At Last

Against the predictions of just about every "expert," the San Francisco Giants not only made it into the World Series, but won the title. For the first time in its 52-year tenure in San Francisco, the Giants franchise brought the trophy home to the Bay Area.

The buzz around these parts was unlike anything this area has seen since the first Niners Super Bowl season in 1981-82. Even the success of that team, though, did not carry the deep resonance of the Giants' World Series win. A franchise that generates numerous Hall of Fame players, sets up an entire generation of loyal followers (from the 1960s) thanks to superior players and perennial second-place finishes, and tantalizes its fans with occasional but not frequent visits to the postseason develops and loyalty among its followers that is both broad and deep. The outpouring of joy was astonishing in its intensity and purity, and continues to reverberate more than a week after the clinching game. Anyone who says that baseball has been supplanted by football as the nation's pastime has not experienced the intense concentration and outpouring of joy of a World Series championship.

The fan bases in Boston and Chicago receive a lot of attention for the perceived "curses" on their baseball franchises as they went decades without World Series titles. The media never tire of telling stories of the fans' misery, and the fans never tire of serving up the stories. The Bay Area is different. The fact that the Giants franchise also endured a decades-long championship drought was seldom noticed or remarked upon, even by the team’s fans. Maybe it is a matter of an easygoing California vibe, but Giants fans never regarded the failure of the team to win championships as some kind of cosmic referendum on the team or its fans.

Speaking as a relatively long-term fan (more than 30 years at this point), it is, frankly, baffling to think of the Giants as the World Series champions at all. I am conditioned to expect the Giants to get very little attention nationally. Growing up in an era when the team was bad and the only national sports programs were This Week In Baseball and the George Michael Sports Machine, it was a huge thrill when the Giants would get so much as 20 seconds of airtime each week. They almost never appeared on NBC's game of the week or ABC's Monday Night Baseball, so the Giants felt like our little regional team. The got all the attention of a minor league team, and during most of my youth, played like one.

When they made their run to the World Series this year, it never failed to catch me up short to see the Giants discussed by the same talking heads that routinely spend most of their time (especially in October) talking about the Yankees or the Red Sox. My astonishment often turned to amusement when the national media folks got their facts wrong or tried to create a clumsy narrative (“they’re a bunch of cast-offs!”) to explain the team.

In the end, winning the World Series was a fantastic experience for the team and its fans. The parade through San Francisco was an unprecedented outpouring of civic pride. One of the attorneys in our office went into the city that afternoon; it took him an hour and a half to get across the Civic Center Plaza, so stuffed was it with orange and black clad, deliriously happy fans.


It will be impossible for next year to live up to the excitement the Giants gave us this year. In fact, it will almost certainly be disappointing since expectations for the team have changed so dramatically after the last few rebuilding years. We will have no cause to complain, however. After 52 years in San Francisco, and 56 years in franchise history, the Giants are the World Series champions.