There is to be a parade today. How festive! In this parade, members of the San Francisco Giants will ride by on floats because the team won the World Series. Seriously. It was in the papers and everything. Edgar Renteria was named the World Series MVP. Not Will Clark, not Willie McCovey, not Juan Marichal or Gaylord Perry, not Bobby Bonds, not George Foster or Jack Clark, not Orlando Cepeda, not Matt Williams or Barry Bonds. The answer was Edgar Renteria.
Edgar Renteria.
Every mention of "Market Street" since the site began in 2005:
6/2/05When the Giants won the pennant, the celebration would spread to Market Street. Solid, wall-to-wall celebrating partisans for blocks. When the Giants won the World Series, school would be canceled, workers don't have to even call in with an excuse, and the whole region would be a giant, sobbing group hug. From Gilroy to Redding, people with frowns would get locked in steamer trunks. It would be beautiful.
7/18/05If the Giants turn the season around in the second-half, people will look to this series as the catalyst. Also, if the Giants turn the season around in the second half, I will streak down Market Street wearing nothing but a beard of bees*. Still, it's fun to dream, and it's fun to win.
*Not true. I will, if pressed, spend an hour in the same room with a bee, as long as I retain the right to shriek like a six-year old with a hand caught in a sewing machine should the bee get near me.
9/29/05Even teams like the Pirates have something to look forward to. For example, each and every start from an exciting young pitcher like Zach Duke. We have Matt Cain and Noah Lowry, and both are definitely worth looking forward to. I'd rather watch a parade down Market Street, but you take what you can get.
6/27/08The sweep of the Cardinals was simple poetry, but the Derek Jeter lineout to Kent in Game 7 of the World Series was poetic justice. The parade down Market Street was like a dream. I made out with Cameron Diaz the whole time. Aquaman was there, too.
10/20/08Phoenix has had a championship parade. Miami has already had two championship parades. And now Tampa/St. Petersburg wants one? That’s too much. Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Milwaukee, and, oh yes, San Francisco are already in line. No cutting. You can almost steal our franchise, and you can steal our first-round picks (as long as they’re expensive busts), but hands off an out-of-turn championship, Tampa.
And you know what? All of those circa-‘60s and -‘70s franchises can get bent too. San Francisco’s had baseball since the ‘50s without a parade down Market Street. But I'll reserve the bulk of my ire for the newfangled expansion teams trying to make the Giants look bad
7/26/09If the Giants hold steady -- if they believe that this isn't a team that's seriously going to contend, and they hoard every one of their prospects like pieces of wartime coal -- I'll understand, but I'll secretly wonder in five years if blowing up the farm for Freddy Sanchez and Victor Martinez would have led to a parade down Market Street.
1/21/10I hope I look like a pessimistic goofball at this time next year. I hope my thousands and thousands of words of wrong are mocked, belittled, and laughed at. I hope they carry an effigy of me down Market Street during the championship parade just so people can throw tomatoes at it.
10/18/10I will take hostages. Don’t test me. Don’t test my desire to watch a parade down Market Street. They can’t just get this close and then lose, making me wait all offseason for the start of another uncertain season that can fall apart in hundreds of different ways before the All-Star Break, which would lead to another interminable offseason that would lease to the start of another uncertain...
11/2/10Lincecum pitched one of the best games of his life in a World Series clincher. He'll be on a float, traveling from Montgomery Street to Market Street. Tim Lincecum.