Quarter Century: A Recent History of the San Francisco Giants in the Postseason: A Fanpost Novel, Part One

As we approach the Giants' first trip to the World Series in eight years, and their third in my lifetime, I thought it would be a good chance to look back on postseasons past. Personally, I'm qualified to go back about a quarter century, to 1987. I was seven years old then, and it had been sixteen years since the team's last trip to October, way back in 1971, so I supposed I could just as easily call this "Third of a Century," but it doesn't quite have the same ring.

Anyway...

I was born in Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital on March 23, 1980, and was a Giants fan almost immediately thereafter. My father, a native of Laurel, Montana, and my father's father, a native of Sumatra, Montana, a town which no longer exists, took me to my first game at Candlestick Park just a few months after my birth. Since I was born in the East Bay, have always considered the East Bay Home, and since I have both lived and worked in Oakland and will defend that city's charms far past the point at which it becomes obnoxious, I'm often asked why I'm not an A's fan. I have two answers, depending on the circumstance. If I'm feeling flip, I'll say that it's just common sense. Clearly, the Giants, for all their foibles, are the only team to root for, and the choice of all good-hearted people, whether they're from The City or the East Bay or the east coast, or Sumatra, Indonesia, for that matter. If I'm feeling kinder, though, I'll tell them that my father's family moved down from Montana to Vallejo in the 1960s, in the heyday of Willie Mays, and when the Oakland A's were still the Kansas City Athletics, and so he became a Giants fan, and so he passed it down to me.

The 1980 team was a thoroughly mediocre one. The year was notable for being Willie McCovey's swansong and one of Jack Clark's best years. But the team itself was forgettable, and soon to get worse. The first teams I really remember at all were from 1984 and 1985, when I was four and five years old. Their rosters featured names like Brad Wellman and Manny Trillo, Frank Williams and Jim Gott. The 1984 team was bad, and lost 96 games. The 1985 team was worse, and became the only team in organization history to hit the 100 loss plateau. The postseason wasn't even a thought in any Giants' fans mind, back then. It had been so long that most fans couldn't remember a single game in the NLCS - the NLDS, of course, still being a decade away.

That changed in 1986 with Will Clark and Robby Thompson - and, though he's mostly forgotten now, and mostly reviled when he's remembered, the team's young third baseman, Chris Brown, who was hyped as a rising star with his .317 batting average. And also Roger Craig, the manager. Craig had pitched for the Dodgers and the expansion Mets, along with a few other teams, and was somewhat famous for once saying that you had to be a good pitcher to get 20 losses - a feat he himself accomplished in back-to-back years in the 60s for the Mets, one of the worst teams in baseball history (in 1962, Craig lost 24; the Mets lost 120). His reasoning was that, if you were losing that many games and you WEREN'T a good pitcher, the team wouldn't keep sending you out. Craig gained a reputation for being a great manager of young players like Clark and Thompson, and was also something of a visionary on the pitching side of the equation. He was famous for calling pitches from the dugout, and also taught all of his pitchers the then-relatively unfamiliar split-finger fastball. At the time, he took a lot of heat for this: many critics believed the split-finger would destroy his pitchers' arms and ruin their careers. It's a complaint I haven't heard in decades now, which leads me to suspect it was probably bullshit, though I don't know for sure. With all these new pieces, the 1986 Giants went from 100 losses to a very respectable third place finish, winning 83 games. It was a modest finish to be sure, but it was already clear that the organization had turned a corner, and 1987 could be the year it all came together. They even had another great young player in the organization: a shortstop named Matt Williams, a rare combination of power, fine defense, and the most incredible case of premature baldness you'll ever see.

1987, the year of Humm Baby (Roger Craig's nonsensical but strangely alluring catchphrase), didn't disappoint. Well, Matt Williams did: he came up, played in 84 games, and crapped his pants worse than anything you can imagine. He posted a line of .188 / .240 / .339 - and he also struck out 68 times and walked just 16 times in 266 plate appearances. He ended up back with the Phoenix Firebirds, the Giants' AAA affiliate at the time. Actually, this pattern repeated for a few years before Williams stuck in the majors: he was truly awful for a long time. One wonders if he would've survived at all nowadays. But while Matt Williams flailed, the Giants flourished. Just two years removed from losing 100, they won 90 and easily won the weak NL West, finishing six games ahead of the Cincinnati Reds, the only other team in the division to finish above .500. They also pulled off a very bold move midseason, trading the now struggling Chris Brown along with young pitchers Mark Davis, Mark Grant, and Keith Comstock for starting pitcher Dave Dravecky, reliever Craig Lefferts, and third baseman Kevin Mitchell. Mitchell had been a role player for the World Series winning Mets in 1986, and my family had lived in New Jersey that year, so my father and I were familiar with him and excited by his raw power potential - and, actually, I still remember his first game as a Giant. He was so new to the organization that his jersey didn't even have a name on the back yet. But really, the trade was all about Dave Dravecky, who was in his sixth year as a consistently above-average starting pitcher. He had been an All-Star in 1983, although that was actually probably his worst season.

