Game Seven was an anti-climax after a gripping Series. I was sure LA had the momentum after the win yesterday but Houston had their own thing going on and got it done on the road. The Giants played a memorable Game Seven in Kansas City a few years ago, and the Cubs won a thriller in Cleveland just last season. This game was not as dramatic as the Astros jumped to an early lead and never looked back. I was certain someone in the Dodgers lineup would hit a 3-run homer to make it a contest, with all the lead changes and big hits throughout these games that seemed inevitable to me. Plus I remember a certain club that had a 5-0 lead in a clinching Series game losing to a Southern California squad. But the Astros kept the lid on with stubborn pitching and steady fielding and they won their first-ever championship. We know how that feels.
I've said before I'm not much for schadenfreude. I'm entirely orthodox in my Giants fandom: my two favorite teams are the Giants and whatever team is playing the Dodgers. But I'm not the rub-it-in type; I know how elusive championships are and how lucky any one team is to have a shot. And LA had their shot. This is the best team they've ever fielded and it came up a game short. I have a lot of friends who root for the blue, and I do feel for them. I certainly know what it's like to have your team let you down. This is the nature of fandom--we are subject to the capriciousness of the baseball gods.
Congratulations to the Astros! They are deserving champions and they beat three of baseball's most storied franchises, the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Dodgers. Impressive.
--M.C.
26 comments:
Well, not only swatting down the Smurfs, and beating the Red Sox Nation and the Yankees along the way—at least for me, this was also a victory for the city recovering from a hurricane flood and very incidentally having been subject to the scoffing hint by one or another of the right-wing peroxide crew (Coulter? Lahren? Ingraham?) that the weather disaster might be a punishment from God for Houston’s having had a lesbian mayor.
I see this Astros victory as a small sign that we may have a chance to avert the apocalyptic nightmare that appeared to be the logical conclusion of the Trump 'administration'. A Dodger WS Title would have clearly portended that.
As I said the other day, unfortunately this looks like a pretty durable & talented LA batting order. That's scary. They are also super-white (Puig is the only non-white starting position player), which is weird & a throw-back to their earlier Garvey, Cey, etc. days. The Astros are much more multi-cultural & likable for that reason, too.
On Saturday, I will be changing planes in Houston, on the way to Guanajuato State, Mexico, for Susana's 2nd Yoga Retreat there. I will be sure to congratulate a few Astros fans & may even be inspired enough to buy a Astros WS Championship pencil or something. The following Saturday, we change planes in LA, where I will keep my head down & do nothing offensive to Dodger fans ... maybe! Funny how our travel plans worked out.
Astros assistant hitting coach Alonzo Powell is the new Giants hitting coach. He's from SF, went to Lincoln HS, was a Giants prospect (sent to Montreal in the Bill Laskey trade), played mostly in Japan (Chunichi Dragons).
I remember him as a Prospect for us!
I expect more BB's & fewer K's! That will be a welcome change in hitting approach!
If it were only possible for both teams to lose this world series. Any team that plays in the state where enron was, the company that tried to take down California, I cannot root for. I also cannot root for the bums. So perhaps the lesser of two evils won, and that has not been the way things have been working out lately.
And just to add my own churlish note, the most exciting World Series game might have been Don Larsen's perfect game. A 13 - 12 game is just two WS teams with shitty pitching.
Nonsense. That was an amazing game.
And Game 1 was a great game, too, a throwback pitchers duel that raced by at just over two hours.
I have to chime in a bit on this one (who knows why). I can understand a 13-12 game is terribly exciting but I can’t see it as truly great baseball. Great hitting, sure. But quite a bit of world class shitty pitching too. Didn’t Kershaw blow a 4 run lead, which he did how many times during the season??? Didn’t their awesome closer blow the save, which he did how many times during the season??? So if we ignore the fact that two of the games biggest stars coughed blood, I suppose it was “great baseball.” Anyway, I heard so much crap at work about how great a game it was, that I needed to vent. Sorry.
One of the heroes of the Series was Charley Morton. He was a nobody for a long time. Now he's a star. That sort of thing is fantastic. The best starter of the post-season was Justin Verlander. He gets a loss and a no-decision in two starts and his team wins the Series. That's fantastic. The greatest pitcher of his generation blows two three-run leads. That's fantastic! What do you guys want? All the games to follow some fucking formula? Two evenly-matched teams played seven see-saw affairs--heavyweights slugging it out and hoping to survive 15 rounds--and the road team won to earn their first-ever championship. And to boot our arch-rivals got beat. That's not "good baseball"? That's great fucking baseball fer chrissakes.
But that's just my two cents.
