The Giants win the thing that comes after the pennant!

With apologies to Alan Moore and Dr. Manhattan:



It's 1985 and I'm a kid getting into baseball. The Giants are my Dad's team so I go with the Giants as opposed to the Athletics. And also, the DH is an unavenged crime against humanity and beauty. I cut clips out of the Chronicle and the Examiner recording their wins and paste them into an oversize sketching pad. The wins are only a few, we're in last place for most of the year. The radio jingle motto that year is, "Come on, Giants. Hang in there." On lazy summer afternoons I listen to Hank Greenwald call the games and the Giants lose them. There's something stirring in the way they TRY to score runs every day yet almost NEVER do. I'm a kid so I have no responsibilities towards nothing. I learn to describe me and my team as "we." We lose 100 games that year.

It's 1986 and Will Clark hits a home run in his first at bat in the major leagues and it goes for like a 100 miles.

It's 1988 and it seems evident that the A's are a lot better than the Giants.

It's 1989 and the A's and Giants are both in the World Series which oughtta be impossible, and then there's this real big earthquake which kinda throws everything in perspective.

It's 1993 and I'm graduating from high school and learning to be an artsy kid who doesn't follow sports and anyway it's the last year of the pure pennant race, before divisional play, so basically it's a big year for things being gone and lost forever.

It's 2000 and I realize that the Giants will never win a World Series because J.T. Snow comments about the aesthetic beauty of a loss to the Mets instead of being crushed and enflamed by losing, and I see that the Giants don't want it bad enough, possibly because of the Bay Area's sunny climate of civility and relativism and fine cheese, they don't have the killer instinct.

It's 2002 and I'm in a bar seeing Rich Aurilia hit a double to center field and it just kicks ass. Later I'm at work at the casino and we're up 6-1 on the Angels and about to win the World Series. I have to pay attention to my job for a while because some idiot is trying to gamble away the whole doughnut shop in front of me. When I look up at the TV again, we're losing. We lose to the Angels. We will never win, because you only get so many chances.

It's 2003 and my baseball heart is broken and anyway we're losing awkwardly to a Florida expansion team that goes on to win the championship over the Yankees and that is just foolishness.

Its 2005, 2006 and 2007 and I'm supposedly this grownup now, the internet has eaten my memory and exploded the world, and the only Giants news is of Barry Bonds' at-bats and his pursuit of the home run record, with no coverage or care about whether they win or lose. It feels like a particularly cynical and ridiculous time.

It's 2010 and I am just all over the place but I remember that once in a while even skinny Jose Uribe would hit a home run because given enough trials, anything can happen. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Yet in spite of your insane expectation, sometimes a different result will happen. Jose Uribe passed away in 2006. It's October and I'm of the belief that Jose's ghost is hovering over his cousin Juan Uribe, much more the power hitter. Uribe hits it high. And he hits it deep.

We beat the Braves with deadeye pitching and like, three hits. We beat the Phillies because they're the best team in baseball. And we handled the Rangers (that is, Bush's team) with authority, because, despite our occasional wacky politics and obscure-foodie/cultural elitism, we just really like standing together and singing along to Journey songs. That are sometimes about Detroit.

I mean, who does that? GO GIANTS.