So now, six paragraphs into this monstrosity, we finally come to the first playoffs in my Giants' lifetime. The Giants went up as underdogs against the more experienced Cardinals. Back then, Busch Stadium was known as one of the most extreme pitchers' parks in baseball, and aside from ex-Giant Jack Clark, the Cardinals had built their team around getting on base and extreme speed. They featured players like future Giant Willie McGee, Ozzie Smith, Terry Pendleton, and perhaps their best-known player, Vince Coleman, who wasn't much of a hitter, but who stole 109 bases that year, 107 the year before, and 110 the year before that. The Giants fell in Game One, with veteran ace Rick "Big Daddy" Reuschel taking the loss, but in game two, Dave Dravecky came through huge, tossing a complete game, two-hit shutout. Will Clark and Jeffrey "Hac Man" Leonard both hit huge home runs in the win. The Giants and Cardinals split close contests in games 3 and 4, and in game 5, the Giants won a huge game, giving themselves a 3-2 series lead before heading back to St. Louis. Kevin Mitchell was the offensive star there, hitting a home run and tying the game early, after Reuschel faltered again, with an RBI single. Joe Price, who'd had a very nice season for the Giants after struggling for years with the Reds, picked up Reuschel by pitching five shutout innings in relief, only allowing one hit. Unfortunately, Price later proved to be something of a one-year wonder for the Giants, and they released him in early 1989.

Game 6 at Busch Stadium was the single biggest Giants game in decades. They were on enemy turf (literally - Busch Stadium didn't convert back to grass until years later), and the Cardinals had a reputation of being very tough to beat in their home park, which played to their strengths in terms of pitching, defense, and speedy slap-hitters. Both teams had arguably their best pitchers going (Dave Dravecky and John Tudor). It seemed inevitable that the game would be a pitchers' duel, and indeed it was. In fact, while the two teams combined for 11 hits, there was only one piece of offense that mattered, and it came in the bottom of the second inning.

You know all the moments we wish we could forget? Benny Agbayani's tenth inning home run, Jose Cruz's dropped fly ball, the collapse in game 6, the disaster of game 7? Well, for me, the first of those moments, and the one that remains perhaps the most painful (only game 6 can compete, really) is the second inning of game 6 of the 1987 NLCS.

The thing is, Candy Maldonado was a good player. I'll say it again: CANDY MALDONADO WAS A GOOD PLAYER. I have to repeat it because I have to convince myself of it. I'll never believe it, not really. Because, to me, Candy Maldonado will always be defined by that second inning. I can't think of him without thinking of that.

Maldonado, you see, had this annoying tendency to go into feet-first slides on catches. Every now and then it worked, and when it did it looked great, but this time, well, it didn't. Tony Pena hit a ball to right, and it wasn't even all that well-hit. It was shallow. Maldonado got a bad break and then charged in, and then he went into that feet-first slide, and BOOM! It bounced right next to him, and it took one of those huge artificial tuf bounces, and it went all the way to the wall. Maldonado went stumbling after it, and eventually the ball was recovered, but the play was so badly botched even Pena, a veteran catcher at age 30, was able to leg out a triple. And then Jose Oquendo, goddamn Jose Oquendo, who still makes lifelong Giants fans of my generation glower for his role in a bench-clearing brawl the next year, Jose Oquendo hit a sacrifice fly, and Pena came in to score. And it was the second inning, but that was it: 1-0. Dave Dravecky was, perhaps, the original Matt Cain, at least for my generation: 6 innings, 5 hits, 0 walks, 8 K, and the loss.

Game 7, after all that, was one of those games that you sort of know will be an anticlimax, because all the wind's already been take out of your sails - like our game 7 in 2002, or like the Red Sox's game 7 in 1986, after the ball went between Buckner's legs. And it was. The Cardinals scored 4 runs off of fading golden boy Atlee Hammaker in the second inning; the Giants scored no runs all day. Nothing more to say about that.

