Hmm…what a shame.

But here is the source.

The NL West tour is over!

best of luck Shawn

He was my first favorite player. He’s also the reason 55 is my favorite number. At least Tim carries the torch now, both with the number and my favorite player!

There was nothing so beautiful as a Shawn Estes curveball.

A good Giant? Did everyone conveniently forget that move in the 2000 playoffs when he injured his ankle and hopped off of second base and was tagged out? Not to mention the fact that he was pitching so badly in that game that I was glad he was injured. If we had gamers like Aaron Rowand on the team at that time Shawnie would have been laid out in the locker room.

I remember when he was hammered and stole a policeman’s bicycle in Los Gatos. Ah…good times!

In April 2005, in an early season baseball game a relief pitcher on the Giants ripped two tendons in his hamstring, yet got over there and covered first base to get the final out and earn a save. He then went on the DL for three months. That player was only the most hated player in recent Giants’ history, a pitcher by the name of Armando Benitez. Yet here we have a guy who in a FREAKING PLAYOFF GAME, turns his ankle going into second and limps off the bag, allowing himself to be tagged out. Yet someone just called him a “good Giant.” No wonder the Mets traded for him a couple of years later. They wanted to thank him for enabling them to go on to the World Series in a year that it should have been the Giants.

A lot of this has been said already, but Shawn Estes has always been a bittersweet for me. He had such potential, and he got off to SUCH a good start for the team in 1996-1997. Even then if you looked closely you could see the seeds of future problems – 100 walks in 1997. But at the time you didn’t want to see that, you wanted to see the 3.18 ERA, the couple of complete game two-hitters, the 181 strike outs. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, the Giants were mostly teams who lived on hitting, Estes’s start as a Giant was pretty thrilling. Now that we have Lincecum and Cain and all that minor league pitching, this is hard to remember, but in 1997, the Giants’ three most recent opening day starters were Mark Gardner, Mark Leiter, and Terry Mulholland.

And, in 1997, it had been nearly a decade since the Giants had made the playoffs at all. Shawn Estes was a big part of that team, and even if he never did a single thing right the rest of his career, I would remember him fondly for that. He had solid years for contending teams in 2000 and 2001, too.

I was certain he would be the first Giants pitcher in my lifetime to pitch a no-hitter.

And yeah, his curveball was beautiful. Throughout his tenure as a Giant, even the bad years, I always went to his starts if I could because I loved that curveball.

One of those games I went to was the one in 2001 where the Giants lost 1-0 in 18 innings to the Arizona Diamondbacks. That was a miserable loss in many ways – especially since the Giants finished just a couple games behind Arizona that year, and Arizona went on to win the World Series – but it’s also a fond memory of mine, and Shawn pitched great that day.

He never became a star after 1997, of course. He had a couple more okay years with the Giants, a couple poor years, and after he left the team he quickly became a joke. Like the guy the Giants traded for him (Salomon Torres), he was a bit of a headcase. I’m sad his career didn’t work out the way I wanted it to – but still, for me at least, the good outweighs the bad, and thus I say thanks for the good times, Shawn, and I roll my eyes at rxmeister’s cranky hyperbole.

The evil empire just won’t give him his release