A Foregone Conclusion

The San Francisco Giants will be World Series champions

Easy to say now isn't it? 

The Detroit Tigers entered this World Series as the favorite to win in six games. I cringed at that line at first glance. Really? The Giants are riding an unmatched emotional tidal wave right now, and you can't just stop tidal waves.

But then I thought: Maybe Vegas is right. The Tigers have the best pitcher in the world, the best hitter in the world, and they just embarrassed the most prestigious franchise in the world. If Verlander pitches three times in a series, nobody can beat them right?

But then my baseball senses kicked back in. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I was an all-state caliber baseball player or even all-conference. Hell, I didn't even make all-division (still lose a little sleep over that). But up until college I had played the game all of my life and my baseball senses far outweigh my talent. Let me explain.

As I mentioned the other night, baseball is just a funny game. Is Barry Zito a better pitcher a better pitcher than Justin Verlander? Absolutely not. But on October 24th, 2012, Game 1 of the World Series, he was. That's what great about baseball. 

Baseball, more than any other sport, on any given night, talent can be completely excluded from any form of analysis or prediction. One team can play a game or even a group of games that drastically exceeds their ability. A player who has never hit over .300 in his life can suddenly hit .500 in the postseason. You rarely say, "Man, Blaine Gabbert really outplayed Tom Brady tonight." Or, "Wow, JJ Reddick just made Kobe Bryant look silly tonight." Yet that happens all the time in baseball. Pablo Sandoval is hitting better than Miguel Cabrera right now. Marco Scutaro (Marco Scutaro!) is the best hitter on the planet right now.

The more I think about, the more the Detroit Tigers were doomed at the start of the series. Sweeping the Yankees...great. That's awesome. But that was probably the worst possible result for them.

The Giants postseason run? Best possible result.

After going down 0-2 to the Reds in the NLDS, the Giants did the unthinkable--winning the next three on the road, reserving a series with St. Louis where they would have home-field advantage. 

Down three games to one, they did it again.

They won two in a row to force a Game 7, where a towel-waving, energy-infusing, max capacity crowd lifted their team to levels of baseball acumen that the players didn't know they possessed. 

The same Kyle Lohse who has gone five and two-thirds of one run ball just four days earlier, got bounced out of the game after two innings of a Giants hit barrage. 

With a 9-0 Giants lead going into the 9th, a relentless bombardment of rain seemed to hover around AT&T Park and meticulously avoid every other region in the San Francisco area. Somewhere, someone out there wanted to suspend this game. Puddles accumulated on the infield in an instant. You didn't even have enough time to process that instant before the field turned into diamond shaped reservoir in the next instant. But nothing was stopping this tidal wave.

Skip Schumaker grounded into a fielder's choice for the first out, and then after a John Jay strikeout for out number two, Fox focused their super slow-mo camera on Marco Scutaro--looking up to the sky and raising his arms in triumph, soaking in the rain as if it was the last drops of water left on Earth. 

Fittingly, Scutaro camped under a Matt Holliday pop-up to send the Giants to the World Series.

All the meanwhile, the Tigers sat 2,400 miles away awaiting their destination, soaking in the honorable feat of sweeping the New York Yankees. 

Imagine watching that though. You haven't played a baseball game in four days, and you are watching team riding an emotional ecstasy and performing at an inconceivably elite collective level. A level that drastically exceeded their talent. And now you have to travel to their place and try and beat them?

Doomed.

The Tigers didn't have any emotion in their series because they didn't need it. The Yankees were never in it. Once Jeter went down, the Yankees signed off. It was easy. They didn't have any momentum, their hitters weren't in a groove, and their pitchers weren't loose. 

Ask any baseball player--baseball is all about rhythm, about getting in a zone. A zone like Marco Scutaro's, where every pitch seems hittable and the ball just seems bigger. When there is a break in games like the Tigers, everything gets thrown off. The ball seems smaller and the plate seems wider.

For the Giants nothing was easy. They had to win three games in a row twice to even clinch a birth in the World Series. 

And now they are going to win it.

The Tigers are psyched out. They are probably thinking: "This team is out of their minds right now. They are possessed."  That's because the Giants are. 

It's the baseball zone. You start doing things that you can't even explain.  You square up a fastball that would wind up one-hopping the wall for a double on any other day--but on this day or this series, it clears the fence by twenty feet. You start throwing 95 instead of 90. You react to everything without even thinking about it. Something just takes over.

For the Giants, that something has taken over. That something is more powerful than a triple crown winner or pitcher that throws 100 mile per hour in the 9th inning.

Madison Bumgarner came into tonight's game losing both of his previous two postseason starts, allowing 10 runs in 8 innings. Tonight, he shut down the Tigers for seven. 

That's baseball.


-Chris Collins

Follow Chris @ChrisCollins127

Follow Chris and Pj @IceBathReport