Game One: Braves 4, Giants 1
“The Greatest Game Ever Pitched,” by Jim Kaplan, one of two new baseball books with a spotlight on “your” San Francisco Giants, tells the story of a classic game between the Giants and the Braves in 1963. Game One with the Braves in 2011 is the worst big-league game pitched by Madison Bumgarner, who barely gets warmed up before four runs score. Adios, Bum. He’s learning Major League Baseball can be just as challenging as the North Carolina state high school championships. A master of steady deception through last fall’s playoffs, he has been made the fool so far this year. Against a team as pathetic at plate as the Giants — let’s not bother with the stats. He doesn’t last three innings.
In 1963, the Giants’ Juan Marichal and Braves’ (Milwaukee then) Warren Spahn both lasted 16 innings! You want to talk torture? Try 16 innings at Candlestick. The Giants finally won 1-0 on a walk-off home run by Willie Mays.
Not only were Spahn and Marichal two of the best pitchers of their time, but Marichal, the young high-kicking “Dominican Dandy,” represented both a generational challenge common to all athletics and a cultural challenge to North American dominance of the game. The Giants of the early ’60s (Marichal, Mays, McCovey, Cepeda et. al.) were baseball’s most completely integrated team, an impressive team weakened by the racism fostered, ironically, by their owners and manager.
For those unfamiliar with this chapter in SF baseball history, the book gives a quick and useful summary and a decent, though pedestrian, account of the history of Latinos in Major League Baseball. Kaplan tells the game story with numerous detours that get tiresome by the end.
Hits, as Spahn reminded, come from timing — a lesson both Mr. Kaplan and the Giants will want to take to heart.
Game Two: Braves 5, Giants 2
Until the Opening Day blow bestowed on Bryan Stow, I thought Tim Lincecum’s picture on the cover of the new year’s edition of Sports Illustrated constituted the darkest omen for the Giants this season. Not just appearing on the cursed cover, but wearing a suit and bow tie and playing with a bottle of champagne? Was this a party at the Age Song Assisted Living Community? There’s controversy over whether the bow tie signifies that Timmy’s going corporate; some contend it’s a subtle dig at his penny-pinching, pot-disparaging Owner.
On Saturday afternoon Timmy pitches like a stoned Bill Neukom. He walks the first two batters and almost a third before being bailed out by the incredible sloth of Brave base runners. His fastball never does find the strike zone and his breaking pitches don’t bother to break, but he manages to shut down the Braves’ big guns like Brian McCann and Dan Uggla. The bottom of the order is another story. With one out and two strikes in the third inning, weak-hitting Nate McLouth singles. Then Lincecum walks the pitcher, Tim Hudson, to set up the first run, on a soft single by Martin Prado. Similar scenarios unwind in the fifth and again in the seventh.
If Lincecum looked like Little Boy Lost on Saturday, his hitters were apparently in no mood to find him. A lineup featuring the absence of Buster Posey performed about as you might expect against Hudson, a sinker-baller of some reknown, who befuddles the Giants, as pitchers who throw the dreaded sinker generally do.
Welcome back Cody Ross, who got his first hits and run batted in for the season.
Note: Both the Braves and the Giants got nine hits; the Braves walked six times, the Giants none.
Game Three: Braves 9, Giants 6
The third game is the most fun from a fan point of view. Battling the flu, Jonathan Sanchez opens with a shaky first inning and the Braves lead 2-0. Sanchez sticks it out through five, leaving with the game tied thanks to a Buster Posey home run. In the seventh, the Braves strike back for three runs set up by two Jeremy Affeldt walks. Reminiscent of last year’s resilience, the Giants claw their way into the lead with four runs in the bottom of the seventh, two driven in by Aaron Rowand with his first hit of the series. Sergio Romo can’t hold the lead, hanging a slider to Dan Uggla, who crushes it for his first hit of the series. Finally, in the 10th Brian Wilson gets behind Nate McLouth. On a 3-2 count, McLouth smacks a fastball (not weakly) right into the centerfield camera, and that’s the game.
Want to escape back to 2010? Try Andrew Baggarly’s paean to the 2010 Giants season, “A Band of Misfits.” Baggarly, the beat reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, fashions a season through a sequence of player profiles, painted largely with recycled anecdotes and factoids supplied by GiantsInc. But he catches an imporant sub-theme to the season by foregrounding a distinctive aroma that sweetened the air around Mission Creek, Lincecum’s popularity despite (!) his bust, chants and signs urging GiantsInc to “Let Timmy Smoke.”
A heralding of significant cultural import? Who knows. Baggarly appears to be writing for an audience of high school boys (do any still read?), so never gets out of the shallow end of the pool. Which makes the book: a) a good gift to annoy friends and relatives living in Philadelphia, and b) an easy escapist read while watching the current Giants play like midgets.