exercises in the willful suspension of disbelief
Primer Part One
Primer Part Two!
Now that we're talking about the Giants, let's go ahead and flesh out some of the recurring supporting characters on that team as we did for the A's.
Meet Brian Wilson (#38, RP). Meet his beard.
Wilson is our closer, and he is actually crazier than Zito, of all the things we never thought we'd see. It's largely an act, of course, playing up the wild-man closer type, but he just does it so well. The mohawk is an old favorite. The beard he started letting grow in the early part of the 2010 season, and then he just never shaved again. And then: he dyed the beard black with shoe polish. To further its powers of intimidation. Because he is amazing.
(of course we won it all, we had a viking on our side)
Also, once while doing a web-cam interview from his house, this happened:
No, seriously. No. SERIOUSLY.
(and then they went on leno)
There has never been any good explanation given for why Wilson keeps the gimp from Pulp Fiction in his home. Rumor has it that this unorthodox mascot (known as The Machine) is actually Pat Burrell, our beloved left fielder (who took token $1 million salary in 2011 to stay with the team after we picked him up off the scrap heap on a whim, and he ended up with a ring), but that does not make the situation any more clear, nor less hilarious.
Wilson and Zito lived together in L.A. in the off-season once, which you think would spur massive amounts of lunatics-in-love fic, but alas! Thus far the Beach Boy has mostly been employed for comic relief.
Less crazy, but no less endearing:
This is Matt Cain (#18, SP), another starting pitcher to add to the pile (I got a type, what can I say). He is currently the longest-tenured player on the Giants, having come up with the team at age twenty-one in 2005. Since then, he has been like a metronome of unflappability and quality pitching. He's our hard-luck case who never gets any run support and so his stats are never so shiny as Lincecum's, but that makes him no less essential to all that we are and do.
Cain is another one of those voice-of-reason guys like Huddy, observing the shenanigans of his rotation mates with vague bemusement and proffering occasional good advice that never gets taken.
(matt and tim auditioning for superbad, i assume)
Yay, it's time to talk about Pablo!
Pablo Sandoval (#48, 3B) patrols the hot corner, and I frankly dare you not to love him. Zito nicknamed him the Kung-Fu Panda shortly after he joined the team in 2009, and the moniker has caught on with some fervor.
Sandoval is one of those guys where if he's happy, everybody's happy. That big ole grin! He had a fantastic rookie year, hitting .330, and then went through a severe sophomore slump (complicated by a rough divorce/custody battle and significant weight gain) that ended up keeping him off the postseason roster in 2010. Pablo was still necessary for good luck and general positive vibes, though.
After watching his team win the World Series without him, Sandoval lost forty pounds in the off-season and came back in 2011 looking just like we remembered him, smacking the cover off the ball and making everybody's day better just by showing up, and then he broke his hand, and was on the DL for six weeks, which was sadface, but upon returning the Panda resumed his awesomely awesome ways, and looks to be finishing the season over .300 with 20+ dingers, just what we hoped for from him.
And I have no context for this picture at all, I just like it:
(that's jonathan sanchez between them, also wondering why the hell pablo is stroking tim's ear. and background zito!)
(more panda and jonny)
So much affection for these guys, I can hardly even tell you about it.
*
And then baseball breaks your heart.
It's the fifth of June, 2011, and last week Buster Posey got destroyed in a collision at home plate in the twelfth inning. He broke his ankle and tore a couple of ligaments and needed surgery; he's out for the year.
Difficult to put into words, actually, something that happens to me rarely. The clean-up hitting catcher for the best pitching staff in the league. The hope and the heart of this team. I was at the game where he got hurt, one of twenty thousand people staring in shocked dismay at Buster face-down in the dirt, Buster not getting up.
So.
Baseball rolls on without any one man. And the Giants are hanging in there, somehow, trading first place back and forth with the Diamondbacks in a shitty division, in a year when offense is down across the board. We're still winning games, staggering and limping and ugly, but we're winning them. Last year the team motto was "Giants Baseball: Torture," so at least this is familiar. We'll still be here no matter what.
*
Well.
Here we are then.
4 August 2011, still in first place, one game up on the Diamondbacks. Still pitching well, but you know who hits in the Giants' line-up this year? No one hits in the Giants' line-up this year.
Okay, Pablo came back from his busted hand and continued hitting .300--helpful. GM Brian Sabean (who constructed the championship team last year out of bubblegum and popsicle sticks) acquired the best player available at the deadline in Carlos Beltran--also helpful. But in general we are toothless, thompless, batless. Of course God is on our side, so we're still like twelve games over .500.
And, then, well. Zito.
Zito came back from his foot injury (clean-shaven, guess he figured the porn 'stach was bad luck) and for the first few starts he made he was awesome and on-point and everybody was so happy for him. And then--he reverted to being Zito again.
His last start, the Giants lost 9-0. They put him back on the DL pretty much immediately; this is quite plainly a stalling tactic while they figure out what to do with him. Send him to the bullpen? He's never pitched a non-playoff inning out the bullpen in his career, and one thing you want out of your 'pen guys is brash swaggering confidence, which is not so much in Zito's wheelhouse just now. Send him down to the minors? Wow, how humiliating for everyone involved. Trade him? They can't trade him, they still owe him $50 million. Release him? They can't release him, they still owe him $50 million dollars.
Here is an elegy for Barry Zito written by someone else. My own is still being stitched together out of disappointment and abandoned hope.
on to way too much fic