They came back, though. 1988 was a middling year: the team slogan in '88 was, "Humm Baby, Let's Do It Again!" and after an 83 win, tied-for-third-with-the-sorry-ass-Padres season, I asked my dad what he thought would be the slogan for '89. "Humm Baby, Let's Get Better Again," he suggested. And 1989 was an incredible year: Will Clark did his best imitation of God, posting a 175 OPS+ - the best of his career. Kevin Mitchell was the first Giants MVP in recent memory, leading the majors with 47 home runs, 125 RBIs (I know, LOL RIBEYES - but the stat mattered to almost every fan back then), a .635 SLG, a 1.023 OPS, a 192 OPS+, and 345 total bases. While Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, perhaps more hyped across the Bay (as hard as it is to believe now, in those days it was the A's who got the lion's share of media attention), were called the "Bash Brothers," Clark and Mitchell earned their own moniker: the "Pacific Sock Exchange." Not exactly my favorite nickname, but oh well. Matt Williams, after yet another wretched start, finally started to show some inklings of his promise, posting a .500 SLG and 16 home runs in the second half - although his OBP was still horrible.

In 1989, a whole 'nother kind of drama unfolded, too. Dave Dravecky, who should by all rights have been the hero of the 1987 NLCS, was diagnosed with cancer in 1988, and was limited to just 7 starts. Worst of all, the problem was in his left arm, his throwing arm, and his career appeared to be over. In August 1989, however, he defied the odds and made it all the way back. His comeback game came at Candlestick, against the Reds, then managed by Pete Rose, who was just weeks away from being banned from the game for life. I was at that comeback game with my father and his coworker, and along with the NLDS game I attended in Atlanta this year, it remains one of my most incredible memories as a baseball fan. I still remember driving across the Bay Bridge, listening to KNBR, where callers were pledging to donate x amount of money to a child suffering from leukemia who Dravecky had befriended if certain events happened in the game. $20 if Dravecky gets the win, $15 if Will Clark hits a home run, and so on. The one I'll always remember, though, was $100 if Pete Rose gets kicked out of the game. At age nine, that seemed like an impossibly huge sum of money to me. And, as it happens, Rose DID get tossed out. But that's beside the point. Dravecky went out on the field, and stepped up on the mound, and he pitched his heart out. From the moment he began warming up in the bullpen before the game, the atmosphere was charged. Reporters had come from all over the country, flash bulbs popping left and right, and fans were on their feet, cheering and crying all at once, for everything Dravecky did. It's hard to explain how much the man had come to mean to The City and its baseball fans. He was such a good pitcher, but he was such a good man, too. He was a conservative, a born-again Christian; I once heard his personal politics described as being to the right of Ronald Reagan. In other words, he couldn't have been more out of step politically with the community, but nobody cared. He was just such a good man. Such a huge heart, such a giving spirit, such an inspiration through all the suffering that everybody knew he was going through every day. Never a bad word to say of anyone. And the fans loved him, and when he came back, it seemed like such an impossibly happy ending. Especially when that first game back went so well: he pitched eight strong innings, allowing 3 runs on 4 hits and 1 walk, before giving way to the Giants' closer at the time, Steve "Bedrock" Bedrosian. He got the win, and the whole ballpark was on his feet for him. And then, five days later, it ended just like that. He was pitching in Montreal, had thrown five innings when his arm snapped. He fell over on the mound, clutching his arm and screaming: I remember him saying later that he grabbed his arm because if felt like someone had chopped it off with an axe. His arm, so weak from his ordeal with cancer, had broken right in two mid-rotation. He never pitched again. Dravecky was with the Giants down the stretch run, though. In fact, maybe he shouldn't have: when the Giants clinched the Western Division late in the year, he got crushed in a celebratory dogpile and his left arm was broken again. In October, the news broke that his cancer had returned. He lost his arm. He lost his arm: it had to be amputated to prevent the cancer from spreading. The child Dravecky had sponsored died the next year. There was no happy ending in the end. Twenty-one years later, I still can't think of it without tearing up.

