Back to the blog after a short break.
Even though the Giants season has been done for awhile, sometime around mid-June the team got toe-tagged, the Giants finds themselves wearing the outfit of the spoiler. The concept of being a spoiler has roots back to most of our early childhoods. Hey, if I can’t be happy and win my division, neither should you! The Giants are basically the equivalent of the kid that wouldn’t share his juice with you. For shame! But while we eventually all became healthy and well adjusted adults, traces of that unkempt youth still linger within us. It feels good to drive over that huge water puddle and drench the poor slob walking down the sidewalk. We can’t help it.
It would feel good to help put the brakes on division rivals post season drives. Of the last remainig 5 series on the year, the Giants play 4 of them against teams with visions of playoffs dancing in their heads (LA, SDx2 , and ARI). No team ever starts out hoping to be spoilers in the last part of the season, because spoiler status is only acheived once you are to far out to make it into the playoffs. But in the play that is baseball, this is the role the Giants got and the role that they must play for now.
Here’s my list of who I’d like to spoil the most:
1. Dodgers – Is it any surprise that the Dodgers would be #1? At the time of this post, the Dodgers are only 3.5 games out of the NL Wild Card. How sweet would it be to enact a little revenge for the Steve Finely grand slam in 2004 that eliminated the Giants? I still have a huge stockpile of irrational hatred for Steve Finely. It would be a nice finish to an otherwise bad season if the Giants could hammer the last nail in the Dodgers coffin.
2. Diamondbacks – The current leaders of the NL West and if it wasn’t for the Dodgers they would have made my #1. I’m not sure why I dislike the D-Backs as much as I do but I think I can break it down into 2 reasons. 1) Eric Brynes. I can’t stand Eric Byrnes. From his stupid flip he makes whenever he throws the ball from the outfield to his overratedness, I just can’t stand him. I was happy to see the D-Backs blow money on him for 3 years and not the Giants. 2) I know this has little to do with the team, but the D-Backs have to have the worst announcers outside of Hawk from the Chicago Whitesox. Daron Sutton, who for some reason has to yell louldy whenever any play is happening, and Mark Grace are just terrible. Mark Grace is a moron that has to end every sentence with the word “Folks” and is full of lame one-liners that include “GASSSS”. Just a totally unlikeable pair. I almost always mute them when I catch D-Backs /Giants games on MLB.TV and instead turn on KNBR to hear the great John Miller.
3. Padres – The Padres don’t really bug me too much, so they’ll rank low on my spoiler list. I actually like some of their players like Hoffman, Peavy, and Maddux. Bud Black is a former Giant, so they’ve got that going for them. I’ll probably root for the Padres to win the NL West mostly because they aren’t the Dodgers, D-Backs, or the Rockies.
