Oh, how it’s changed. There are the Giants, wildly successful, in the standings and at the box office. And then there are the Dodgers, despised as much by their own fans as they once were by San Francisco — bankrupt, literally and emotionally. The applicable word is unbelievable.
L.A., where the stadium always was as full as Tommy Lasorda’s belly, where the team always was in the race, where they smirked at that town up north — and shivered when they were in that town.
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I don’t know what’s in the water at AT&T Park, but the Giants continue to drink from the fountain of unexpected good fortune.
Amazingly, San Francisco has a better record since Buster Posey was lost for the season than with him.
Too bad the Giants can’t morph Eli Whiteside’s gamesmanship with Chris Stewart’s arm and Hector Sanchez’s bat.
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The San Francisco Giants will visit the White House next week to be honored by President Barack Obama for last year’s World Series win.The Giants defeated the Texas Rangers last November for their first World Series victory since the team moved to the San Francisco from New York in 1958.The Giants will visit with Obama at the White House next Monday, an-off day for the team before it starts a three-game series in Philadelphia the following day.
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The extraordinary tale of Pablo Sandoval feels like it just gets more extraordinary at every turn.
Standing at second base after a ground-rule double on baseball’s grandest celebration of its talent — the 82nd All-Star Game earlier this week — Sandoval gave off not a hint of the wild ride his career as a Giant has been so far.And if the past nine months haven’t squeezed a complaint out of him, I don’t think anything will.
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At least the Ringling Brothers know their “Greatest Show on Earth” is just a circus. For all the goofy changes Major League Baseball made hoping to put a serious face on their All-Star Game, they may as well have had the starting lineups pile out of a VW Bug in clown costumes.
At least that would have spiced up Tuesday night’s near three-hour snoozefest, where for the first time, the designated hitter was used in a National League park. With a record 34 players on each roster, there weren’t enough reserves available to pinch-hit?
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“Mark it down, repeat.” Those are the confident, if not unabashedly cocky, words of Giants closer Brian Wilson in the opening moments of the preview for “The Franchise: A Season with the San Francisco Giants,” which aired in April on Showtime.
The Giants are back on the small screen today at 10 p.m. with the premiere episode.
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The Giants should trade Barry Zito now. They’ll never have a better opportunity.
Zito has pitched very well since coming off the disabled list. That might fool a contending team that is desperate for pitching help, but we’ve seen similar streaks by Zito that haven’t lasted.
Remember April 2010? He had an ERA under 2.00. And do you remember the rest of the season? Not so good. He reverted to form, with his ERA rising to 4.15 and his win-loss record declining to 9-14, and was left off the postseason roster.
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At some point this Giants season, somebody’s got to notice.
So far, the story of the 2011 Giants is not pretty.
Ace Tim Lincecum, owner of two NL Cy Young Awards and a World Series ring, is struggling to post a .500 record.Buster Posey is lost for the season after playing just 45 games.
Pablo Sandoval has been out of the lineup as often as he’s been in it.
Andres Torres is coming up as invisible in 2011 as he was inspiring in 2010.
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San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson treated a group of 1,000 Junior Giants to free baseball mitts and tickets to Thursday night’s game.The Giants brought the young baseball players into AT&T Park on Thursday afternoon for a question-and-answer session with Wilson and to receive a glove.“I never thought I was going to meet him,” said 10-year-old Paris Mankin-Wallace, an outfielder for the SF Sluggers.
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The Giants go on the road and score 13 runs in one game, 15 in another. Then, they return home and it’s the same agony of low-scoring, one-run wins or losses. They scored six runs Wednesday night — but it took them 14 innings.What’s going on here?
Two things:
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