But the Giants went on. They played the Cubs in the NLCS. They crushed the Cubs. Hardly a spoiler, of course. In Game 1, Will Clark set the tone, crushing a grand slam off of a young Greg Maddux. That began one of the great postseason offensive performances of all-time. In the five games of the NLCS, Clark posted a line of .650 / .682 / .1.200, with 2 home runs, 3 doubles, and a triple. Suck it, Derek Jeter. In the end, the Cubs only managed one win, a 9-5 romp in Game 2, a game that was never in doubt after Rick Reuschel again collapsed in the postseason, allowing 6 runs in the first inning. The game ended 9-5. But in games 3, 4, and 5, the Giants won close games, and the Cubs had to wait another year (or century, as the case may be).

And then the World Series. What can I say about the 1989 World Series? About the actual games, almost nothing. They were wretched. They played the A's - the Bay Bridge Series, it was dubbed - a dominant team a year removed from a shocking 4-1 World Series defeat to the Dodgers (yes, it was the year of Kirk Goddamn Gibson, and fuck him) and a year away from a shocking 4-0 sweep at the hands of the underdog Reds, but in 1989 they could do no wrong. They not only swept the Giants, they never fell behind in any of the four games. In the composite box score, the A's outscored the Giants 32 to 14 and outhit them 44 to 28. It was lopsided and, if you were a Giants fan, it was embarrassing as hell.

It was also, of course, the year of Loma Prieta, the year of the earthquake. It came, if you're young as hell and don't know the story, in the pregame warmup to Game 3, the first at Candlestick. Tim McCarver, then a younger man but already a jackass, was narrating some footage from the first two games. And then static, a few sounds of panic, the words, "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth..." and then a test signal. My family had moved 3000 east to Princeton, New Jersey, just a few months earlier, and we watched it, horrified, on our little tv screen. And I went back to school the next day, to the fourth grade, and everyone was talking about it, but nobody understood. It was just a cool story or a big joke to them. Not to me: we still hadn't gotten in touch with our family back home, because the phone lines were tied up, and it was very, very real to us. Not to them. I couldn't have felt less at home.

After the 1989 World Series, another long postseason drought began. It was almost broken in 1993, a magical year, when the Giants almost moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, but then were saved, and pulled Barry Bonds out of their hat, and all of a sudden put together a 103-win year. But we know how that ended, too: the final game of the season, Fred McGriff hitting the crap out of the ball for the Braves, Salomon Torres and then Dave Burba giving up hit after hit after hit. The best team since the beginning of divisional play not to make the postseason. And the next year, Will Clark was gone, the magic was gone and there was no postseason, anyway.

And then, an awful 1995 and a worse 1996. And then Sabean took over, and he traded Matt Williams, and he traded for the worst-hitting first baseman in the majors (J.T. Snow), and everyone hated him, and everything seemed hopeless - until the games were played. And then, somehow, they were GOOD. So inexplicably good that they became known as "the team of Dustiny." Barry Bonds was Barry Bonds, but J.T. Snow and Jeff Kent magically turned into a good supporting cast, and the pitching was as good as it needed to be - Shawn Estes looked like an ace for years to come - and, for the first time since 1989, the Giants won the NL West. They faced the Marlins, who were not the Marlins we know now. They were a big-budget team, built on big-name players like Gary Sheffield and Bobby Bonilla, as well as a high-priced Cuban defector of our later acquaintance, Livan Hernandez. Unfortunately, again, I can't tell you too much about the games in this one either, for two reasons: first, there were only three, and second, I more or less missed all of them. It was my senior year of high school, and I had my first job at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, and all the games happened while I was working. The owners turned KNBR on in the office, and I caught the odd snippet, but ti was always bad news. In this series, the Giants took the lead at least once in each game: in the seventh inning of game one, in the first and third innings of game 2, and in the fourth inning of game 3. In the first two games, they blew their lead the very next half inning each time. In game 3, they held the lead for an inning and a half, and then got around to blowing it. And then, after eight years of waiting, they were gone just like that. It couldn't have been more of a let-down.

Well. I had hoped to write this all at one go, but it it's already long as hell, and it's 1 AM in the eastern time zone, and I still have 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2003 to cover. I'll try to find time tomorrow, but I probably won't: I teach in the morning/early afternoon, I have class in the afternoon, I'm going over to a friend's for dinner, and then, well, it's game 1 of the World Series. So, tell you what: we'll have a game off on Friday, right? That's a pretty quick day for me: I teach, but I'm done by about 1 o'clock, and home by 2. I'll try to write part two then, if people enjoy this and would like to hear more.