The San Francisco Giants have had a mixed season thus far, with stretches of winning without hitting spliced with stretches of losing without hitting. And while it's still early -- the Giants are only 3.5 games back, after all -- the plummet toward .500 happened pretty quickly for a team that seemed like it was just 17-10 and on top of the world. No one's sure how it's all going to end, though some are more pessimistic than others.
I have a theory, tough, and I think it's airtight. Airtight enough, in fact, that I'm going to have to preface the rest of this post with a "spoiler warning", as I'm going to tell you how the season will end. If you read beyond this point, and when October rolls around you aren't surprised, you only have yourself to blame. Here goes:
The Giants offense has been dead the whole time.
I know, I know. It's a little anticlimactic. Some of you suspected this would be the twist five seasons ago, but the clues that I've found have shown a masterful job of foreshadowing.
When the team was hitting in the beginning of the season, it was confusing. They were second in the league in on-base percentage for a while. It turns out that was an alternate reality in which the Giants offense was in purgatory. The organization left little clues hinting at this. An anagram for "Bengie Molina" is "A Limbo Engine", for example. Another clue is that the hitters they acquired weren't that good. The Giants offense was being judged before it could leave purgatory. When the judgment came back as "awful," the offense was free to leave and die.
In the Russian folk tale "The White Duck", there's a passage that reads:
The witch opened the door quietly, and, seeing that the two brothers were sound asleep, passed a dead man's hand cut off at the wrist over them so that they might never wake.
The two brothers in the folk tale are what Mark DeRosa and Freddy Sanchez are supposed to represent -- the "dead man's hand" is a metaphor for the ailments that are preventing them from hitting because, again, the Giants offense has been dead the whole time.
I don't have time to flesh everything out right now -- I'm working on an essay about these theories for later. But there are constant clues being left by the team.
- There are repeated references to bad hitters being "sent down."
- Fans at the park are do an "Ooo-reeebay"-chant, which is in part a memorial for the deceased Jose Uribe.
- When pitchers talk to position players for a mound meeting, the pitchers cover their faces in a reference to Egyptian funerary masks.
- The Willie Mays statue in front of Mays Field only has four toes on each toe under the bronze cleats. Four toes on a statue somehow relates to purgatory or else I wouldn't include it here just to add filler as I slowly pull this theory out of my nether regions over a period of five-plus years.
- Freddy Sanchez's walk-up song is "Homecoming" by Kanye West, which includes the line:
Loyee oyeee oh, loyee oyeee oh
Coming home again
Loyee might be a reference to James Loye, who played Frodo in the Toronto and London production of "Lord of the Rings: the Musical." While Frodo did not die in "Lord of the Rings," the walk-up music might reference the Giants offense melting like a ring inside of an active volcano, and eventually dying, which would be the "Coming home again" referenced by Kanye, which represents a return to the abhorrent sucking the Giants offense has been guilty of for the past six years, which in fact constitutes an offense that has been dead the whole time. Pretty obvious, when you think about it.
So it's pretty clear that the Giants offense was never alive. The Giants will reveal that the offense was dead slowly over the season, with a final revelation coming in September or October. When they do reveal that the offense was dead the whole time, try not to think about how the Giants have wasted hours and hours your time for the past five-plus years, flailing away nonsensically. Just go along for the ride, man.
Dammit.