Random musings on the San Francisco Giants and the 2012 World Series #1

When I left San Francisco and moved out East in 1980, it was like being forced to break up with my first girlfriend. After devoting myself to the Giants for two years in 1978-1979, I was relegated to seeing them twice a year—if I was lucky—when they came to New York to play the Mets. (If I tuned in the radio really well, I could sometimes catch their games on WPHT when they played the Philadelphia Phillies.) And being a West Coast team, most of their games took place long after I had gone to sleep; their box scores never even made it into the sports pages of the New York Times.(I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that this was long before the Internet, or even the late-night scores published each morning in USA Today.) In New York the San Francisco Giants were completely irrelevant.

Also, the Giants were a bad team—in the first five years I lived in New York, they had a losing record three times, and barely squeaked over .500 the other two. (They had similar half-decade-long dry spells from 1991–1996 and 2005–2008.) When they did play well for a whole season, they specialized in losing in heartbreaking fashion in the playoffs: their 1987 breakdown against the Cardinals in the NLCS; their 1989 4-0 dismissal by the A’s in the Earthquake Series; their 2002 meltdown against the Angels. (Still hard to talk about that one.)

Until their 2010 championship, the Giants were very much under the radar. Of course there was all the hype about Barry Bonds, but for the most part that was about celebrating individual achievements (achievements that now seem very tainted). Essentially, the Giants were like my own little secret. That’s why, even now, it’s especially weird to see the team being covered by the national media, the Times, etc.