his fist. The Giants have scored. They are going to avoid elimination for one more night. In the living room, my father and I are up on our feet and screaming.

October 11, 2012: There are three men on. It is game 5 of the National League Division Series, and the Giants are clawing their way back. Buster Posey is up to bat. He is back after the worst season he could imagine in 2011, when in May he was slammed at home plate, twisted up and back by an incoming runner, fracturing his fibula, and tearing several ligaments. He needed two trainers to help carry him off the field. Now, the pitch. I am in the car with my mother, we are in the parking lot outside my meditation class listening to the radio. The announcers cry out. Buster Posey has hit a high and deep fly ball to left field, a grand slam. The Giants will move on to the next series.

October 19, 2012: The Giants are down three games to one in the National League championship series. If they don’t win their night game against the St. Louis Cardinals, they are out of the playoffs and the World Series hopes of Bay Area Giants fans will be crushed. Barry Zito is on the mound, very tall and attractive. For the last several years, he has served as public enemy number one among hard-core Giants fans. His contract is worth $126 million, and many think he has never played well enough to deserve it. In the last few hours, a twitter hashtag has gone viral: #rallyZito. My father and I are anxious, watching the game through our fingers. The innings stack up slowly and incredibly. Zito shuts out the Cardinals over almost 8 innings. For the first time since joining the Giants six years ago, he is dominant.

***

The Giants are not, strictly speaking, the most beautiful or well-kempt team. By game 7 of the 2014 World Series, the wild-eyed Hunter Pence had grown his hair out so long that it appeared like a large and bushy blonde afro. During press conferences, he sometimes kept it out of his eyes with a sweaty gray bandanna. Pablo Sandoval is notoriously oscillating between hefty and overweight — his bulk, and his ability to miraculously do the splits to field third-based grounders, earned him the epithet “Kung Fu Panda,” which has stuck. Giants fans routinely come to the stadium wearing large panda heads, or warm, fluffy panda hats. The gawky, long-legged Brandon Belt, a first baseman known for his ability to stretch, foot on the bag, glove reaching way out for wayward throws, has been affectionately dubbed “the baby giraffe.” (Giraffe hats are also common.) For several years the young ace Tim Lincecum grew his black hair down almost in his shoulders, and started to appear on the mound like a thin, pale teenager.

Personalities vary widely. There is the quiet decency and country attractiveness of Buster Posey, a stoic team leader forever commanding the infield from behind home plate or at first base. There are the loud, inspirational dugout speeches that earned Hunter Pence the nickname “The Preacher.” During the 2012 season, closer Sergio Romo became famous for both A) making faces behind Erin Andrews as she stood in the Giants dugout, and B) attending press conferences in a T-shirt with the caption “I only look illegal.” If the narrative arc of baseball was not enough to bring Northern Californians into the Giants fold, perhaps these numerous quirks of the team did the trick.

Fans might call the team “diverse.” Opponents might use the less affectionate term “riffraff.” In their second World Series, the Giants faced off against the Detroit Tigers. There was something terrifying about the matchup — all the Tigers players somehow resembled Prince Fielder, their notoriously large slugger. It was something like watching an adorable, scrappy group of fourth-graders play against a middle school team. Everyone thought the Tigers would win handily. Instead, the Giants swept them four games to zero.

The Giants are happiest as underdogs. Before the final game of the 2014 World Series, Bruce Bochy was asked if he was aware that no team had won game 7 away since 1979. He was aware. He seemed almost pleased.

***

As sports fans, we are both willing participants and distant spectators. The narratives are real: they exist on our televisions, in our sports bars, in our gyms. They are discussed over dinner tables and on train platforms and in the office. They are communal. Last summer, I waited in line to take a cable car to the top of Mont Blanc in France. I was wearing my Giants hat to keep off the glare, and a tall American man appeared out of nowhere and slapped me on the back — “Go Giants!” he said. At a tiny café in Cody, Wyoming, later that summer, my father struck up a conversation with an elderly couple, again based on nothing but the familiarity of a logo on a hat.

I don’t remember the 2010 season. I was in the midst of applying to college, and hardly watched it. I didn’t watch the 2014 season either, except for the World Series which I streamed to my dorm room at Princeton, sometimes Skyping in to California so my father and I could groan and cheer together.

My attachment to the Giants comes from those 2012 moments, and there is no mystery in that. I was in the middle of my second gap year, 19 years old and not interning at a fabulous newspaper or creating water filtration systems in Africa or backpacking through Europe. I was at home, and I had a chronic medical condition that kept my movements limited to walking from my bed to the living room couch to the kitchen and back to the couch. Sometimes I went to sports bars with old friends to watch the games, but mostly it was just my parents and me, watching the games from our living room. I was at once intimately connected with something larger than myself and horribly detached from the college life I had expected to be living.

Sports and sickness together like pieces of a puzzle. The Giants, with their odd personalities and communal inside jokes, were my proxies for experience. To live vicariously through them was at least to live.

***

It is Wednesday, October 29, 2014. I am in a friend’s room to watch game 7. He is Australian, and for the past two nights has been asking me questions like, “How many times can he swing before he has to hit it?” Another friend is rooting for the Giants’ opponent, the Kansas City Royals. Despite my protestations, he seems to think that the Royals are David to the Giants’ Goliath.

