I didn't see this posted anywhere, and thought it was worth mentioning.  Apologies if I missed it somewhere.

On the KNBR morning show's interview with Kruk yesterday morning, he was talking about the celebration back at the hotel after winning the pennant on Saturday night.  He said that he was getting into the elevator at the hotel, when Buster Posey got in too, a big smile on his face.

 

Krukow said to Posey: "I don't want you to get the idea it's like this every year."

Posey's reply after a brief pause: "Why not?"

These past 48 hours have been absolutely insane.
It's like an emotional highlight reel for the entire 2010 season, with all the highs and lows of 162 games crammed into 18 innings. 

This playoff run feels different to me somehow, and I started thinking about why.  Is this team really so much different from the one in 2002, or is it my perception that's changed?  The answer, as far as I can tell, is yes. 
The players this year have so much more personality, and each story behind each player ranges from merely interesting to downright "cosmic tumblers" bizarre.  They're a blast to watch interacting with each other, a far cry from what I do remember from 8 years ago. 

But there's more to it than the names on the roster.

The last time the Giants got this far, I'd just gotten back into following baseball after a very regrettable hiatus.  The '94-'95 strike came at the worst possible time, since I was young enough to simply find other things to catch my interest.  I fell out of watching, playing, and thinking about baseball until the beginning of my senior year of high school, which happened to be 2002. My older brother had started watching Giants games again, and I decided to sit down and watch too.  I loved it all over again.  It felt so familiar that I wondered how I could have ever lost interest in the first place.  To me, at that point, it was cool and exciting (of course) to see the Giants make it to the World Series.  And it sucked when it got cancelled.

But I'd missed out on the triumph and heartbreak of the recent years.  I didn't watch as the Marlins walked over the Giants in the '97 NLDS.  I didn't see the Giants keep coming so close, only to fall just short.  I knew Barry Bonds had gotten the HR record, but I didn't see any of that unfolding as it happened.  I'd missed out on so much of the recent history that while I thought Giants Baseball was fun, exciting, awesome, etc, there wasn't the same meaning that there was for so many others.

But I was hooked nonetheless.  I watched every game I could from then on.  It's amazing, by the way, how people will slap the "bandwagon" title on someone so quickly.  "I don't remember you caring about the team a year ago...  Let's see how long this lasts." But I didn't care.  I was in.  From the wire-to-wire run in '03, to the debut of Buster Posey, and everything in between, this was epic.

Now that I'm seeing another postseason, it's just so much bigger and better. 

And if this is how I feel, I can only imagine what it's like for the fans that have been there for it all.

So what about you guys?  Does this run feel different to you too, and why or why not?  Is it the team that is so different, or is it the past teams that led up to this one that makes the difference?

Hey Everyone, it's been a while since I've been around to post or comment at all. 

I got married on the 17th, and for our honeymoon, my wife and I went down to Disneyland and also to one of the Giants vs Bums games last week. We were at the epic clash on Tuesday, 7/20, and I've learned a few things about LA in general:

1) When driving in LA, if you don't know exactly where you're going, you're not getting there.

2) When you need to move over a lane, you don't hope to find someone nice enough to let you over; you hope to find someone paying little enough attention that you have an opportunity to cut them off.

3) Dodgers fans have to be the only group that can be incredibly hostile and apathetic at the same time.

 

The fan sitting next to me was more interested in taking pictures of the crowd and then zooming in on the photo she just took to try to pick out famous people in it than in actually watching the game.

We sorted through our pictures and thought you might want to see a few of them.  Our camera wasn't the greatest, and a lot of the action shots didn't turn out, unfortunately.  It's a good camera for close-up stuff, but the zoom on it was a bit lacking.  Ah well.

 

 

It was about an hour-and-a-half drive from the hotel in Orange County to the Stadium, the last 30 minutes of which were the last 2 miles.  We didn't particularly enjoy sitting under this sign for a good 5 minutes while the cars in front of us let their passengers out to walk on ahead.

 

By the 3rd inning, the seats were starting to fill up.

 

 

If anyone would like a field day for photoshopping our resident laughingstock, here ya go:

 

I can't tell you how beautiful it was to be able to take this picture:

After the game, I also loved taking a picture of one of their water bottles, corrected:

 

It was James Loney Bobblehead night, and when they handed me one, someone said "Hey, he's got a Giants shirt on, he doesn't want one!" but I replied "Yeah I do, you don't know what I'm going to do to it..."

I had big plans for it, I was going to take a poll here for how best to treat it, but it wouldn't fit in the luggage, so I had to make do in the hotel room.

I didn't even need to do anything to it for it to be a bit embarrassing to Loney.  The bobblehead even has him wetting himself.  I swear it came out of the box like that.  Just too perfect, considering he was the one who called Mattingly back to the mound =)

I wasted no time "improving it" though:

Boy, he's just falling apart there...

 

That has to be one of the best games we'd ever been to.  We couldn't believe that the fans were doing the wave during a full-count, bases-loaded jam, even though we'd heard stories about them. 

Definitely an experience, it was a blast going into enemy territory and watching the Bums implode on themselves like that.  I don't know that we'll ever go back, but it was definitely worth hitting up once at least.

 

 

 

 

 

My first FanPost.  I'm so proud of myself

Right, big whoop.  Anyway, on to the topic:

 

Lexluth7's post about the 1/3 season MVP got me thinking about the other side of the coin.  There have been some standout pleasant surprises for the team this year, being discussed in his thread.  But who have been the biggest flops this year?  I'm mostly interested in people's opinions on who's been surprisingly bad.  I think we pretty much all expected Molina to suck, but is the level of suck just so extreme that it goes beyond our already-low bar?  Did anyone really think Rowand would produce significantly?

With all things being considered, 2 people stand out to me as being the biggest disappointments:

Pablo, of course, because he's struggling to repeat his performance from last year but is, most unfortunately, our DP machine right now. He's shown flashes of being able to pull himself out of this, but he's definitely performing below where I was expecting by a wide margin.

The other, for me, is DeRosa.  I didn't love the signing in the offseason, but I was thinking he'd be an upgrade to the offense, albeit overpriced, especially considering some of our AAA options.  The point remains that I figured he'd produce more than he did.  Maybe it's not fair to include him because he's injured, but looking at the roster before the first game of the season and seeing who on it is the most disappointing, his name kinda stands out in bold to me.

Discuss.