An update on coverage this season

Hey there lovely McCovey Chronicles community. I know how thrilled You People get every time we have a community update, so bear with me, I’ll try and make this quick and painless.

The newest and shiniest (OK, maybe not shiniest) San Francisco Giants season is upon us in just a few days, so I wanted to talk about how the season will be covered here at McCovey Cove Chronicles Dot Com.

If you have a special eye for puzzles, and have paid very close attention, you might have noticed that I’m currently the only person writing on this site. And if you exit Oracle Park and venture down the street to Chase Center, you might notice that I’m half of our Golden State Warriors coverage at Golden State of Mind (hey, come talk bounceball with us).

All that is to say that I’m pretty busy these days.

The above was true last season as well, when I covered every single Giants game, save for one series when my partner’s mother unexpectedly died. But that was a 60-game season, four months removed from any other live sports to cover, with the Warriors sitting at home twiddling their thumbs and, frankly, with myself sitting at home twiddling my thumbs.

Now, as we gear up for a full 162-game slate, the Warriors are in full swing and making a playoff push, and I’m on the verge of being able to leave my apartment and see my family members, whom — like you with many of yours, I suspect — I haven’t seen in over 15 months.

You can probably see where this is going, so I’ll stop beating around the bush: I am not going to cover every Giants game this season.

Most weeks I will cover five games — for the next few months my schedule will rotate with the Warriors schedule (while still covering the Giants on those days), and then, when the NBA season ends, I’ll build a rotating schedule around when the Giants play.

My goal is to cover as many games as possible still, but I’ll be transparent with you: there’s a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and I plan on seeing friends and family and doing fun things, and that means taking the occasional time off for non-bereavement purposes.

Everything else will remain the same. There will be gamethreads for every game, so there will always be a place for you to talk about Brandon Belt getting rung up for taking a pitch two inches off the plate. There will be daily BPs for food talk, and previews for every series. There just won’t be 162 recaps.

I’ll admit it was really hard to make this decision, as I first came to McCovey Chronicles because I thought Grant Brisbee’s recaps were the single best piece of sportswriting on the internet on any given day. But covering 162 baseball games, in addition to a full NBA and WNBA schedule is, I had to conclude, not feasible. I’m hoping that this is temporary, and we’ll have a solution for daily game coverage by next season.

Thank you everyone for understanding. If you have any ideas you would like implemented for the season — if people want, I can schedule post-game threads for the days I won’t be recapping, for example — I’m all ears.

One last note: Since Roger and Kevin are no longer contributors, there will be, sadly, no Minor Lines. But I do want to make sure that Minor League baseball is covered, since it’s been an integral part of this community for so long. I’m leaning towards a weekly Giants Minor League recap — what happened last week, who were the top performers, what is everyone’s stat line now, etc. — but open to any and all suggestions for what type of Minor League content you would like.

Thank you, everyone.