In the Old Times, the Giants would never embarrass a fan favorite with a DFA.
If they had a legend finishing out his contract, they’d find a way to keep him on some kind of roster until September, a phantom IL or rehab assignment until rosters expanded and he could get one last ovation from a cheering crowd as he said goodbye. If they had a playoff hero, a multiple World Series champion, a heart-and-soul-of-an-era type player, they’d move this injured guy to the 60-day IL and keep that roster spot warm just so he could come back one last time.
Even if the Farhan Giants wanted to do that, they couldn’t. Just about everything I described in the above paragraph — rehab assignments, rosters expanding, cheering crowds, the 60-day IL — is gone this year. And besides, the Old Times faded away. In a lot of ways, they felt like baseball’s last hurrah of how things used to work, when teams would give a guy a shot because they liked the cut of his jib, and grizzled scouts would sign prospects based on the sound of the ball hitting the catcher’s mitt, and then Matthew Lillard would be humiliated when his top draft pick had trouble with the curve.
Wait, sorry, at least some of that was from the movie Trouble With the Curve. My apologies.
The Giants officially cut ties with Hunter Pence on Sunday, saying goodbye to one of the final remnants of the championship era. Now they’re down to just the Brandons, Pablo Sandoval, and Buster Posey (currently in stasis) who were on the active roster in 2014. Sandoval is on a one year deal, and the other three are all on contracts that expire after the 2021 season, and it’s possible that one of them will get re-signed, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Admittedly, Pence did get re-signed this offseason. After a resurgent first half with the Rangers last year, the Giants saw enough to give him a contract in the hopes that he would mash left-handers. Instead, the decline that Giants fans witnessed in 2017 and 2018 skipped 2019 and came back strong in 2020, with Pence rocking an OPS+ of 12 and fielding extremely poorly when he got the chance to play the outfield.
It has been tough to watch Hunter Pence fade from the player he was to the one he is. His unorthodox swing and throwing motion defined him on the field, and while he’s still playing the same way, giving it everything he’s got on every play, something in him can’t do it anymore. He’s aged, and the league has changed, and every day we watched him we were reminded of just close he was to the end of his playing career.
It was impossible to miss, and impossible not to internalize. This is the end for everyone at some point. This is what it will look like when they run out there on the field and they just can’t perform anymore. We saw it happen to Tim Lincecum, and then a few years later we saw it happen to Matt Cain. We saw Pat Burrell not recapture his 2010 magic in 2011, and Travis Ishikawa and Conor Gillaspie fail to carry their dramatic home runs into 2015 and 2017, respectively. Jeremy Affeldt struggled through a miserable 2015, and Javier Lopez didn’t do much better the next year. The team itself became a shell of itself after its final playoff run in 2016, and Giants fans were there for every bit of it. None of this is new.
It’s especially not new when it comes to Pence, since we already saw it in 2018. His bat had slowed down, and he looked done, and at the end of the year the team gave him a scooter and said goodbye. Then he revitalized himself in winter ball, and was an All-Star for the Rangers in 2019, and the story was irresistible. You don’t have to succumb to age, atrophy, and entropy. You can fight it and win the day.
Maybe you can. But a day is short and a career is long. There’s no winning in the long run. It’s already happening to Pablo Sandoval, whose bat has clearly slowed even from last year. It’s happening to Brandon Crawford, whose glove is not nearly as steady as it was a few years ago. It’s happening to Brandon Belt, whose injuries have transformed from people hitting him with baseballs in bad spots to his body getting creakier, and keeping him off the field a little more. And Buster Posey’s not anywhere near the kind of hitter that he used to be, to put it mildly.
At times, this is hard to watch. But there’s also something sort of beautiful about it — the knowledge that we’ve been there for these guys for large parts of their careers, if not the whole thing, and we’re gonna be there at the end too. These are our guys, and we’re gonna take whatever joy we can from seeing them on the field. There’s sadness, but there’s also appreciation and respect for everything they were and everything they are now.
We miss the old days, but the old days weren’t going to stick around forever. The world changes, and if you don’t change with it, you get left behind. Maybe you get left behind even if you do try to change with it. That’s okay. These aren’t the Old Times anymore. Hunter Pence gave everything he had and it wasn’t enough, and he kept doing it. There’s something to be proud of there.
If we’re lucky, we’ll be doing this exact same thing in 15 years with Joey Bart and the other stars of the Second Dynasty. If not, we can still appreciate what we had, and what we have now. It was time for Hunter Pence to go, and he went with grace, gratitude, and understanding. The real tragedy is that everyone isn’t more like him.