Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Baseball experts are swooning for the scrappy Angels. But the Giants are scrappy too -- and they're a better team.
Oct 19, 2002 | If you want to understand how sweet and surreal this World Series is for the San Francisco Giants, you've got to appreciate the low points of this strange season, and there were lots of them. For me the nadir was June, during the exercise in tedium known as Interleague Play, as the Giants kicked off the first of two series with the Oakland A's. I was on the phone with local sports-talk host Larry Krueger, Giants manager Dusty Baker's No. 1 critic, and he was yelling in my ear about Baker's latest crime: continuing to start struggling Gold Glove first baseman J.T. Snow instead of rookie Damon Minor, who'd hit three home runs in three days against the Toronto Blue Jays.
"Watch!" Krueger bellowed at me. "He's gonna start Snow over Minor tomorrow night! He'll do what he always does! He never plays the hot hand!"
Krueger was wrong. Baker started Minor that series, and for the next month or so, until the unfortunately named rookie, the Titan of Triple-A, went consistently cold. Minor was hitless against the A's, the Giants dropped two out of three and fell four games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the Baker-hating continued, unabated: Sure, he'd benched Snow, but he played another one of the critics' whipping boys, veteran Shawon Dunston, who fouled out with the tying run at third in the last game.
That led to my personal low moment of the season, watching Baker chew out reporters after the game. "I know you still have faith in Shawon Dunston," one began gently. But the short-fused manager, his energy and patience drained by prostate cancer surgery six months earlier, cut him off. "If I didn't, I wouldn't keep playing him! I hear people saying, 'Dusty's so loyal, Shawon's your boy.' I hear all that shit. But he can do it. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't keep running him out there." The post-game press conference broke up shortly thereafter, and so did the Giants, or so I thought. You saw it on TV, a week or so later, after the team dropped two out of three to the sad Baltimore Orioles: The Thrilla in San Diego, the Rumble in the Dugout. Barry Bonds had Jeff Kent by the throat, team trainer Stan Conte was holding back none other than Baker himself, and if you thought you'd tuned into the WWE instead of ESPN, you had company. This was a team in free fall.
Fast forward to the League Championship Series victory against the St. Louis Cardinals: Bonds and Kent are hugging, not hating. A resurgent J.T. Snow, batting .282 in the playoffs with several crucial hits, vied with catcher Benito Santiago (another has-been revived by Baker; more on him later) for Most Valuable Player. Shawon Dunston had a clutch hit during a ninth inning two-out rally in the final game, setting up the gritty game-winning single by Kenny Lofton, another Giants' retread. Baker outmanaged his mentor Tony La Russa, the only other guy to win three Manager of the Year awards, and the Giants were going to Disneyland for a World Series against the Anaheim Angels. While Baker, Snow and Dunston were drinking champagne, Krueger and their other critics had to eat some crow. "Look, managers have good and bad years, and Dusty's had a very good year," Krueger told me after the big win. There is a God.
But the doubters haven't disappeared entirely. In fact, while most baseball analysts say the Giants and Angels, both wild card winners, are amazingly evenly matched, most give the edge to the Angels anyway -- even though, in category after category, it's the Giants who have the statistical and psychological advantage. And I don't get it.
In other years, I'd have written that off as East Coast media bias. They're all in bed in Bristol, Conn. by the time many Giants games are over, so some team highlights don't even make it onto ESPN. But the Angels play three time zones away, too, so that won't explain it. And it's not that the Angels have fared better in postseason play, one of the so-called "intangibles" that can give one of two evenly matched teams the edge. While the Giants haven't won a World Series since 1954, they've been there twice since then, in 1962 and 1989, and five Giants players have World Series experience with other teams. This is the Angels' first trip in their 42-year history, and nobody on their roster has World Series experience.
Which is not to say the Angels aren't a great team. They're fantastic, a lot like the Giants, in fact. Both teams put themselves in holes during the first half of the season, and fought back like champions. Neither team could really afford to lose a single game in September, and when it counted most, neither did.
I think the Angels bandwagon, though, is mostly powered by two things: The historic sense that the Giants choke in the spotlight, and the media's lessened but still significant dislike for Barry Bonds. The Bonds factor alone should give the Giants the edge in any close matchup. He spooked La Russa and the Atlanta Braves' Bobby Cox, taking the two best managers in the National League behind Baker completely out of their games. But instead the Bonds factor seems to work the other way in the analysts' minds: it translates into their overestimating, and maybe subconsciously pulling for, their opponents.
That anti-Giants, anti-Bonds prejudice was not at all subconscious in a juvenile Jeff Pearlman column on CNNSI.com this week, which judged the Giants' victory over the Cardinals final proof that "There is no God." Pearlman's evidence? That Bonds and Lofton, whom he depicts as an arrogant asshole and a lowlife thug, respectively, are going to the World Series, and the team of Darryl Kile and Jack Buck are not.
There was nothing juvenile or even hostile to the Sporting News' Ken Rosenthal's column giving the nod to the Angels. There was nothing to it, period. He walked through all the reasons smart baseball folks think the Giants have the edge, and then picked the Angels anyway. Why? "My head tells me the Giants, but my heart tells me the Angels," he wrote.
No matter. The motto of Dusty Baker's team is, "We don't start nothin', but we don't take nothin' either." The disrespect will rile them up a little, while the natural advantages the analysts ignore make them the favorites on the field. My head tells me the Giants, and my heart tells me the Giants, too. Here's why.
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