Snapshot of a season: Aubrey Huff opens the bottom of the seventh inning with a single down the right-field line. OK that’s not the 2011 Aubrey Huff, but it doesn’t matter, for he no sooner touches first than he’s replaced by speedster Andres Torres. Right away, Torres tests Arizona pitcher Daniel Hudson with a big lead off the bag. Hudson takes the bait and Torres takes second on a wild throw. “Your” SF Giants have a 1-0 lead, a fast runner on second and no outs. Can they bring Torres home? Can they break the game open? Can they take the series from the Diamondbacks and save a season on the ropes? It’s “Rally Time” scream the electronic cheerleaders.
Really?
Pop out. Fly out. Ground out.
If Snakes were Sharks they would smell blood. Maybe they would smell ineptitude with a side of garlic fries. Whatever messages he receives through his olfactory senses, a serpent named Ryan Roberts opens the eighth with a homerun to wreck Ryan Vogelson’s shutout and tie the game. After an infield hit, a walk and a double, the game is effectively over. You want to say “season is effectively over,” but “your” SF Giants have yet to be mathematically toasted.
The game opened brightly enough. The fog lifted and the sun shone like redemption on Cody Ross’s helmet when he hit Hudson’s second pitch of the game into a bleachers gone mad. What a way to start the game! The crowd, more than 42,000 for another GiantsInc sellout, sensed something special, other than Star Wars Day at the ballpark, was about to happen. As usual, the crowd was wrong. Especially a crowd like this one. The realists had already left and the neo-bandwagonites never arrived. Besides the usual smattering of druggies, dreamers and drunks, the crowd was mostly children and tourists.
Give the tourists a little sun and they always have a good time. Children, on the other hand, were glum.
You get into an argument with a baseball purist in Section 328. True, the Mission Bay Hypothesis that a team scoring the fewest runs in the league can nonetheless make the playoffs, must have been cooked up by the Bank of America’s mortgage securities fraud division. Still you can’t help but love a team for making no-score baseball into an art form still unappreciated by the east coast elite.
Only one Giant hit has reverberated through the season, the one Bryan Stow took in the L.A. parking lot after the opening day game the Giants lost 2-1. As irrational an act of violence as a drone strike in North Waziristan, it was both omen and epitaph for the Giants’ season, the only hit that really counts. Good luck Bryan.
Very hard to repeat. Too many imponderables, too much luck involved (unless you can buy your luck). Stick with the garlic fries, you cant go wrong.