Like I said, exciting but come on. After one year do we all really think that good pitching doesn’t still beat good hitting? A few more dingers than usual and suddenly the nature of the game has changed. Please. We all know what a truly great World Series performance looks like and it will never be forgotten. No one this year did anything that compares to what we all saw MadBum do. No one may ever. So I guess I’m spoiled. But I’m just can’t get that thrilled by this year’s fall classic. Like Ron, I figured the scum would win just to make this year the absolute worst ever. So thank Willie that didn’t happen.
My two cents: Barbara and I ended up watching the whole damn series and we actually had a good time. Of course we hoped for LA failure, but Barb is a covert Kershaw fan (such quality can't be denied) and if you recall, his first outing was excellent and he earned a small measure of redemption. Fortunately he sucked in game 7, so fuck him, he's a fucking Dodger. I got a chance to yell Beat LA a lot of times, and that always feels good. Altuve is a god and Correa is not far behind. I dig watching new stars for the first time. In the end, I didn't care much. I'm not particularly happy for the people of Houston. Fuck Texas. I guess the best thing is, it's still been 29 years since LA won the WS. Let's have 29 more.
So here is another thing. I was on the East Coast for most of this series. That doesn't mean people weren't interested, it means the first pitch was at about 8:20 each night. Throw in extra time between innings for commercials, numerous pitching changes etc. and neither I nor anyone I stayed with saw the end of a game (I was home for game 6 & 7). That sucks, and it would have been just as bad were it two East coast teams.
Of course I'd rather watch THE GIANTS in the Series, but I can still enjoy baseball even when they aren't. Like Bob, I enjoy seeing new talent. Who can't like George Springer? And why does one individual's performance make a great Series? Or not? Whether one guy dominates play for a week, or you have multiple stars, or a variety of ups and downs, it's still baseball and it's still great. I don't have a rulebook that says "in order for a Series to be great blah-blah-blah must happen . . .". What's bad about watching two really good teams trying desperately to win for seven games? And who says this Series changes the nature of baseball? This is what happened in THIS series, it doesn't imply anything about NEXT year's Series. And a final note on MadBum--do you really believe no one will ever do something like that again? Of course they will! They did it before! And it won't take away anything from HIS performance for that to happen, in fact it will highlight how great it was and how hard it is to do stuff like that.
Good morning. Johnny Cueto has decided to opt IN.
The news about Cueto is a little surprising to me. I had a gut feeling that he wanted out but I guess the $ always wins out. I’m not sure if this is all that good for the Giants. He showed little or nothing after the mystery blisters that wasted his season finally went away.
Unlike JohnnyC, I have decided to opt out. By that I mean that I choose to give up my regular blog rotation spot to some other dedicated fool ( my choice would be Ron ). I’ve tried video and all kinds of writing styles but it is always HARD for me and often not rewarding. My patient and loving wife can attest to my complete lack of grace and comfort as I have tried my best for years to crank out this stuff. I don’t know how Mark does it. I’m pooped. And,well, obviously last season’s hell is part of this too. But I’m still processing that.
I’m not disappearing, just taking a break and letting another voice in.
Cueto is not worthy of your efforts.
Thanks Bro but I must disagree. Cueto is super talented, unique and rather emotional. He is often a truly fun spectacle. He doesn’t hit dingers though. Anybody want the duty?? Bilingual preferably
Cueto had a bad year. It happens. I'm happy he's back. I'm looking forward to watching him next season.
JC I am certainly not going to tell you what to do or what not to do, you're a big boy and I know this has been weighing on you for some time. But I do think you are being too hard on yourself. When you write you have only one standard to live up to and that is your own. We do write for a discerning audience here at RMC, but not a critical one. That is, RMCers love to argue WHAT you write about but we don't argue with the writing or the writer. How you say what you say is uniquely yours and that's one of the best things about the blog, we all have our own voices.
I find, after a decade of this, that the writing comes easily. But I write every day (I don't "publish" every day), so my writing muscles are well-developed. And I stopped trying too hard. I used to think I had to be the fount of all knowledge about the Giants, now I realize that I have my OWN perspective on things and that's what matters. I've surrendered to the process and stopped worrying about what comes out. Whatever comes out is what I had to say, sometimes I don't know what that is until the screen is full, then I know what I "meant all along." I know that seems backwards or even illogical, but it is true. The heart will guide the hands without the hands being conscious of it.
So when you say opt-out I don't take that as retirement. More like moving from the rotation to the bullpen (with spot starts still possible). The nice thing about the bullpen is you can play multiple roles. So you are still expected to contribute, I'm not taking your name off the masthead, but you can certainly re-write (hah!) your role. In fact, you may find the spontaneity of chipping in when you "feel it" will make the creative process more fun and the writing more like playing and not like working. Think about how easy it is to comment rather than post. Your posts can just be comments that need more room!
