Saturday, May 4, 2013

Fence-bustin' Buster

I used to have this card when I was a kid and later I carried it around with me in my wallet as a sort of good luck charm. Not that the Giants had much luck in those days, they always seemed to run out of it at the penultimate moment. I should have kept the thing in plastic or something because it eventually disintegrated. I'm from the era where we clothes-pinned our cards to our bicycle spokes or drew mustaches on guys from other teams. We didn't have the capitalist sense of later generations. Now this thing will cost me forty bucks on eBay.

 
These days, the Giants are lucky as hell. Lucky to draft Buster Posey after four teams passed on him, for instance. I'll bet those teams hate games like last night when Buster uses his super-powers to vanquish his adversaries. It's not like Buster blasted bombs off AAA call-ups--his double in the 6th was off Clayton Kershaw, fer chrissakes, who is just about the best around, and his homer to win it was off Ronald Belisario, probably the scariest guy in the bigs. I mean, he's huge, he wears those grotesque goggles, and he throws it a thousand miles an hour and no one is quite sure where it will go. But Buster is not troubled by such trivialities. His mother was an immortal goddess, you know.

I'll admit to a bit of gut-wrenching panic when our hero was thrown out at home. I don't like to see Buster + home plate + sliding & colliding and this time he was doing the sliding, but it was just another routine gun 'em out from CF kind of thing. Matt Kemp still has an arm, even if his bat looks like an overcooked macaroni noodle. He finally got a hit in the 9th, I think it was his first against the Giants in 2013. Speaking of hitless streaks, how about Hunter Pence finally getting a knock off the big lefty? He was 1-1, then 0-for-26 before the single that was almost an RBI. It's Ryan Vogelsong's turn tonight, but I'm way more interested in which Dodgers player will hobble off the field. I'm thinking of setting up an office pool. Those guys are dropping like flies! Let's hope the good guys stay healthy--and lucky.

GO GIANTS!

--M.C.

3 comments:

Brother Bob said...

When I read about this game in the morning paper I was glad I didn't actually have to watch it. It would have been awful to watch Kershaw shut us down for 6 innings. That kind of game eats me up. Of course I would have loved the ending.

nomisnala said...

I had great hope last night, it seemed like the usual old giant-dodger game in reverse, and so it was. I too destroyed many of my baseball cards from the 50's but my uncle worked for Topps and I had more cards than most corporations. Unfortunately when I moved out and went to grad. school across the country, my folks retired and moved, and saved all the wrong stuff. My tossed out a ton, a mean 2000 pounds of baseball cards because they were just too much to move or store. She did not even tell me. My mother in law then sent me a tee shirt that said, I would have been a millionaire but my mother threw out all my baseball cards. In my case it was true, and she should not gloat as her daughter would also be rich if not for my mom. Neverthelsss, last nights game had to be brutal for dodger fans.

Zo said...

@nomis -
I'm feeling your pain, man. I could have been a hundredaire myself but for the same thing. Well, not the same, but I feel for you. - Zo