Ray Ratto
CSNBayArea.com
PHILADELPHIA -- When the comprehensive tale is told of how the San Francisco Giants achieved the World Series nobody thought they had any reason to deserve, it will unravel about midway through Saturday’s game. It won’t be told well at all, in fact.
And the reason why is because while you can list the events of Saturday’s 3-2 Game 6 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies so that someone can copy-paste them into a Wikipedia file, you can’t type on a puddle of adrenaline. You can’t make an elegant phrase out of Bruce Bochy’s full-on naked managing. You can’t explain with charts and graphs how much air can be sucked out of an open-air stadium with one very bitchy knee-high slider from one man with a third-rail fetish.
It can’t be done, and yet it must, because only those who were there can truly walk the rest of us through, and they must try lest the story fade into standard-issue video clips and clichéd champagne sprays.
It may help, though to understand that the Giants are certifiably mad, as in full-on bughouse crazy. And they are comfortable with that.
“I’ve never actually seen a game played at this extreme an edge,” general manager Brian Sabean said in the middle of a long soliloquy about Brian Wilson, the closer who walked the game as close to oblivion as it could stand.
“Just everything. Jonathan (Sanchez) doesn’t have it and we haven’t had that happen in I don’t know how long, the thing with (Chase) Utley (on the third-inning benches-clearing debate), Jeremy Affeldt saving our asses, Madison (Bumgarner) and Timmy (Lincecum), the (Juan) Uribe homer, and Wilson. Just everything. I’ve never seen a game quite like it. I’ve never seen a game come close to it, and we’ve done this a lot.”
Oh yes they have, but Saturday was the masterpiece, the one if the Giants never play another game will be remembered as the game of their era.
“We met today, the coaches and the staff, and we just decided we didn’t want to come back tomorrow,” Bochy said. “The pressure would just be too great. So we were going all hands on deck tonight. We told Timmy he would pitch the eighth if we had a lead. We told Madison to be ready just in case. We were going for all of it right here.”
And so they did. Bochy told two starting pitchers to be ready to work in relief in case a third starter flamed out, and Sanchez did.
“I don’t know, I just didn’t have it,” he said. “I warmed up real good, but I got out there and I just didn’t have it. And the thing with Utley, I’m not trying to hit him (which he did, in the upper back), but when he throws the ball at me like that, I’m a professional player too. I didn’t like that.”
So Bochy made the first of several what can be called nothing less than Billy Martin-level choices. He decided the Phillies would not see a right-handed pitcher until he was good and ready to give them one, so he went to the little-used Affeldt for two innings of spotless relief.
Of course.
Then he went to Bumgarner, the 21-year-old man-child who slipped in and out of trouble twice, loading the bases in the fifth and stranding a leadoff double in the sixth without being harmed.
Of course.
Then he Lopezed the top of the Phillies order for the fourth and final time, because Javier Lopez’s work on Utley, Placido Polanco and Ryan Howard must be elevated to a verb.
Of course.
Then Uribe hit a ball that could only be a home run in Citizens Bank Park, a low line drive that barely snuck into the second row of seats in the right field corner and gave the Giants the 3-2 lead. Giant fans dismissed the park as a cheap little walk-in closet of a place, but they will love it forever now because they must.
Of course.
Then Lincecum came in for the eighth, “because we told him if we had the lead in the eighth we were going to go to him and have him get us to Willie,” Bochy said. Lincecum wasn’t sharp, giving up one-out singles to Shane Victorino and Raul Ibanez, but he did complete the bridge to Wilson, who threw a 1-1 fastball to Carlos Ruiz who hit it on a line (shades of Willie McCovey, 1962, perhaps) to Aubrey Huff at first base for an inning-ending double play.
Of course.
Then Wilson, well, Wilsoned the ninth, because he is a fully conjugated verb of his own. After dismissing pinch-hitter Ross Gload with two pitches, he spent 14 pitches walking Jimmy Rollins, inducing a ground out from Polanco and walking Utley to bring up the Phillies’ most powerful source, Howard.
Fastball, up, but Howard swings through it. Fastball up, ball one. Fastball up and in, ball two. Slider away catches Howard looking at strike two. Fastball up, ball three.
Of course.
Fastball up, Howard fouls it off, and then knee-high slider with a middle finger as its tail fin, slightly away and locking up Howard for the entire winter.
“My approach was to throw the ball as hard as I could with conviction,” Wilson said. “I could have spotted it a little better at times, I guess, but I’d rather throw my hardest fastball with as much conviction as I have.”
And yet, to win the pennant, he went to what players used to call the bastard pitch, a slider tailing away and down that none but the truly great can attack with as much conviction as Wilson delivers.
So it ended. The team with the great starting pitching used half its rotation in relief, the first time anyone can remember that happening in a postseason game. The bullpen that had been largely spotty for players not named Lopez or Wilson, delivered seven scoreless inning for the first time since the 1911 World Series. The player with the bad left wrist helped push a homer that would never have been one except in the one place they happened to be playing.
This was the zenith of Giants baseball in our times, a game in which every player and coach extended himself beyond reasonable capabilities to take a trophy it didn’t have the numbers to explain.
But it did have a daylight burglar’s guts and a car thief’s brass and a con man’s belief in the story that everyone would have to believe, no matter how unbelievable it might be.
And now, Wednesday, against the Texas Rangers, another team that has no right to be in the World Series except this: They got there because they were better than everyone else when it was time to be. That’s the only standard that needs to be met.
But when they arrive in San Francisco Monday for their first workout and see the Giants in ski masks and black overcoats, they shouldn’t be surprised. You can’t explain them. You can only experience them.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.
