On Jackie Robinson Night, Giants win in early morning

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — The game was everything baseball could be and should be, full of passion and tension, and carrying with it thoughts of a pioneer whose courage and skill helped shape the sport to what it has become.

This was the night the Major Leagues honored Jackie Robinson, and at AT&T Park, the timing was perfect, even if the game time, 4 hours and 54 minutes, may not have been.

The Dodgers, Jackie’s team, against the Giants, which almost were Jackie’s team.

The Brooklyn Dodgers, of course, when Robinson in June 1947 became the first African-American to play in the major leagues. And the New York Giants, who nine and half years later, in December 1956, traded for Robinson, unaware — as were the Dodgers — that Jackie had retired.

So much on this Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, 12 innings of baseball coming to an end at 12:14 a.m., a beautiful end for the several thousand fans who remained from the sellout crowd of 42,469.

Hector Sanchez singled home Brandon Crawford from third, and the Giants were 3-2 winners.

The rivalry. The revelry. The reminders that major league baseball was off-limits to African-Americans until 1947 when Jackie, as beautifully planned by Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, was elevated to the big club.

You know the story. You’ve seen the movie “42,” a slightly embellished version of Jackie’s life, as Hollywood biopics tend to be. That was Jackie’s number, 42, and Tuesday night it was worn by every player on both teams, by every player in the majors.

A grand gesture by the Giants, who used both their main radio announcer, Jon Miller, and famed Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully for the pre-game introductions. For the 86-year-old Scully, there was great meaning.

Beginning with the Dodgers in 1950, Scully not only knew Robinson but that winter he somehow got involved in an ice skating race with Jackie.

“We had some sort of symposium up at Grossinger’s in the Catskills,” Scully said earlier in the long evening. “There was a rink. I had grown up in New York, so I knew how to skate. Jackie, I don’t think had ever been on skates.

“He said, ‘I’ll race you.’ I was surprised. ‘But you don’t know how to skate.’  He told me, ‘That’s the way to learn.’”

What America learned was that baseball truly became an American game when the doors were opened to all races.

Another African-American who followed Robinson into the majors was Monte Irvin, who joined the Giants out of the Negro Leagues and played his way into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Irvin, 95, was invited to the pre-game festivities but sent a note, read to the crowd, that at his age air travel was too hard on his body. 

Irwin played with Willie Mays, and Mays, heading for his 83^rd birthday, was in the Giants' clubhouse before the game, although he didn’t take part in any ceremonies. Too bad.

Another nice touch was the tribute to Boston on this first-year anniversary of the bombing at the marathon finish line. Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” the Red Sox’ theme song, was played over the sound system, and the AT&T crowd sang along, as the fans do at Fenway Park.

There was a full moon peering down from beyond McCovey Cove, further embellishing an evening made even more special when Sanchez, who had struck out as pinch hitter in the ninth and then replaced Buster Posey at catcher, ripped a pitch off Brandon League with two outs in the bottom of the 12^th.

“I had to do something,” joked Sanchez. “My wife was sitting in our car in the parking lot for three hours.”

League was the seventh Dodgers pitcher. Yusmeiro Petit, who got the victory, was the eighth used by the Giants.

“It’s great that every year we honor Jackie Robinson the way we do,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said in his pre-game interview in the dugout. “No man had his impact on baseball and society.”

Bochy made his comments at 4:30 p.m. nearly eight full hours before he and his team were done for the evening. And the morning.

This one won’t be forgotten for a long while.

Romo off, Reddick on: Baseball is back

By Art Spander

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The sun was shining, and the A’s and Giants were playing ball. What else do you need to know? That Sergio Romo couldn’t find his changeup pitch? That Josh Reddick twice reached over the right-field fence to steal away home runs? That 6,498 fans were living it up?

An exhibition, the opener, the two Bay Area teams. And every time they play, for real or not — although isn’t baseball the truest form of reality even when the game doesn’t count? — in our minds it’s the 1989 World Series once again.

Time passes, baseball remains eternal.

It’s all about anticipation, about the new kids on the block, about the veterans, about the players — and the plays. When baseball comes around, we’re all young again, remembering what was, wondering what will be.

Strike three, ball four, go the lyrics from Damn Yankees, “walk a run you’ll tie the score.” 

Other lyrics, from South Pacific, “ . . . her skin is tender as DiMaggio’s glove . . .”

A sport, a metaphor, an ideal.      

The greatest mass dream America ever had. The great Frank Deford said that of spring training, a time of myth and magic, when winter melts away and no one has a care.

There used to be an eatery near Scottsdale Stadium, Pischke’s, where the posted admonition was “No Sniveling.” Easy advice. Nobody snivels during spring training.

They cheer. They laugh. They hope. They marvel.

“I don’t think I’d seen anybody go higher against the wall here,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said of Reddick’s superb defense. “And he did it twice. Back to back. What do you think the odds were on that?”

