Remember when Barry Zito, a bizarro legend in San Francisco Giants lore, retired from baseball and released an album? Wasn’t that a time.
On the surface, Zito’s album was exactly what we all wanted when we were 15. It’s titled No Secrets. It features tracks such as “Hearts I Didn’t Break,” and “Undiscovered You.” The depth, people.
Young teenage Brady is 100% thinking about his crush while playing this album and drinking green tea with three tablespoons of sugar in it, and having deep thoughts.
When you google “Barry Zito album review,” the first two results are telling. The first is a link to the site you’re currently reading, where our esteemed music editor Bryan Murphy penned a review that should have earned him a gig at Rolling Stone.
Here’s the meat of Bryan’s review:
Barry Zito absolutely sounds like a man who made approximately $146 million dollars over 16 years of pro ball in and used that money to build or rent out a professional music studio space to record a professional grade music album for no other reason than that he could.
Look, the man’s entitled to do whatever he pleases with his money. There are worse things he could do with it, too; making a music album falls under the label of Totally Harmless. And yet, that doesn’t answer the biggest question I have after listening to this album off and on for half the calendar year: Why?
The second hit is a link to a website called Saving Country Music, and the review is titled, “I’ll Be Damned. Baseball Pitcher Barry Zito is Not Half Bad at the Music Thing.”
Honestly, I cannot think of a positive review that feels more like a negative review than that, and I didn’t even read it.
Zito isn’t the only person to recently wear a Giants jersey and make some tunes. Jake Peavy’s been working on his music passion/career for quite some time:
And of course, there’s former third base coach Tim Flannery, an avid musician who now tours as part of Tim Flannery and The Lunatic Fringe. I’ll let you guess which part the Flan Man is.
But none of those three men are current Giants, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one on the current team is pursuing a music career, unless you count DJ BC Raw.
So I ask you: Which Giant will come out with an album once they hit retirement? Or rather, which Giant will come out with the best album when they hit retirement?