The 2012 baseball season is finally over and the San Francisco Giants are your World Series champions. If you are a Giants’ fan you probably aren’t going to appreciate the rest of this column. I’m not a Giants fans and am not drinking the Kool-Aid about how good they are.
Admittedly I am standing on very shaky ground here. The Giants won the championship in one of the most boring and uneventful World Series ever, but they did win. They beat the teams that they were required to beat, including the Steven Strasburg-less Nationals.
Yes, I’ve heard about their great team chemistry and about the closeness and unselfishness of their players. I’m just not buying it. There were other teams with more talent that also had these unmeasureable traits. The Giants were just a “good” team that was playing well at the right time. In many cases, that is the most important trait for a champion. The best team does not always win, just the team playing the best at the right time.
Oh, yeah, the Giants had pitching! Really? What I saw was professional hitters looking amateurish swinging at pitches a foot out of the strike zone and then taking a strike “right down the middle.” Why? Who knows? They just slumped at the wrong time.
The Giants hitters were nothing to be proud of, either. Other than Pablo Sandoval’s three-homer outburst in Game One, the Giants showed very little offense at all. Their few clutch hits provided the difference in the other games. It was just a boring series!
The one area in which the Giants lead the universe is in hair! What an unsightly bunch. Tim Lincecum’s long girlish locks are laughable. Brian Wilson’s outrageous beard should be banned before he steps on it. Sergio Romo, Hunter Pence, and Sandoval also had facial hair that has no place on a baseball field. Just an opinion!
The one man on the Giants that I really admire is their manager, Bruce Bochy. He is a smart baseball man and an excellent tactician. He seems to make the right moves and make solid decisions at every point of a game. He is certainly a championship skipper.
The San Franciscans do have a budding superstar, if he hasn’t already reached that level. That is Buster Posey, a baby-faced assassin with a bat. This Florida State grad is a stud and is the best player on the Giants squad without question. He may even be the MVP of the National League in 2012. He would get my vote!
Aside from Sandoval and Posey, the Giants are a bunch of spare parts that morphed into a workable machine at the right time. Baseball experts who are much smarter than I may disagree, but I’ll stand by my opinion. You can have the Giants, I don’t want them.
And keeping with the baseball theme, I see that the Braves exercised the contract options on three valuable members of their team. Atlanta secured Brian McCann, Tim Hudson, and Paul Maholm for next season at a combined cost of $27.5 million. These guys will once again be important cogs in the Braves’ drive towards another playoff appearance and I am glad they will be back. McCann will not be ready until the season gets started, as he recovers from shoulder surgery, but the Braves think he will be 100 percent by May.
With about $25 million to spend on free agents the Braves will have the money to pick up some vital cogs to replace Chipper Jones and probably Michael Bourn. Hopefully at this time next year I can write a column about the Braves winning the 2013 World Series title. It could happen. As the Giants showed, you just have to play good at the right time.






