MADE ME BELIEVE

Dear Spike:

Here's to the misfits. The outcasts. The freaks.

Here's to surprise. To passion. To dreams.

Here's to the team that made me believe, again, in baseball.

Here's to the San Francisco Giants.

You'll not likely remember this moment, but I'd like you to understand it, so I'll fill you in on the particulars: You were sitting in your high chair, eating some bananas and chocolate chips, when Brian Wilson blew a fastball past Nelson Cruz to give the Giants their first championship since your grandfather was still in diapers.

You, your mother and I all exploded into cheers. Foot stomping. Hallelujah-making. Whooping and hollering and laughing and crying.

Yes, a little bit of crying.

Why should I care like this? About a game? About a game played by millionaires?

Well, maybe I shouldn't. And for a long time I didn't.

I grew up on this game, following the Giants and the more successful band of Bash Brothers on the opposite side of the Bay. I can still remember the lineups of both the teams that faced off in the 1989 "Bay Bridge" World Series. That series was interrupted by an incredible earthquake — but when it finally ended with an Oakland A's victory, I remember wishing that it could have gone on forever, so that night after night I could hide under my covers and tune my little red radio in to listen to Will Clark knock a Dave Stewart pitch over the center field fence, or to hear about how Carney Lansford snagged a rocket-shot off Matt Williams' bat that just should have gone up the third base line for a double. I had it all planned out: The A's would win a game, and then the Giants would win a game. And they'd just keep playing, forever and ever, marching from one side of the bay to the other, and back again.

Four years later, the players — many of them millionaires, many times over — stopped putting on their spikes over a dispute regarding revenue sharing with team owners. For the record, I think the owners were greedy pigs, but it was still a strike over a game played by rich men. And it resulted in the cancellation of a large part of the 1994 season, including the playoffs and World Series.

Sacrilege.

After that, it almost didn't matter when I learned that many of the players I'd cheered for in that all-too-short World Series in 1989 were using steroids. Mark McGwire. Jose Canseco. Traitors. Scum. Cheaters.

But I didn't need to know that Barry Bonds was on the juice to know that guy was a complete horse's ass. For 14 years, I couldn't look at The Giants.

But I fell in love again last year during a date with your mother at the Giants' beautiful ballpark at Willie Mays Plaza, right across the street from where your great grandfather once worked as a copy editor off Mission Bay. We ate hot dogs and Crackerjack and watched Tim Lincecum pitch a less-than-perfect game. Still, to watch that young man, uniform hanging off his skinny frame, hurl a baseball that fast. Incredible.

What a freak.

And a completely likable freak at that. Sure enough, as manager Bruce Bochy pieced together a ragtag gang of players for the 2010 season, they were all just...

... so damn likable.

Oh, they're still millionaires. And some of them are scoundrels, no doubt. But they keep it to themselves. And that's really all I've ever asked of my professional athletes.

So there was Edger Renteria, an aging and injury-prone infielder who not so long ago had been relegated to the minor leagues.

And there was Buster Posey, a 23-going-on-14-year-old kid with a swing as sweet as a honey-dipped Baby Ruth.

And there was Aubrey Huff, the veteran who had never even been to the playoffs and who didn't even have a team to play for nine months ago.

And then, this evening, there was Lincecum, pitching as perfect a game as I've ever seen in the Series. Eight innings against one of the best hitting teams in the big leagues. Ten strikeouts. Just three hits.

Oh, I could go on. And I will. Again and again. Not all bedtime stories are fairy tales, but this one will surely sound like one.

Love,
dad