This baseball season, like every baseball season, has gone on forever. How long ago was it that LaMonte Wade Jr was just some guy the Giants got from the Twins over the offseason? Seventeen lifetimes? More? Remember when the bullpen was an absolute trash heap and Farhan didn’t know how to build bullpens and Kapler didn’t know how to manage bullpens and there wasn’t anyone worth a damn in there other than Rogers (tops out at 85, sure to be exposed!!!!) and McGee (only throws fastballs, sure to be exposed!!!!!!)? That was forever ago. This has gone on forever.
It also feels like it shouldn’t be over yet.
This is how baseball is, and I hope you appreciate just how hard I’m going to have to work here to not rip off Bart Giamatti. It eases its way into the year with Spring Training, and then for six months it’s an everyday presence, like sleeping or showering or wanting to not have to wear a mask anymore but wearing it anyway and not resenting the people who make you because they’re not the ones prolonging this pandemic but instead resenting the people who refuse to get vaccinated. You know, normal stuff.
But the Giants have been playing, pretty much every day, for six months. It’s not that time doesn’t seem to have passed (it’s been forever, if you’ll recall), but this is how life is. In the morning, you eat breakfast and go to work. In the afternoon, you come home — or continue to be at home, only with Zoom now turned off — after a long day of resenting your job. In the evening, there is a baseball game. Sleep, repeat, sleep, repeat. The summer passes.
That rhythm is coming to an end. Maybe this summer has felt a little shorter (though still forever) because the Giants have been so good; dread slows time down, and there has been a notable absence of Giants-related dread for the first time in a very long time. Maybe a basically normal season has been so welcome after 2020 that we’ve all been able to bask in it a little more, letting it wash over us. Maybe it doesn’t feel like the end of the season because the Giants have barely played the Padres in the last four months, and by the end of the season Giants fans are supposed to be sick of the Padres.
Or maybe other people don’t have the same experiences and perceptions I do. Also possible!
All the same, it seems too soon for the last road trip of the year. It seems too soon for the last anything of the year, but here we are. The season has both not flown by — forever — and flown by. The Giants have already faced the Dodgers for the last time in the regular season this year, and have gone to Arizona for the last time and hosted the Rockies for the last time. They have four series left, and then the chips will fall where they will fall, and the postseason will start.
One of those chips, by the way, will be Giants fans becoming extremely sick of the Padres extremely soon. 10 games in 21 days? This is MADNESS. What depraved Hairston will emerge from the Gaslamp this year? DON’T THINK WE’RE NOT EMOTIONALLY PREPARED, PADRES.
But if you have to have one last road trip of the year, seemingly early but actually right on time in the typical way, what better way to go out than Petco Park and Coors Field? The first one is a wild card, with an exciting young team that has completely collapsed — except against the Giants, of fucking course — but can still do massive amounts of damage in the blink of an eye.
The second one is a dystopian hellscape whose very existence suggests the presence of a wrathful God forcing you to atone for your sins. Coors Field will always hurt you, because it is its nature to hurt you and yours to be hurt by it. It’s like if the scorpion was all, “I’m gonna hurt you now,” and you, the frog, were like, “Yep, that’s right, you do this nine times a year and it always sucks.” Then you let the scorpion sting you and you both die, except Coors Field lasts forever, because that was the unholy pact its architects signed in blood.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, is what I’m saying here.
Also, every game will be crucial to determining who wins the division. Unless the Giants go 5-0 over the first five games while the second place Dodgers go 0-5. They should do that and make me look stupid. Boy will my face be red!
The end of the season is just about here, and it has both come too soon and taken italicized forever to arrive. The Giants’ last road trip of the season starts tonight in San Diego and it’ll go a long way to whether this ends up being one of the all-time San Francisco Giants seasons, or just a year when they couldn’t quite seal the deal and had to settle for a wild card. I’m nervous. I’m scared. I’m excited. I can’t wait.
And I’m already sick of the Padres in anticipation.