Mike Morse, the new Giant, the guy they signed to play left field, to hit home runs, smacked both those balls, one in the second inning, the other in the fourth.

They were over the fence. They were in Reddick’s glove.

"He's known for doing that, man," Morse said. "I'm happy to help him work on it in spring training, I guess."

Reddick even got a standing ovation from Giants fans. They know special when they see it. Those were special.     

“When I looked up, it was probably two feet above my head,” said Reddick, “and I guess got lucky to throw my glove at it. I just quick-snatched it, I guess you could say. I was shocked, even being able to come close to it. No idea how I did it.”

The A’s did it to the Giants, 10-5. Four runs in the first for Oakland. Six in the fourth. “A rough day for Romo,” said Bochy of Romo who gave up seven hits and all the runs in that sixth. “He was off a little bit.”

Twenty-six players used by the Athletics, 26 by the Giants. Players with numbers like wide receivers (81, the Giants’ Adam Duvall, who homered in the bottom of the ninth). With numbers like defensive linemen (67, the Giants’ Andrew Susac).

It’s like Little League. Everybody gets in.

Before the game, Larry Baer, the Giants’ president, held court in the dugout. He said he wants to see the A’s get their ballpark. In Oakland.

“If we can help them get it, we will,” said Baer. Sharing AT&T for a while wouldn’t be out of the question, if that fits into the A’s plans.

He said he wants to see the Giants rebound after their awful 2013 season, so out of character for the franchise.

“It felt strange,” he said of not being in the race. “It was like that’s not in our DNA.”

He said he wants to see the Giants sell from 2.8 to 3 million tickets, which presumably they will do.

“Nobody has said the Giants can’t make it on the field because of money,” was Baer’s outlook. Yes, the Dodgers have billions, and won the National League West last year, but don’t think the Giants won’t spend when it’s needed — in August and September.

“Besides,” Baer pointed out, “it’s how the money is spent. Look at the A’s.”

Yes, look at the A’s, careful with their dollars, who won their division again, who in Nick Punto have a shortstop that solidifies the infield defense, who as it was shown Wednesday can be frighteningly aggressive at the plate.

The new signee, Sam Fuld, led off the game with a single to center. And away we went, without hesitation. Bang, boom, wham. In the end 16 hits, and only four walks.

The A’s weren’t waiting. The waiting was done for all. Baseball was back.

Giants’ frustration turns into victory

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — The manager felt exactly like the fans. Frustrated, disappointed, maybe if he would confide, defeated. The Giants, the World Series Champion Giants, had spent four hours Tuesday night “squandering a 6-0 lead,” as Bruce Bochy so accurately phrased it.

Now a bit before noon Wednesday, a weary Bochy was meeting his obligations and the media. “That,” he said to the journalists about the night before, “was one of our worst games.”

One of their worst games in one of their worst recent seasons. It’s one thing not to repeat. It’s another to plummet, to bumble in the field, to fail at the plate, to be embarrassed.

Baseball, it’s been said, is designed to test a man, to find how he can react when times are going poorly, because as we’ve seen from the celebrations and the acclaim, we know how he will react when everything’s going well.

How does he play the mental game, often the most difficult of all? Does he solider on? Does he start contemplating the end of the schedule?

What we found out a few hours after Bochy’s remarks was what Bochy said he already knew. The Giants still have their pride, and their professionalism.

The Giants loaded the bases in the seventh on three walks with nobody out. Only one of those runners scored. The Giants trailed, 3-2, and you surmised they would lose another. They didn’t, getting two runs in the bottom of the eighth to beat the Colorado Rockies, 4-3.

The feeling in the clubhouse was more of relief than elation. More of reassurance than satisfaction.

“If we had lost this game,” conceded Bochy, “after the way we did (Tuesday) night it would have been really bad, really frustrating. This would have been a hard game to take.”

Especially with a 10-game road trip against the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees starting Thursday. Especially with a home crowd, one of those empty-seat sellouts, the 240th in a row, screaming as if the Giants were in first place, not in last.

“The fans are still behind us,” said Brandon Belt.

The Giants on Wednesday at AT&T Park got what they had been missing, effective pitching and timely hitting in the same game. The mark of a lousy team is to lose a game 9-8 and then the next day lose one, say, 3-2. Which, after a seventh inning when they had the bases loaded and scored only one run — on a sacrifice fly — appeared likely.

But not only did San Francisco win, it also won a home stand (2-2 against Arizona, 2-1 against Colorado) for the first time since May. The Giants also received fine pitching again from Yusmeiro Petit. On Friday, he was one out from a perfect game. On Wednesday, he retired the first nine batters he faced in order — meaning only one base runner in 13 innings — but then he wobbled in the sixth and came out.

Still, three runs allowed in 14 2/3 innings is the stuff of a guy who might very well be a starter next season. He’s hoping as much, as he explained through a translator. So is management.

