Giants win final game of 2017 season on Pablo Sandoval walk-off home run

In a decade, this game, this game right here, might be a big deal. We’ll look back and remark at how everything shifted. How the fork in the road was clearly defined. The Giants will pick second in next year’s draft instead of first. If they had lost Sunday’s game against the Padres, they would have had the first pick. We won’t know what that means for years.

And it’s all because Pablo Sandoval hit a walk-off home run in the final game of 2017.

Ha ha ha ha hahah aha ahhaaaaaaa.

I’m not laughing because I’m mad or because I was desperately hoping for that first-overall pick. I’m laughing because it’s the silliest damned thing I can imagine. There are so many silly things about this season, but this one tops them all. The Giants (who were supposed to contend) finished with the worst record in baseball (tied with another team), but they didn’t get the first-overall pick (because the Tigers finished one game behind the Giants last year, which was the tiebreaker) because Pablo Sandoval (lol) hit a ninth-inning walk-off home run. That’s all amazing.

The best argument against draft-pick scoreboard watching is always 2008. If the Giants had the first pick, they probably would have picked Pedro Alvarez. They picked Buster Posey instead, which means there are four teams who could have had him but decided not to. The draft is too weird to start worrying about the exact order. If there’s a Bryce Harper or Alex Rodriguez, it makes a difference. That’s not the case for the 2018 Draft.

Really, it would be very Tigers for them to get the first-overall pick and watch the Giants steal the Hall of Famer a pick later. It would be the 2012 of drafts! They have the Matt Bush/Justin Verlander karma going against them, too, so this is pretty much set in stone.

Pablo Sandoval hitting a ninth-inning home run in 2017 is going to shape the entire direction of the franchise. For good? Maybe! For ill? Maybe! All I know is that we watched 162 baseball games — most of them turds — and the last one featured Sandoval altering history, for some reason. I’m not even going to write something like, “THAT’S SO 2017 GIANTS” because I don’t know what it is yet. It might be so 2023 Giants. We haven’t read that story yet.

The last time the Giants had the second-overall pick was 1985, when they finished with the worst record in baseball, but the draft was rigged to a weird AL-NL-AL format. The Giants should have had the first-overall pick, but the bureaucracy pantsed them.

That’s how they got Will Clark instead of B.J. Surhoff.

The point is that this game will mean something. And the Giants might end up with the best player in franchise history, or they might end up with the Calvin Murray to the Tigers’ Derek Jeter. We’ll see. And I’m not mad. It’s just funny that Pablo Sandoval is the fella directing traffic on the freeway of time.

Welcome to 2017, where you realized you knew absolutely nothing about baseball for the first time. Like, literally nothing. You thought it was weird before, but this was the season when you realized your predictions meant nothing. My baseball predictions are as good as my EPL predictions, usually. This year, I picked North Tremonton Pass to win the Warbler’s Dandy Cup, and that was more likely than Pablo Sandoval making sure the Giants don’t lose 99 games on the final day of the season.

Pablo Sandoval! Ha ha ha ha haaaaa. Welcome to the future, presented by Pablo Sandoval. Let’s see where this leads.

Sandoval murdered that ball, of course.

I enjoyed the part where the Padres pitcher looked exasperated because he didn’t get the call on the non-strike he threw the pitch before.

COME AT ME, BRO

If you weren’t sure about Johnny Cueto coming back, it’s hard to imagine a team watching this start and thinking, “Oh, we should probably go $90 million for him. If we’re outbid, maybe $95 million.”

Which means that Cueto isn’t opting out. Which means that the Giants will have him for close to that amount, and that ... doesn’t bother me? Like, I’m excited to have him bounce back on the Giants next year?

I don’t know. This is all so confusing. But Cueto allowed all sorts of hits in the first two innings, and he looked like latter-day Livan Hernandez instead of last year’s dynamo, and that should be discouraging. But he’ll be around, and I’m happy about that.

This is all so confusing.

The Giants finished with 98 losses, tied for the second-most in franchise history. You watched more Giants losses in a single season than almost anyone who ever lived.

Congratulations. I really mean that. And it could have been 99 losses if not for Pablo Sandoval, who is on the team for some reason. Never forget that.

Matt Cain is gone forever, Pablo Sandoval is here indefinitely, and no one has heard from Tim Lincecum since he disappeared into his hyperbaric chamber months ago. The 2018 Giants will have Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford, and about 22 question marks. It’s going to be the weirdest offseason in recent memory.

That’s okay. Because it was the weirdest season in recent memory. It’s over, and I won’t miss it. Until the first day without baseball.

Wait, come back, baseball, you awful monster. Come back and let me hate you more.