Giants hope to make history at home
SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Giants would be happy to play their final nine innings in the Admirals Club Lounge at Kansas City International Airport if it meant a ring and a festive trolley car ride. Free gourmet nuts and small-bite samplers for everybody. Madison Bumgarner could chug seven tiny cans of grapefruit juice. Yes, yes, yes, enough electrical outlets!
As it is, the Giants will play the next three games at AT&T Park, meaning they could win the World Series – their eighth as a franchise and their third on the West Coast – in their home ballpark for the first time since 1922.
Granted, history doesn't ask how, and it most certainly doesn't ask where. (Unless there'll be a quiz.) The Admirals Club Lounge would be fine. But, if the Giants were to cope with their suddenly vulnerable bullpen, and they were to get the ball to Bumgarner on Sunday with an opportunity to clinch, and he were to pitch them past the Kansas City Royals for their fourth win of the series, that surely would mean something to them and the community that has grown around them, particularly since they arrived in China Basin almost 15 years ago.
Plenty would have to happen, of course. More games like Game 1. Fewer like Game 2. They are 4-1 here this October. They are 14-6 here in postseason games since 2010, when they started winning championships again. And the Royals, back in the playoffs after going on three decades, hardly lose anywhere. They played their game Wednesday night and might just be running downhill again.
When it was suggested Thursday evening to Giants manager Bruce Bochy that Game 3 might be kind of important (these are the brilliant observations that come from travel-soggy ball writers), he smiled and said, "Yeah, I'm trying to think how long it's been going now how important this next game is. I think I've heard this since late August. …It's good to be home, but we're not going to change how we play the game and I'm sure they're not either."
The major issue at hand is their bullpen, hallowed for the better part of October and now in some disrepair. Hunter Strickland and Jean Machi were ineffective in Game 2, continuing their trends of recent weeks. While Strickland received most of the attention after his six-pitch detonation of Game 2, it's Machi – the highly competent and vital bridge to Sergio Romo and Santiago Casilla all season – who most concerns the Giants. His postseason ERA, in five appearances, is going on 12. And Tim Lincecum, the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency bullpen dweller of 2014 and a Bay Area hardball icon of years past, came up lame just as Bochy swung that tiny hammer Wednesday night. Bochy reported that Lincecum's aching back was better by Thursday and that he – Lincecum – would have an MRI done. If Lincecum can't go, right-hander George Kontos, who hasn't thrown a competitive pitch since September, could be added.
Anyway, it would appear Bochy is in a bit of a corner with his bullpen, particularly if either or both of his coming starters – Tim Hudson and Ryan Vogelsong – leave those middle innings vacant.
"We think we're going to be fine," Bochy said. "It didn't go well [Wednesday] night, but that hasn't happened very often. So we try to stay positive here, and I want those guys that were in there to stay positive too, Machi and Strickland, because they may be needed."
They have a good fight on their hands. The Royals, and their fans, have as much a claim to this as do the Giants and theirs, arguably more. Kauffman Stadium is alive again, just as AT&T Park has lit up most nights for the past five years. The Giants have just done it more lately. Just not here, and just not for this.
They won in 2012 at Comerica Park in Detroit, in 2010 at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. In 1954 they emptied their bottles at Cleveland Stadium, and in 1933 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. It's not a particularly deep history, not as if, say, the Yankees had somehow managed to stack road clinchers upon road clinchers for almost a century.
There was, however, a similar storyline last October, when the Boston Red Sox clinched at Fenway Park for the first time since 1918. The locals, by last fall, had turned that, too, into a curse, because it just feels better that way. They wept for that, as well, and then sent Mike Napoli into the streets without a shirt, and it was as if Red Sox fans had fallen in love with their team all over again, having witnessed it all up close in their own backyard. That's here, only without as many layers of paint.
AT&T Park is a special place, in sights and sounds and enthusiasm among the finest acreage in major league baseball. It's had its share of fun, and when the Giants won the pennant here last week, the streets were lined with revelers, both upright and not.
So, yeah, not since 1922, when the Giants beat the Yankees of Babe Ruth (he hit .118 in that series), when Frankie Frisch and Heinie Groh each hit nearly .500, before 38,551 at the Polo Grounds, have the Giants celebrated at the end with their own. Which probably very few remember.
(The entire series was played at the Polo Grounds, home park for the Giants and the Yankees, with the "home team" alternating, and Game 5 – the Giants won it in five – was the Giants' turn. Yankee Stadium opened six months later.)
The Royals need only a win here to send the whole thing back to Kansas City for Game 6. Or, for that matter, three to send it all back to KC for a parade. In that case, they'd have the Admirals Club to themselves.
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