A Series for the Ages (No, Not The World Series) By Chuck Strom

A month ago I watched the San Francisco Giants get thrashed 9-0 in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. Except for a few delusional optimists, all of us who were there that night believed that we had witnessed the final game at AT&T Park for 2012. I cannot overstate the depressing sense of finality we felt. During the game the park was a morgue, and the last image I remember from that evening—thankfully unrecorded for posterity—was waiting for a BART train in the Montgomery Street station after our early departure and seeing other fans in their Giants gear looking tired and glassy-eyed, silently waiting for their ride home.

Having spent the rest of October watching the Giants win their second championship in three years, I believe that winning the series against Cincinnati was the most difficult and extraordinary of their accomplishments. They won three straight road games, a feat that to my knowledge no other team has ever duplicated in the playoffs, and they survived several moments when the Reds seemed poised to finish them off. In Game 3 Giants pitcher Ryan Vogelsong, perhaps a bit jittery from starting his first postseason game at 35, gave up three hits in the first inning. That he escaped with only one run scoring and then, with the help of four relievers, shut down the Reds for the rest of the game was miraculous and absolutely necessary, since the Giants managed only one hit in the first nine innings and scored their only run on a hit batsman and sacrifice fly. As is usually the case in such games, the outcome was decided by the team that committed a mistake first, as the Reds did in the tenth inning with a wild pitch and an error that allowed the winning run to score.

The other moment that stands out to me was in Game 5, when Giants manager Bruce Bochy, who normally removes pitchers with a ruthlessness unmatched since Sparky Anderson earned the nickname “Captain Hook,” inexplicably left a tiring Matt Cain in to pitch the sixth inning with a 6-2 lead. A similar move doomed the 1984 Chicago Cubs, when Jim Frey stayed too long with Rick Sutcliffe with a 3-0 lead in Game 5 of that year’s National League Championship Series. Cain promptly gave up a home run, a walk, and a single to bring the tying run to the plate. Watching this in a sports bar, I kept saying, “Get him out of there,” to the TV as if somehow Bochy would hear me. He didn’t, of course, and he was rewarded with a serendipitous moment of the kind necessary to a championship: Cain summoned all that was left in him to strike out the next hitter and get a double play when catcher Buster Posey threw out Jay Bruce who had broken for third. In an instant, the disaster that seemed certain to happen didn’t, and the Giants went on to win 6-4. I still think Bochy dangerously tempted fate by leaving Cain in to pitch in the sixth, but this might be an example where games—and championships—also get decided by mistakes that are forgiven.

It is natural but unfortunate that the memory of this series will be overshadowed by the subsequent NLCS and World Series. No DVDs of the NLDS will likely be marketed by MLB; based on prior history I anticipate that the forthcoming official Giants championship DVD set will include the four World Series games and the last three of the NLCS. Nonetheless, this was a series for the ages, and it provided the last evidence I needed to discard the ingrained pessimism through which I had traditionally viewed the Giants—a psychology born of waiting until I was forty-seven for a season to end in triumph. Now, at least when it comes to baseball, I know that anything is truly possible.

– Chuck Strom