The Giants win the World Series: a fiction

Wilson has the sign. He winds and fires..fastball..HE STRUCK HIM OUT! TEIXEIRA HAS STRUCK OUT AND THE GIANTS ARE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF BASEBALL FOR 2010! The Giants have won their first World Series since 1954 and their first World Series in San Francisco. They are mobbing Brian Wilson on the mound and listen to these 43,000 fans cheer! – Jon Miller

Wilson delivers..STRIKE THREE AND THE GIANTS HAVE WON! THE GIANTS ARE THE WORLD CHAMPIONS! (Woohoo! – Mike Krukow) The Giants have done it! – Duane Kuiper

I’ve never seen the Giants win the World Series and so I wonder what it’s like, sometimes watching baseball, sometimes throwing the wiffle ball in the backyard (conveniently I have changed my name to my mother’s maiden name, which just happens to also be Wilson) and sometimes while stuck in public transport (the daydreamer’s equivalent of a Buddhist monastery). I’ve seen a favourite baseball team win before; the Red Sox were the previous focus of my imagination, mainly because the Giants’ 50 years seemed so utterly puny compared to the 86 years of emptiness in New England baseball. I attended the 50^th anniversary of the 1954 Giants that year and half the team was still alive, including Alvin Dark, Dusty Rhodes, Johnny Antonelli and of course Willie Mays. The reality turned out to be very different to the dream. I was estatic when Foulke tossed Edgar Renteria’s groundball to Mientkiewicz but the real joy had been reserved for the American League Championship Series win the week before. The titanic struggle had vanquished almost every reservation and sense of foreboding a Red Sox fan could have, so by the time the World Series came around I think all Red Sox fans knew that the Cardinals didn’t have a chance, even if the Redbirds had won just 105 games that year. Will a Giants World Series win have that anti-climatic feeling? Doubt it, especially since the Dodgers aren’t going to make the playoffs this year. So, onto my dream...

The Giants became World Champions of baseball after a dramatic seven game upset of the New York Yankees. The highlight was surely game five, where the Giants, down 4-2 in the 8^th, rallied to tie the game before Buster Posey hit a 2 run homer off Joba Chamberlain to win 6-4. Tim Lincecum, who had started and won both his games, was named Series MVP. This had capped off a playoffs in which the Giants had been the underdog in every series, beating the two-time pennant winner Phils in four games before breaking Atlanta’s heart, sending Bobby Cox into retirement defeated, beating the Braves in a six game Championship Series that featured three extra-inning games. In the World Series the Giants had lost Game 2 14-3 before Lincecum shut out the Yankees in Game 4, striking out 11 (including Alex Rodriguez 3 times, once with the bases loaded) in a 2-0 shutout. Lincecum returned in Game 7 to give up just 3 hits in 8 innings, gaining the win behind a solitary Pablo Sandoval home run off C.C. Sabathia in the 7^th inning. Sandoval had been down 0-2 versus the hefty lefty, whose matchups with Sandoval were dubbed the Sumo Series. But Sabathia had left a fastball over the plate and Sandoval’s drive into the bleachers sparked wild scenes as fans jumped on top of one another in a mixture of joy and a desire to get the ball that put the Giants into the lead.

When the Giants won, pandemonium erupted throughout the Bay Area. In San Francisco, people hugged and kissed complete strangers coming out of snuggeries like Lefty O’Doul’s, Gino and Carlo’s and the Horseshoe. 10,000 fans had turned up to watch the game at the Civic Center and went wild at the win. “I didn’t think I’d ever see them win!,” said one fan. Another yelled out “We’ve finally done it!” before hollering at the top of his lungs indecipherably. A third simply giggled to herself before beginning to cry. Local liquor stores ran out of champagne. San Francisco General Hospital reported three boys had been born that evening and named Tim after the Giants’ star pitcher, while another had been named Pablo Tim Chang. Stockbrokers in the Financial District ran out to the much-loathed Vaillaincourt fountains, dry for almost a decade, and danced in them to the amusement of some homeless nearby, one of whom wore a tattered Giants cap and waved his finger (the index, thankfully) at passersby. In San Jose, fans drove up and down Almaden Boulevard honking horns and shouting “Go Giants!”, with the same also being true in San Mateo by the Caltrain station, which had been painted orange and black for the World Series. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who had been standing behind managing general partner Bill Neukom when the World Series trophy was presented on the infield at AT&T Park, announced plans for a victory parade starting at the ballpark and going down the Embarcadero and Market Street to the Civic Center on Saturday, November 6. He slurred his announcement slightly, no doubt partaking in some anticipatory victory libations. Hundreds of thousands of fans were expected to attend San Francisco’s first championship since the 49ers won Super Bowl XXIX in 1995 and reports came in that fans from New York (some of whom had seen the last Giant World Series win), Sydney, London and Half Moon Bay were expected to arrive in time for the parade.