You are better at word-smithing than you are currently allowing yourself to believe, and if I may say so, you are hidebound by your perception that others are evaluating your work and thus judging you. It's what holds ALL latent writers/artists/creators back: this idea of the lurking critic tsk-tsking over everything. (We schoolteachers are particularly sensitive to this.) You know how they say "dance like no one is watching"? That's the key to relaxing and writing freely, not to sweat about what anyone thinks. It's hard to do, I admit. And I do feel a responsibility to my audience, but an audience, as much as I'm grateful for one, is not the important part, or even a necessary part. The important part is the growth and self-awareness that comes from sharing what you feel. It's weird, I know, that a public expression is the result of an inner search, and that a concrete product is comes about from what is, in the end, a spiritual or metaphysical endeavor.
So, take a break, enjoy the off-season, and come back to the parts of baseball and the Giants that you love, and then share that love.
Congrats to the Astros, as much as I understand anti-Texas sentiment, I can feel their pain regarding waiting 50-whatever years that they had to wait. And especially getting forced to the AL, when they wanted to stay in the NL, but had to suffer that indignity because Commissar Bud wanted to keep his precious Brewers in the NL still, when they were the more obvious choice to go BACK to the AL, where they were before. The Dodger's I'll start feeling sorry for them once they reach 60 years.
I enjoyed the series. It was great baseball drama. Yeah, lousy pitching but then you had the games going back and forth, which made it very dramatic. I can enjoy well pitched games as well as games where the balls are flying around. You have players who stand up and be counted upon, like Charlie Morton and George Springer. And you have stars who come back down to Earth when the weight of the games pushes them to the ground, as if they were on Jupiter.
I guess I'm odd. I love seeing the guys out of nowhere be the hero (probably because I was never the athletic god-like players who got picked first in pick-up games, I was usually one of the last two selected, and they would have to think hard about picking me...). Gene Tenace will live in my mind forever. For us, you know the names: Cody Ross. Renteria. Scutaro, Zito and the guy he named, Panda. Travis Ishikawa, Yusmeiro Petit, Duffman running and scoring from second.
And maybe I'm being picky, but it was not just Bumgarner, but he was the one in 2014, but then it was Cain and Zito in 2012, and Lincecum and Cain in 2010, plus the Core Four in all three, we got great pitching throughout the 3 in 5. Bumgarner stands tall, yes, but I think all of these guys also deserved credit for standing up when the team needed them to in the other two championships.
And, yeah, it was bad pitching this year for the most part. This is why people believe Beane crap about the playoffs being a crapshoot. If you have dominant pitching who can do it reliably most of the time, you've maximized your chances of winning it all, instead of crying about how your stuff don't work in the playoffs. His stuff don't work because he never had any great pitching, his core 3 were great in the regular season, but not really that dominant, i.e. pitchers who could strike out batters reliably.
Most teams are lucky to have that one guy, like a Kershaw or Verlander or Keuchel, but we had Lincecum, Cain, and Bumgarner, plus guys who delivered, like Zito and Vogelsong, plus our Core Four (plus BWeez, got to give him his due as well, he's kind of left out of conversations because of his weirdo stuff, but we don't win without him in 2010), that's how you make the games less a crapshoot and more a plan to win in the playoffs. The A's never had such a guy in the playoffs, let alone a rotation of them, as good as Zito, Hudson, Mulder were, they were not the strikeout guys that Lincecum, Cain, Bumgarner were/are.
JC, I was sorry to see your announcement. One trait of baseball bloggers on the beats’ sites and MCC, beyond their infantile sniping and squabbling, is their ultracrepidarian arrogance—“ultracrepidarian” = making declarations way outside one’s expertise. (Once I came across this word, I’ve kept it in mind for only this one use, for bloggers sure of themselves, when veiled by pseudonyms, and raring to strut their opinions snidely or with bluster as facts.) To me, a great virtue of Raising Matt Cain has been that no one of you in the regular rotation takes on these egoistic airs, though you all still care about genuine facts and the Giants. There’s no posturing. I have enjoyed this in all of you, and have now and again made comments that you all have generously afforded me the space to make, keeping the same criteria of focus, commitment, but also of temperament in mind. You, JC, have been a welcome contributor to this ethos that I value, and I hope you ease your self-judgments enough to keep on contributing.
Not just crepidarian but ULTRA-crepidarian!! Love it.
Roy Halladay killed in a plane crash--40 years old.
One has to wonder where the little fellow's power hitting comes from? That is Altuve? Can he really hit like that and be smaller than my fifth grader? And then it hit me, Altuve is an engine, not just any engine, but one day Barry Bonds coughed up the engine that kept him going, and if one looked closely what he coughed up was 'ALTUVE" So we now know that Altuve, was the inside engine, that sparked Barry Bonds for all those years. We just couln't find him, but now we know where he is. From now on, I will call him Barry Bonds Altuve.
It is difficult to think about the 2012 World Series without thinking about, Pablo Sandoval and Sergio Romo.
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