Aaron Hill shouldn’t make the team because he might be the next Steve Finley

Last night, there was a live television broadcast of a Giants game, which is an excellent use of the medium of television and hopefully there will be several more of them aired this year. 2017 Backup Infield Candidate Number 33714, also known as Aaron Hill, started the game in order for the Giants to evaluate him, and during the broadcast, Mike Krukow mentioned several times Hill’s excellent history against the Giants. I have very sensitive Steve Finley alarms in my head, and they go off at the slightest provocation. Krukow’s praise for Aaron Hill’s lifetime achievements against the Giants was that slightest provocation. So, Giants: please do not keep Aaron Hill.

This is the part of the article that no one will enjoy, in which I will have to talk about Steve Finley and you will have to think about Steve Finley. Please feel free to skip this paragraph and the next two and click on an ad instead. Look at those ads to the right. Good stuff! I don’t know why I’m acting like I personally would get any money from your clicking on it, but hey, let’s go with that as a comedic premise instead of talking about Steve Finley.

Steve Finley is the goddamn devil. He spent his entire career beating up on the Giants, with an .849 OPS against them compared with just a .775 career OPS. He hit that grand slam against Wayne Franklin that won the Dodgers the 2004 NL West title, and cost the Giants their shot at the playoffs, a grand slam, by the way, that was OVERKILL, since a SINGLE would have won the game just as much, but NO, he just had to RUB IT IN. And then in 2006, when he came over to the Giants after being traded by the Angels for Edgardo Alfonzo, a trade which somehow both teams lost, he parlayed a hot April into starting 103 games, and also tied Willie Mays’s San Francisco-era record for triples in a season with 12, because when you look at Giants record books, it’s totally appropriate to see Steve Finley’s and Willie Mays’s names together.

So just to recap: he was otherworldly against the Giants when he was just pretty good in general, he hit a grand slam for the Dodgers against the Giants in a playoff race, he spent months starting on a bad team and playing very poorly over semi-prospects the Giants could evaluate because Finley had a hot April and put his name next to Willie Mays in the record book (a record which Angel Pagan eventually erased in 2012, and we can all thank him for that), and he smells like eggs. Steve Finley is awful.

Steve Finley, before 2006, was well known as a Giants killer. Then he came over to the Giants and played just well enough for a month that he could spend the rest of the year killing them. It was a devious, brilliant strategy, and we must be vigilant. We must be watchful. We must never let it happen again.

We must stop Aaron Hill.

Aaron Hill doesn’t have quite the history against the Giants that Finley did, and he doesn’t have the iconic moment either. Still, what he has is a history of being annoying to the Giants and getting hits that hurt the Giants and generally making the lives of Giants fans worse. This is sufficient. A mini-Finley is still a Finley.

The example of Steve Finley shows us that we cannot expect Aaron Hill to stop irritating us if he becomes a Giant; in fact, he could become more annoying than ever. This is an unacceptable risk, and with the presence of 700,000 other potential backup infielders in camp, or maybe more, I don’t know, I haven’t counted every one of them, it’s also an unnecessary one. Aaron Hill must be stopped.

Do the right thing, Giants. Do not put Aaron Hill on the roster. I am so serious about this that I went this entire article, 688 words, without making a Luann reference. I am committed to this idea. No Aaron Hill forever.