1. That's right, I said dynasty. 10 of the last 15 World Series have been won by the 21st-century baseball powerhouses: the Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals and Giants. Three World Series titles in five years isn't quite Yankees territory, but it's getting there, and the Giants may not even be done yet. What's worse, the Giants are pulling away from the Dodgers in terms of franchise championships: The Giants have eight and the Dodgers have been stuck at six for, oh, 26 years and counting....
2. The Giants are no longer a small- or mid-market team. Their $149-million payroll is the major league's sixth-highest, and it only figures to go up — as it should. It's good to see their management reinvest all that postseason money into their team. It's bad to see that they have fewer Jason Schmidt- or Andruw Jones-sized blunders in their free agent history, but that's an entirely different frustration.
3. Every team has bad fans. Remember Jonathan Denver, the Dodger fan (and the son of a Dodger security guard) killed by a Giants fan near AT&T Park in 2013? It turns out that Denver and his brother teamed up against the Giants fan, whom the SF District Attorney could not prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" did not act in self-defense. So if you detected some subtle anti-L.A. sentiment in the Giants' quotes about Bryan Stow participating in their pre-game World Series ceremonies, just remember that every team has bad fans — even the Giants.
4. 2014 was as unenjoyable as winning years get. The Dodgers' 42-8 streak in 2013 may have been an anomaly, but the 2014 Dodgers didn't even come close to making any kind of winning statement. Unlike, say, hockey, baseball rewards the team that gets hot at the right time, and the 2014 Dodgers never truly got hot, posting a winning streak of more than three games against above-.500 teams only once (in July, against Atlanta). Add to that the bullshit Time-Warner Cable situation (still unresolved, by the way!), and 2014 would be a year to forget — if you saw it in the first place.
5. Some fuck you's are in order. Fuck you, Chase Carey, for trading Mike Piazza. Fuck you, Frank McCourt, for costing us Vlad Guerrero. And speaking of Vlads: Fuck you, Vladimir Shpunt, for not doing your job.
OK, I feel a little better now.
8 comments:
I have a problem with calling the Giants a dynasty. Not just as a Dodger fan but because the word dynasty implies that a team needs to be winning more than just the WS. The Giants are just an average team during the season and become seemingly unbeatable in the playoffs. Twice now they got to the post season as a wildcard. If not for that extra spot created for the fans, they would not have been in the there in '10 or '14. In my mind a team called a dynasty needs to win their division consistently as the Yanks and Braves did in the '90s (yes, I consider the Braves a dynasty even though they only got 1 WS). Pretty soon there will be something like 12 or 14 playoff spots (like the NBA and NHL) to keep fans interested. Will a consistent 10 seed who gets hot in the WS be called a dynasty in the 2020s? (Man... I hate the Giants).
I refuse to use the D word where the FuckHeads are concerned.
@KLD: Good point, but championships are the yardstick by which franchises are measured, and the Giants have figured out how to take advantage of the system. That's why I actually liked Bill Plaschke's suggestion to expand the first round to best-of-seven.
@karen: I hear you. It's distasteful for sure.
I agree with KLD about a dynasty team needing to win more often and consistantly. During the 90's, it was assumed that the Braves would finish 1st in their division at the beginning of the year. And from 1991 - 2005, they did just that (except for the strike shortened season of 1994). During that span of 15 years the Braves never posted a losing record and won more than 90 games every year but one, and they even hit the 100 win mark 6 times. In the past 5 years, the Giants have won the division twice, finished 2nd, and finished 3rd one year when they were 10 games below .500. They are a good team, they play well in the playoffs, but not quite dynasty level in my mind.
And I whole heartedly agree with the big fuck you to Chase Carey!
fuckyouchasecarey.com? @fuckyouchasecarey?
Good post Orel.
Giants won the division in 2010. 92 wins. 94 in 2012. I'd say they were better than average.
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