FanPost

It's been a long time coming


I posted this on my own blog, but wanted to share it here as well (even though we don't need the primer on Giants World Series heartbreak), as my way of bearing witness to the emotions of the night.

Yes, I got teary while writing this. No, I do not care.

The story goes that in 1885, after a particularly thrilling victory over the Philadelphia Phillies (of all teams), manager Jim Mutrie stormed into the New York Gothams' locker room to praise his team. "My big fellows! My giants!" he exclaimed. The new nickname stuck, and from then on, the team was known as the New York Giants.

Fast forward 125 years, and those Giants have stood as one of the greatest teams of the old guard. More players have been inducted into the Hall of Fame as Giants than any other team, and the Giants have the most National League championships. They are also the first baseball team to win 10,000 games. But alas, their glory days have existed in the past, in memory and in stories handed down from generation to generation. The notion of a world championship was a dream, since the Giants hadn't won a World Series since 1954, when they were still in New York. Since moving to the West Coast in 1958, the team had played in three World Series, only to lose each in heartbreaking fashion.

1962. Lost to the Yankees when Willie McCovey's line drive was spectacularly caught by Bobby Richardson, prompting Peanuts artist and Giants fan Charles Schultz to draw his strip's hero, Charlie Brown, crying, "Why couldn't McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?"

1989. Game 3 was postponed ten days by the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the Bay Area. But it may not have mattered much, since the Giants never held the lead in any game, and the Oakland A's swept the series.

2002. Five outs from a six-game win in Anaheim, Giants manager Dusty Baker calls for a pitching change. In the interim few minutes, the Angels played footage of a "rally monkey" that excites the fans and the team, and the Angels rallied with a three-run home run to win the game and force a Game 7, which the Giants lost.


The Giants have had some ghosts to exorcise, and years of mediocre teams and postseason despair have only served to hold them in place while Linda Blair spews split pea soup all over their nice clean uniforms. So who would have thought that a team comprised of handfuls of rookies, young phenoms, and allegedly-washed-up players plucked off the scrap heap would combine to dominate the playoffs and stand at the top of the game?

In a summer that nobody could have predicted, a fall that nobody saw coming, and a five-game series that saw a team that scrabbled for nearly every run all season become offensive juggernauts, the misfits from San Francisco took the crown.

My big fellows, my Giants, are World Champions.

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