Swan Song Season for Bruce Bochy and Giants

by  |  April 4, 2019

bruce bochyAs I write, the San Francisco Giants are a day away from their home opener at the now, yet again, renamed stadium at Mission Bay. Oracle, is it?

There is no irony in noticing that opening day might be a rainout this Friday—much like their record the last few seasons. I don’t expect much. The most interesting thing about this coming season may be watching manager Bruce Bochy in his final year—and how his loyal players support him.

Like an infield after a watery deluge, the Giants can be a mushy team. They were mushy when they won their last three World Series. They were mushy the last two terrible seasons and are mushy now at the beginning of the new year.

What do I mean? They don’t play like a solid team. All too often it seems as if there is nothing holding them together. They have All-Stars and champions among them—think about how many of the current starters and roster members were on the team during their three World Series wins—but they mostly don’t play ball like that. They can be particularly vexing. This is where Bruce Bochy comes in.

I have always said the Giants may not have been the best team each time they won their three recent World Series, but they were the best coached team. You could see other managers looking over at Bochy from their respective dugouts. “What is he going to do next?” they seem to wonder. “Is he thinking three batters ahead of me? Or three innings ahead of me?” Just go back and check the footage of ex-Giants catcher, then manager of the Cardinals, Mike Matheny. Was he making marks on his line-up card?

No, he was taking notes.

Maybe that’s the case with anyone’s favorite team. You want so much based on the former glory, but all you get is two men left on, six times a game, with Brandon Belt taking strike three.

With baseball, you just settle in to settling in. At 162 games, you can’t get glory all the time. You can spend the whole season waiting for the moment, and it might take a week of mundane games to get there. Hell, when the Giants won the first of their recent World Series, in 2010, I didn’t see a championship team. I went to the stadium five times and they lost every time. They had a guy named Aubrey Huff playing for them. That’s not a baseball name. It’s the name of some kind of Victorian novelist.

Nonetheless, with baseball we find glory in the niches. We find glory in at-bats, great pitches and hot double-plays that have been practiced so many times in spring training it seems like a well-rehearsed dance troupe. Wednesday night, Cody Bellinger hit a grand slam off Madison Bumgarner—to Giants fans, that is not supposed to happen. Then Bumgarner hits a two-run homer (pitchers just don’t do that), but to Giants fans, that is what’s supposed to happen. As ex-player and Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper said after the game, “How do we get Bumgarner in the line up?”

That’s the glory we hang in there for. Sure they lost. The Dodgers are a better team, but the Giants rally in the ninth inning, with player-mascot Pablo Sandoval at the plate, that’s the juice we live for.

We may not have a great season, even a great team, but we stand a good chance to have great moments and that can be enough for a baseball fan to feed on. Bruce Bochy’s rather amazing career in baseball will slowly come to an end as the season progresses. As well, it will end of this phase of the Giants. The year 2020 will be, as they say, the start of a whole new ball game for this mushy team of champs. But perhaps that’s looking too far ahead—we still have to get through a rainy opening day.

You think the infield looks bad? Try looking at soggy bunting.