A Defense of California Baseball

People on the East Coast tend to believe they have a very strong grip on what it means to be a baseball fan. In some ways that makes sense; baseball was originally played in the Eastern cities and their teams are over a hundred years old and well enmeshed in their cities’ fabric. New York is the largest city in the country, making it by default America’s largest baseball town. The Red Sox are part of what makes New England special along with the sea, the historic buildings and the flintiness (and that sweet delicious lobster). But occasionally this crosses over into a form of chauvinism. Only East Coasters love baseball so much and people in other areas besides St. Louis or Chicago aren’t great fans. At times I agree with them. For example the Tampa Bay Rays are on track for their 2^nd American League East title in 3 years with an immensely exciting team. But the fans don’t come – they’re 9^th in the American League in attendance and didn’t draw 30,000 for any of their three games versus the Yankees. But let me stick up for the baseball fans of California. They’re characterized as casual fans ready to leave at the end of the 7^th to beat the traffic, eyes glazed over and uncaring. Not true.

California is a state steeped in baseball. There’s been professional baseball in the state since the 1880s and the Pacific Coast League, drawing primarily from the Golden State, was the most successful minor league of all time, with near Major League quality support in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s the only state with five major league teams and with the exception of the Athletics, whose rootlessness is in part their own making, all of them are well entrenched in their local communities and have experienced success on and off the field in the past decade. All of them, except for the Athletics, have drawn 3 million people this decade, and even the struggling A’s once drew 27,000 people a game. The Dodgers have led the National League in attendance for 27 out of the last 51 years. Californians just love going to games. California has strong college baseball programs up and down the state and has produced 600 more major league players than any other state. That difference becomes starker when you notice that the 2^nd most productive state, Pennsylvania, has produced just 140-odd ballplayers in the last 30 years – compared to over one thousand from California. Obviously part of this is because California is our most populous state. But Texas, which has two-thirds the population, has produced only one-third as many ballplayers and New York, which has a little more than half the population, has produced about one-fifth as many ballplayers. Little League, Pony League and high school programs in California are of a very high quality and the state’s constant good weather (year-round baseball is realistic, especially in the Bay Area and Southern California) helps players refine their craft 12 months a year.

Now that we’ve established that California baseball is historic and of a very high quality, we’ll talk about the fans. There’s no doubt Californians approach baseball different than East Coasters, but I’d argue the lack of outward intensity doesn’t mean we don’t care. One positive about the West Coast is the media covers the sport with a less critical eye. Not critical in the sense that they don’t analyze, but critical in the sense of trying to find people to blame when things go wrong. There is no pulling of hair when things go wrong and while that can lead to stasis (there’s no question Brian Sabean would be out of a job if he was a general manager in Boston or New York) it can also lead to success through continuity. The Los Angeles press weren’t trying to run Walter Alston out of a job, and that continuity undoubtedly helped foster the year in, year out juggernaut that was the Los Angeles Dodgers. A great deal of this is because there’s no market for it. Californians generally want to feel good about their team and assume their owners want to win. That doesn’t make them stupid – the Dodgers have had an ill feeling about them for a while now after the O’Malley family sold the team, and the Athletics have their problems because their owners are cheap and entitled. But this positive feeling encourages a more symbiotic relationship between fan and team rather than an antagonistic one. What this relationship also does is lessen the emotional bipolarity of fans. Fans possibly do not experience the intense euphoria the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 set in motion in New England, but they don’t experience the heartbreak that Game 6 of the 1986 World Series instigated either. Believe me, when the Giants lost in 2002 people were crushed; life did go on, however. Instead people live in a smaller but healthier emotional state of sadness or joy while keeping the games in a healthier context.

