GIANTS BACK IN PLAYOFFS
has a date with desperation felt so good. The month of October brings postseason baseball, and the Giants are in.
They joined the party late, like a man scrambling onto a moving bus. Just when the season seemed lost, buried in a torrent of incompetence, they swept the Dodgers in a three-game series at AT&T Park and clinched a wild-card berth with Sunday’s 7-1 victory.
Now it’s on to New York for a winner-take-all wild-card playoff game on Wednesday. A loss means instant elimination, but this trip sounds awfully inviting to the Giants. Sudden- ly, for a team that won World Series titles in the past three even-numbered years, all things seem possible.
A gloomy morning had given way to glorious sunshine as Sergio Romo stood proudly on the mound, staring down the day’s final out. The fans had risen to their feet as Rob Segedin’s flyball settled gently into the glove of left fielder Angel Pagan, and most of them remained standing for some 20 minutes as a very civil celebration broke out.
The Giants weren’t delirious, as if they’d pulled off some sort of miracle, but rathSeldom
er trotting energetically to the center of the field for a group hug of intense satisfaction. Inside the clubhouse, things got a bit more rowdy. Appropriately, beer was the drink of choice, but a thoroughly drenched Bruce Bochy had other things in mind as he walked to the center of the room, surrounded by his players, and let fly with a spectacular Champagne spray.
“That’s the man,” Hunter Pence said of his manager, so harshly doubted on social media and talk radio in recent weeks but suddenly possessed, once again, with the magic touch. “He manages like clockwork, and now we’re right where we want to be. He never ceases to amaze.”
Once again, Brandon Crawford stood among teammates who have joined him at the sport’s pinnacle, and he couldn’t stop smiling. “We knew we had to win, and we did,” he said. “This is a core group that’s been there before. We’ve got some experience with the wild-card game (Crawford’s grand slam helped the Giants beat Pittsburgh two years ago), and we think we’ll get it done.”
This season was a crazy kind of three-act play, free of convention. The first three months were light and breezy, pegging San Francisco as the best team in baseball. The next three were inconceivably grim, as if occupied by evil forces, and the Dodgers ran away with the Western Division title. Then came the final weekend, and sweet revival.
So many beloved names — Pence, Buster Posey, Angel Pagan, Brandon Belt — came back to life. New faces, the likes of Conor Gillaspie, Ty Blach and Gordon Beckham, found themselves immersed in Giants baseball, vintage style, a brand of spirit only proven winners can enjoy. And on this final Sunday, a day that could have gone horribly wrong, the Giants prevailed with a champion’s ease.
It was billed as an afternoon of fervent scoreboard-watching, specifically the CardinalsPirates game in St. Louis. If the Giants had lost, coupled with a Cardinals victory, Bochy’s crew would have boarded a hurry-up flight to St. Louis for a play-in game Monday night. Packing for a trip they hoped would not occur, the Giants imagined themselves staggering into their St. Louis hotel with the season’s most important game only hours away.
So much for anxiety. The Giants had a 5-0 lead by the second inning and Matt Moore, the pitcher who arrived in a trade that broke many hearts (sending Matt Duffy to Tampa Bay), silenced every skeptic with eight masterful innings. Who cared what the Cardinals were doing? (For the record, they won.) The Giants kept this story tightly wrapped inside China Basin.
The third inning will go down with the great ones in Giants-Dodgers lore. That’s when the Giants turned their television and radio broadcasts over to Vin Scully’s call for the Los Angeles audience. Scully retired on Sunday, after 67 incomparable years at the microphone, and this was among the many loving tributes offered by the Giants’ organization.
Scully was not 15 feet away, in an adjacent booth, as Giants broadcasters Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper sat back to listen. They were just fans now, of this great rivalry and especially of Scully, whom they have idolized for years. When Gillaspie toppled over the dugout railing to make what Scully called an “unbelievable” catch, Krukow and Kuiper stood and applauded.
By day’s end, Krukow and many others would shed a tear over Scully’s farewell. It was all quite wonderful and so very sad. Everywhere there was transition, right down to the Giants’ broadcast engineer, Lee Jones, about to retire after 40 distinguished years on the job.
“That door will close,” said Jones, with only a trace of melancholy. “Then it’ll open right back up again.”
The game does go on, surviving every emotional blow, and the Giants now venture into the great postseason unknown. The Mets could end it all so quickly on Wednesday night. They have a pitcher known as Thor, Noah Syndergaard, ready to unleash his fury. But the Giants counter with Madison Bumgarner, the memories still fresh of his barging out of a bullpen in Kansas City, like a cowboy through saloon doors, to wrap up the 2014 World Series with five shutout innings.
With such fresh new images in play, everyone dared to dream a little. “Look out, baby!” shouted Shawon Dunston, the former Giant who now works in their video room. “We’re goin’!”
And as a maddening regular season brings down the curtain, all sins are forgiven.