November 2, 2010 - NY Times Editorial
They Really Are Giants
Let's remember this later when we are locked in to professional football
and the gloom of winter. Let's remember it when rich baseball teams go
on their off-season spending binges, packing the payroll with talent for
their annual open-checkbook march to the playoffs.
Let's remember, for as long as we can, this long-haired, farm-raised,
mostly home-grown and organic World Series, won by the Giants on Monday
night.
It was their first championship in 56 years, and their first as a San
Francisco team. And team they were - not a consortium of superstars, but
a smooth blend of rising stars and nonstars, of rejects and never-beens,
modestly compensated by Yankees and Red Sox standards, but hard-working
and well-anchored by a staff of awesome starting pitchers, all in their
20s.
Thanks to them, this Series felt relaxed and fun, relatively free of the
high-stakes anguish so prevalent in the playoffs. The pleasures started
with great pitching: Madison Bumgarner in Game 4, his performance as
majestic as his name. Tim Lincecum, all spilling locks and whipsaw arm,
throwing smoke in Games 1 and 5. The black-bearded closer Brian Wilson,
pitching a 1-2-3 ninth to seal Monday's game, 3 to 1, and the Series,
four games to one.
Let's remember, too, the excellence of the Texas Rangers, who got as far
as they did through heavy hitting and the ace Cliff Lee, all but
invincible through the season, the playoffs and - well, for six innings
on Monday night, anyway. There was even a good first pitch, by George W.
Bush in Game 4: an easy strike by a former president who knows how to
throw a baseball.
Excellence and ease, from teams that clicked, that was this Series.
"It's a whole different vibe since Barry Bonds left," one Giants fan
told The Times a few days ago. "People have just opened up and realized
we can have fun with this whole thing." The Giants once tried to build a
franchise around Bonds, the sullen slugger, but the glue didn't hold. It
did this time, with players like the creaky Edgar Renteria, age 35,
whose .412 Series average and three-run homer Monday night helped make
him the M.V.P. Yes, he was a star, but just one in a constellation - of
eccentrics, castoffs, teammates, winners.
7 comments:
Here's the link.
It's nice to be noticed by someone East of the Mississippi (who isn't a Phillies fan). And it's nice they noticed our "awesome" pitching. But the line "relatively free of the high-stakes anguish" simply translates to "it wasn't the Yanks or the Sox." In other words, the teams were underdogs and defied pre-season prognostications. But the stakes were just as high, don't kid yourself. It's still the fecking World Series, thank you very much. And what the hell does the NYT Op-Ed Dept know about fan "anguish" anyway?
Like I said, it's nice to be noticed. And I'm glad they enjoyed themselves watching our club. Maybe they'll even watch next year.
It is just a way to say, "We are not in it." If you want more heart-swelling misty-eyed lyricism, try Bruce Jenkins today.
The unnecessary and just flat ass wrong shot at Barry Bonds turned this good article into a bad one.
One subtext is that we made it look easy. We won game one of each series, and there was no major drama. We simply won every game we needed to win. We neutralized every "great" hitter any of the teams could throw at us, and I include the Padres, because the last weekend of the regular season was very much a playoff series also.
There's been a lot of "getting past the Bonds Era" drivel out there. Funny how no one ever blamed Willie Mays or Willie McCovey or Juan Marichal for the Giants failures to win the World Series in SF.
Barry Bonds is usually trotted out when anything bad happens in baseball or anything about the Giants is noticed by non-Giants fans. Giants win the World Series? Pshaw, we wanna talk smack about Bonds.
You'd think that after Jose Guillen's use of PEDs became known that it would get more attention since he was actually on this 2010 team. There have been so many un-amazing players who have been linked to steroids that it just seems a little funny to keep talking like they're what make a ballplayer great. I mean, Barry Bonds was great before his supposed use, and, he was great after. He was always great. With age comes better plate discipline and sometimes more power. I don't understand. Even if he did use them, so what? What's so bad about them? No one ever answers that.
That being said, it was a great year. I'm giving Christmas gifts to everyone in one form or another.
I have to agree. Much has been written here and elsewhere about the vilification of Barry Bonds. It is payback for not being a lapdog to the media during his career, and frankly, a good part racist. Besides, this is really not the post-Bonds team. The post-Bonds team was simply the guys left over who got worse. This is a team built on home grown pitching and fill-ins (with a couple notable exceptions each way). This is the neo-Giants.
Post a Comment