My 2008 NL Preview

It's probably been written by a lot of people, but your 2008 San Francisco Giants, for the first time in the, probably, last...six or seven years(?) can be rooted for.  

The past such-and-such number of seasons have seen Giants fans, myself included, admit their Bay Area fandom with a throat-clear and wink and a nod and a "Fuck you!  I come to the park to be entertained!" and all the innocence of answering the door with a giant spooge hanging off your ear a la Ben Stiller in "There's Something About Mary."  We had become more defiant over the past couple of seasons though, feeling our boy was bearing an inordinate amount of the juicing focus and punishment.  We shouted back accusations of racism and hypocrisy (remember the '93 Phillies, Phillie fans?  Remember Mark McGwire, everyone else?), re-embraced the chase and didn't care about the spooge on our ear.  We knew it was there.  We were the guy with fucking spooge on our ear.  Like when you see that guy at the bar with the dreads who you've only seen on the street like twenty times as you're driving by and now you are standing three feet away at "Mother's" and he drinks Guinness too and maybe you say a couple things to him and you're going to tell all your friends you saw the guy with dreads at the bar and he wasn't all that bad except he's a giant douche for walking around with dreads and kind of stinks but in your heart, you know, he's more of a fucking stud than you'll ever be because he knows he stinks and is the star of the show anyway and puts up with your little bitch-ass running home to your faggot backwards-hat wearing fraternity wannabe friends to ridicule him and you wish you had the balls to be dreads guy.  We were the dreads guy.  It wasn't always easy.  There was that in-between phase when we just looked kind of stupid and wanted to wash our hair, but goddammit if it didn't make us love our dreads all the more in the end.  The transition from "I need to see proof to believe Bonds did it," to "Yeah, he fucking did it and I don't give a shit," was hard, but made us hard.  We put up with the eye rolls and the condescension, and the douchy self-righteous faggot backwards-hat fraternity wannabe Cub or Red Sox fan, knowing the vitriol, the show of disgust, the national media polls that demonstrated Bonds didn't belong in the Hall or there should be an asterisk on 756, was bullshit, and we laughed at you.  We knew those polls were shit.  We knew if Bonds had done that stuff for your team in your town, you'd be voting to protect what he'd done, that you'd actually explore the whole issue.  We knew the Bonds-hate that overtook the sports nation was an easy, bandwagon-jumping, abandonment of intellectual integrity, and we laughed at you.  We gained respect for the Giants for sticking with their guy; the guy who'd built their park; the guy who'd brought in money and fans and fans and more fans.  In the end, we were the guy in movies that, when coming to the fork in the road, took the one with dead and snarled trees and howling wolves.  You took the other one.  The one with green grass and bunnies.  We've become Tom Berrenger in "Platoon."  You are Jon Cusack in "Serendipity."     

Now the Giants and their fans find themselves changed.  Bonds, of course, is the only big departure, but this is a new team playing in a new era with names like Ortmeier, Bocock, Rowand and Velez.  Introducing Randy Winn as Jeff Kent and Bengie Molina as Bonds.  Columnists, bloggers and anyone else a media organization has subjectively dubbed, "expert," have picked the Giants to finish last in the NL West.  They've thrown insults at the team, hardly batting an eye, writing things about Omar losing a step, or Zito's huge contract.  One blogger, of whom I generally find myself a fan, called predicting a last-place finish, the, "Easiest pick in all of baseball."  The New York Times' Tyler Kepner writes, "If the hitting coach Carney Lansford coaxes runs from this bunch, he's a genius," even managing to sneak in a big Giants nut-kick with the Braves snippet.  We're still laughing.  That anyone at the Times would ever think Kepner's piece knowledgeable is hifuckinglarious.  Nothing about two of the best young pitchers in baseball?  That anyone feels turning a Major League Baseball team full of professionals into a punchline from afar is acceptable is, quite frankly, really, really, super douchy.  But we laugh at the way your articles or posts or snarky little digs trick our minds into thinking we're smelling Massengill emanating from the computer.  Will your 2008 San Francisco Giants finish anywhere in the top half of the NL?  Most assuredly, no.  It's unlikely an offense, built around three 6 or 7 hitters is going to put up runs with any consistency.  Yeah, the Giants are going to lose, but they are going to strike out fourteen of your guys each night doing it, with Lincecum, Cain and Correia.  And we're going to think it all the sweeter when our Giants who were weren't supposed to do shit take two of three from your Cubs or Phillies or Mets and Brian Wilson saves those games and you ask yourself, "Who the fuck is Brian Wilson," and you won't be alone because you and the rest of the baseball world thought all the 2008 San Francisco Giants deserved was a punchline. 

So here are my 2008 NL predictions:

Fuck off.