Invocation: St Willie Mays, pray for us.
I can’t claim to have been the greatest Giants fan over the last decade. I saw Pac Bell Park on the same trip where I met my now-wife in person for the first time, and a couple of years later we took the park tour (a very worthwhile trip when in SF, even if you’re not a big baseball fan) and a little old lady in the gift shop said the batting practice hat made me look like Rich Aurillia, and I decided that the Giants would be my baseball allegiance after some post-Braves years of casting about among Royals, Mariners, or Red Sox. It was National League time again.
Sure enough, a pennant and a World Series appearance followed immediately, only to be short-hopped by a failing bullpen in Game 6. But not before I went to the ballpark and hung out at the back of McCovey Cove and ate at MoMo’s with the huge TVs wheeled into the dining room and soaked up the whole experience. And then, for about five years, the Giants consisted mainly of Barry Bonds’ personal batting practice.
I’ve written about that at length elsewhere, about how Bonds was God’s personal vengeance on baseball, how Bud Selig and an army of sportswriters attempted to make him the scapegoat for the steroid era and how he refused to play along. Well, the Giants refused to play along as well. They kept Bonds around until the record was broken, and even after not signing him in 2008, the fans and the franchise never turned on him. When they reached the playoffs, there he was, cheering from the stands, getting roar after roar from the crowd. And the fans who had not broken faith were rewarded for their fidelity.
This team was a mixed bag. The best young pitching in 20 years, with a catcher who wasn’t called up for good until May, coupled with a ragbag of position players who were charitably described as journeymen at best – hell, some of them weren’t even in the organization on Opening Day. At least one was plucked off his couch in the summer. Nowhere did it look like a team that would be able to knock off the Philadelphia Phillies, the best team in baseball down the stretch and the two-time defending NL champs.
And yet.
The best part isn’t the endless Journey montage, or the plethora of merchandise (“Fear the Beard!” “Let Timmy Smoke”) or even that a team from a city that George W. Bush wouldn’t set foot in for eight years went down into Texas and took a huge shit on the thing he loves most. No, the best part is that everyone – EVERYONE – was in black and orange, EVERYONE was packing the trains and milling around the stadium with no need of a ticket, and EVERYONE outside of San Francisco was reminded that this is the best baseball town west of St Louis and that San Francisco is the most American of cities and WE FREAKIN’ WON THE WORLD SERIES FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN SAN FRANCISCO.
If there’s any team that can claim its hometown band’s “Don’t Stop Believing”…