Hunter Pence Hunter Pence Hunter Pence Hunter Pence Hunter Pence

We'll never get back those years watching the 2010 Giants took off of our lives, but the 2012 championship, coupled with every single Dodgers victory now and forever will make our remaining days so much sweeter. The Giants, you see, had no business traveling down to Los Angeles and winning three of four against the best sports team on the entire planet, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

You see, the Dodgers are now the greatest thing ever created and they have already won the next eleventy World Series. The Dodgers are now *as* good as Kobe Bryant. They are Los Angeles. Everything they touch with their money-infused fingers turns to gold... or at the very least, the National League Manager of the Year.

Losing three out of four to the lowly San Francisco Giants when they've already won 150 games this season doesn't even register to these superior beings. These losses are like safety warnings about head-first slides into first base to Nick Punto: irrelevant.

But stale bread to a starving man tastes better than a rich man's seven course meal, and that's exactly what happened this weekend for the Giants. They got to eat.

And it was thanks in no small part to the guy many people thought would have and should have been traded at the deadline, Hunter Mxyztplk Pence.

It made sense to trade Pence if there was a good deal to be had. Logically, anyway. Emotionally, it would have been difficult to see him switch uniforms after he helped the team win a World Series and had been embraced pretty quickly by the fans and the front office. It would not have been unspeakably painful, of course, as 7 or 8 months in the hometown laundry does not a lifelong Giant make...

OR DOES IT?

You beat the Dodgers, you're a Giant for life. That's pretty much the math, as I've understood, it since childhood.

Five home runs in a four game series... I'm going to guess that the last Giant to do that was Barry Bonds. Buster Posey had four home runs in a four game series in Milwaukee in 2010. The Giants didn't hit any home runs in 2011 or 2012, as I recall, so, let's just draw a line from Barry Bonds to Hunter Pence, shall we, and contemplate what it means for the offseason and the more-than-likely lengthy, guaranteed contract our alien overlord is about to receive from the Giants...

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You just knew that after Juan Uribe made a Gold Glove-caliber play at third base to end the top of the 4th that he'd hit a home run in the bottom of the fourth to tie it up leadoff triple and be stranded there.

I really thought we were going to watch Vogelsong fall apart in that inning, but he held tough against the lower part of the Dodgers' order. Even in the 5th, when it all fell apart and the Dodgers took the lead, it wasn't *so* much because of Vogelsong as it was the Giants' almost completely useless defense. I suppose Noonan and Crawford had an excuse on a tough play -- Edison Volquez's soft grounder -- but the Giants have seemingly had a lot of tough plays that didn't break in their favor this season, ultimately. Really, pitching, offense, defense, everything has fallen to crud this season, so it's not like I'm making an unfair point, it's simply a matter of every phase of the Giants' game being completely aggravating this entire season, often for long stretches of time.

Unrelated to Vogelsong and the defense, but related to the Giants being completely aggravating this season:

Dee Gordon is not a good baseball player (career):

Dee Gordon is a better baseball player in a small sampling, specifically versus the Giants:

Aggravating. Yes, his being marginally better against the Giants in a very tiny sample is that aggravating (to me).

I don't know what these past few starts mean for Ryan Vogelsong going forward. I'm pretty sure I was way off when I opined that he was sure to have his option picked up. It seems less certain. It seems like the logical thing to do, sure, but I'm less convinced now than I was a few weeks ago that Vogelsong will be able to angrily grit his way through another average, back-end-of-the-rotation-quality season. Dat velocity. Dat control. Dat concerns me.

Admittedly, it's tough to make predictions about the Giants lately. That's not true. It's been tough to predict the Giants since approximately Aubrey Huff in 2010. Ryan Vogelsong could be a top three Cy Young vote-getter next year for all I know, or he might be out of baseball by June. There's no telling with this team. Not for me, at least. Not anymore.

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So despite the odds being very much in favor of Hunter Pence returning to the Giants next year and for the foreseeable future (we're talking a Rowandesque tenure, folks), sing his praises as though he were about to leave for a five year mission to explore strange new worlds and new civilizations.