Perhaps this is all unconvincing, an apologia for apathy. But I think Californian baseball fans get stick they don’t deserve and while I wouldn’t want the unparalleled richness of Eastern baseball life to be lost, perhaps we could accept each other’s differences as fans a little more.

Sunday (well, Thursday, but really Sunday) signalled the start of a new season of the National Football League. Like many Americans whose favourite sport is baseball, I have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with this interloper we call football. My enthusiasm for college football has waned as I’ve gotten older and attended college outside the United States, much less outside the Top 25, so this is going to be primarily about professional football.

There are several things to strongly dislike about the National Football League. The first is the entitlement the owners feel towards public subsidies for stadiums. Now there’s no doubt that many of the owners of Major League Baseball franchises feel the same way, but in the last thirty years we’ve seen NFL owners show they mean it, as hallowed franchises like the Los Angeles Rams, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts and Oakland Raiders (and Los Angeles Raiders) skipped town. Tom Benson, who owns the New Orleans Saints, tried to hold New Orleans hostage right after Hurricane Katrina, which is quite possibly the most tasteless thing ever, Al Davis’s sartorial choices excepted. Obnoxiously, these guys (and Georgia Frontiere) usually win and get their free stadium.

With the league rolling around in money, the distasteful way they treat the players looks even worse. The NFL is the only sport in America not to have real guaranteed contracts for its players. Now I do understand on a certain level that the extracting nature of the game requires financial flexibility for teams; nonetheless, this is self-justifying and the lack of care for fringe players and even worse retired players hurts the league. Baseball is no walk in the park for your body, but it’s much less common to hear of guys getting hip replacements before they turn 50, and God knows baseball doesn’t go after your noggin the way football does. The harrowing tale of Mike Webster and how the accumulation of brain injuries in his career just completely sapped him scares me.

But I just can’t rip myself from the sport. Football was invented at the Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, and various other public and private Eastern colleges, and the characterization of the football player as a Spartan philosopher-warrior arose early in football’s history. Damned if it doesn’t work; football is considerably more egalitarian now and the education standards for college players has possibly fallen, but these guys usually are articulate and it makes sense that a sport which relies heavily on quick reads and memorising playbooks should attract such men (even if Alex Smith is a MENSA member and can’t throw a goddamn pass correctly).

NFL Films turns the sport into melodrama – not drama, melodrama – and I eat it up. The graceful running of a back, the way the lines crash into each other like gladiators, the way the punter extends his leg almost up to his shoulder when kicking the ball is always expertly captured by NFL Films and usually matched with some orchestral suite (often times hilariously named something like “Dance of the Fumblers”) with the booming voice of someone like John Facenda or the dearly departed Harry Kalas. That the head of NFL Films, Steve Sabol, happens to be a personable chap and an outwardly enthusiastic historian of pro football doesn’t hurt.

Lastly, being a historian and buff of post-war American middle-class life – my life – it’s impossible to ignore the ascension of pro football in that sphere. Football is middle-class nirvana; best played in the suburbs on well-appointed fields at public high schools, best watched on television while firing up the barbeque and pounding brewskis with Tom from accounting and your next door neighbour Bill and generally most appreciated by people who have enough leisure time (that’d be the middle class) to obsess over their fantasy football teams, watch re-runs of games on NFL Network and look at stats on Pro Football Reference. It would be wrong and quite insufferable to say that football is only enjoyed by the middle class, since that’s a load of codswallop. All sports are enjoyed across the class boundaries, unless it’s something ridiculous like yacht sailing or polo, and plenty of football players come from the working class and the poor. But football seems to suit it best.

Also I really like those old helmets and the long-sleeve jerseys.

So here’s to you football. I’ll be crossing my fingers while raising my toast, but I do like you.