The Giants’ starter, Tim Hudson, is visibly nervous. He lasts just 1 2/3 innings, gives up two runs, and is finally removed by Bruce Bochy. The Giants are coming off of a horrific loss in game 6–10–0 Royals, a game that caused even my Swiss friend to write me a message: “J’espere que tu te sents pas trop mal pour le match…” My parents are on a flight to France. My father and I exchanged constant messages, Skype calls, and emojis throughout games 3 through 6, but now it is just my sister and I exchanging texts: “U watching?” She’s in Manhattan.

Bochy brings in Jeremy Affeldt, the Giants’ aging but aggressively consistent reliever. In the top of the fourth, they scrape out another run, bringing the score to 3–2. Now Bumgarner comes in. In the past two weeks the North Carolinian has become one of the most respected postseason pitchers in baseball. He allows a base hit, then retires the next batter. And the next. And the next. And 11 more.

It’s the ninth inning. I’m climbing all over the dorm, getting up from the couch and then sitting back down and then standing up and walking to the wall. The cameras move over the Giants’ infield and outfield, zooming in on each player’s face. They look tense and distant. Bumgarner is tall and shaggy on the mound, dark curls spilling out from under his hat as he double-clutches the ball in his glove. He is standing there on the mound like it is the center of the world. Joe Buck is announcing and babbling, saying something about how Bumgarner is making history with his World Series performance, about how he has never seen anything like this before.

Everything slows way down. At this stage in the game there is a lot of adjusting. This is the culmination of a season-long narrative, and the painstaking movements of hands to hats brims, hands to belt buckles, and the shiftings from foot to foot accentuate the tension. During the regular season, the brief downtime between pitches and plays seems excessive and dull. Now it is almost as dramatic as the unfolding action. Bumgarner lets air out of his lips and straightens his back, squinting at home plate for his sign. In the dugout, Giants pitcher Jake Peavy massages a friend’s shoulder and mouths, “Come on boy.” There has been very little action for the past five innings. Everyone is in a state of suspended calm.

Suddenly, with two outs, Royals batter Alex Gordon makes contact. The ball flies into left field, it bounces and is missed by centerfielder Gregor Blanco and rolls to the wall, where leftfielder Juan Perez bobbles it. It skitters along the wall and Perez is running after it at a rate that seems impossibly slow compared to the rate at which Gordon is rounding second and headed for third. I am on my knees in front of the television, screaming and half-covering my eyes. For a horrifying moment it looks like Gordon is going to have an inside-the-park home run, like he’s going to make it all the way home and the game will be tied in the Giants will have to come back for the 10th inning, and how could Bumgarner possibly continue to pitch for another inning on only two days rest?

But Gordon is held up at third. Everyone is uncomfortable now. It is as though the magical aura surrounding Bumgarner for the past five innings and all of his postseason appearances has disappeared. Royals fans are on their feet and screaming, jumping up and down. I am covering my eyes again.

The only person who doesn’t seem rattled is Bumgarner. He throws a ball to the next batter, Salvador Perez. He throws a strike. Throws another strike. He blows snot out of his nose. He throws another ball. Finally, Perez makes contact. He pops the ball up. In foul territory Pablo Sandoval, the Kung Fu Panda, makes the catch and collapses, as though exhausted, onto his back, limbs spread out like a starfish.

I scream. I hug my Australian friend, who is laughing at me. On the TV, the Giants players are pouring out of the dugout and hugging each other. I text my sister, who has texted me “FUCK YES.” I sit on the floor and watch Bruce Bochy crack a rare smile.

[caption id=”attachment_1741" align=”aligncenter” width=”616"]

The Giants win the 2014 World Series. Photo courtesy of opciondeportiva.com.[/caption]

As the writer Philip Lopate has stated before me, baseball has always attracted a large literary following. My high school creative writing teacher once gave me A Great and Glorious Game as a gift, a book of essays by the famous A Bartlett Giamatti. The sport is exquisitely cinematic, slow and safe enough that we can zoom in on the faces of players and guess their thoughts and fears. It is a shared history easily acquired and somehow timeless.

As a child, I was lifted bodily out of the stands to watch a home run. I heard the Giants’ announcers playing on the radio as my father cleaned the pool. As a teenager, I watched the Giants to get through some of the most boring and painful days of my life. I appreciated the stories and the comebacks. The Barry Zitos and Buster Poseys of the world. The Madison Bumgarners.

This year, I didn’t follow the Giants closely. On the phone with my father during the late season, I asked him how they were doing, who was injured, who was slumping. But I wasn’t watching every game. Still, as I sat flopped on my friend’s carpet in the aftermath of 2014, I remembered my favorite, quintessential Giants moment.

October 22, 2012. The Giants are about to win the NLCS, and the game is at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The Giants are up by 9 runs in the 9th inning and it is starting to pour. Baseball isn’t played in the rain — rain delays are common since the infield gets muddy and sludgy fast. But the umpires have decided to play on through the final three outs in the downpour.

I am at home, watching from the couch with my father. My favorite player that season, the short and diligent and hard-working Marco Scutaro, is standing between second and first base. He lifts up his head to feel the rain on his face. He lifts both hands, and his glove, as though to catch some of the rain pouring onto his body and onto the field. He smiles — he knows that he is going to the World Series for the first time in his long career. My father and I are laughing at him, ecstatic and pleased. The moment is mushy and cinematic and delightful, and it doesn’t matter that I can’t stand up or walk because I’m too sick or that my father is in his 50s with creaky knees. We are going to the World Series too.