“He’s a really smart pitcher,” said Bochy.

Petit is 29, and it took him a long while to get to the bigs, but perhaps his time has come. In 5 2/3 innings Wednesday, Petit struck out seven.

“We’re playing hard,” said Bochy. “I never doubted that. We don’t have a choice. This is what we’re paid to do.”

They just haven’t done it very well much of the year. Only two statistics are truly important: runs scored and runs allowed. The Giants for weeks now haven’t been able to get people around the bases and across home plate. They did Wednesday because Marco Scutaro, six weeks from his 38th birthday, refused to rest, and because Belt drove a pitch to the opposite field, left.

With the bases loaded in the eighth — in part due to a perfect sacrifice bunt by pinch hitter Eire Adrianza — and one out, Scutaro singled home the run that tied the game, 3-3. Belt followed with a single that would prove to win the game.

“Marco doesn’t like days off,” said Bochy. “He wanted to win this game.”

And so he and Belt, along with Angel Pagan and Brandon Crawford, won it.

“This could take us into next year,” said Belt.

Where it takes them immediately is to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers, supplanting the Giants as the best team in National League West, are waiting.

“There will be a lot of people down there,” Bochy said, referring to expected sellout crowds. “It will be good for our young players to be on a stage like that. We’re going to go down there and try to win some ballgames.”

Something they haven’t done very often — Wednesday being a fine exception.

Zito deserved a better ending

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — He deserved a better ending. Maybe not red-carpet, but not red-faced either.

Barry Zito should have been able to walk away with a smile, with the cheers of thousands ringing in his ears. That’s the way it happens in the movies. The way it happens in reality was played out on a depressing Wednesday at AT&T Park.

The guess is that the game Zito pitched against the Boston Red Sox, the game the Giants in this what-else-can-go-wrong season would lose 12-1, was his last start for San Francisco, his farewell in a year during which neither he nor his team fared well.

Zito wasn’t very effective, not that anyone expected him to be, and the Giants, who can’t field and can’t hit, were even less so. A franchise in search of itself, and reasons for the decline, surely will try someone, anyone, other than Zito from here on out — unless injury demands otherwise.

So it is time to acknowledge the man, as opposed to the player, because Barry Zito was always a man no matter how poorly he threw or how miserably he was treated by the media or the fans.

Good times — and he knew those — or bad times, Zito was mature and in control. If not always in control of a fastball or curve.

I’ve dealt with the best and the rudest in a half century of sports journalism, athletes whose response to even the most harmless of questions could be an obscenity or a quick rush to a hiding place.  

Barry Zito took the blows. What he didn’t take was the criticism as personal. He accepted it as part of the job.

Sure he had the big salary, but that’s the nature of the beast. If you had won a Cy Young Award, as did Zito with the Athletics, and you were in demand in a seller’s market, the dollars would be there.

The Giants wanted this Barry to be a softer, more kindly face of the team than the other Barry, Bonds, so they spent and acquired him.

Zito didn’t pay off. Not until last season, 2012, when needed most.

In the playoffs, in the World Series, he pitched with guile and grace. The Giants don’t win a championship without Zito. Nothing could be more apparent.

Other than the fact his days with the Giants are numbered. They sent him to the bullpen briefly, then Wednesday, gave him the opportunity to start. “He could have come out better,” said Bruce Bochy, the San Francisco manager, who is marvelously protective. “He hung a slider...”

That was smacked into the left field seats in the second inning by Will Middlebrooks. Only 2-0 at that point, but the demons were hovering.

The night before, Tuesday, the Giants won their only game of the series from Boston, a game that in itself might not have meant much but could have been seen as a small step toward the respectability that had flown with the wind.

“The season hasn’t gone the way we hoped,” Bochy had said, as if the fact had to be verbalized. It hasn’t gone the way he hoped, the front office hoped and most of all the way the fans hoped.

“But we have some pride,” Bochy said. 

And almost out of nowhere, they had a 3-2 victory over the Red Sox at AT&T Park, because Ryan Vogelsong became the pitcher he had been — and surely has a chance to be next season — and because Brayan Villarreal walked Marco Scutaro with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth on the only four pitches he threw.

Such a disaster, the defending World Series champion Giants, with a lousy defense, a pathetic offense and pitching that at best could be called erratic.

The way everything went right in 2012 is the way almost everything has gone wrong in 2013.

Except the attendance, the Giants now with 229 consecutive regular-season sellouts. The fans keep coming because the tickets were sold and — because, as on Tuesday — they may be rewarded.

“We have a huge fan base,” agreed Bochy. “I was disappointed in the way we played Monday night (losing 7-0).”

He was even more disappointed Wednesday. “We drifted mentally,” he said. “That shouldn’t happen playing a good team like Boston. We had played well the night before.”

So Zito will be gone in 2014. As will Tim Lincecum. Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner, as now, continue to be the main men of a franchise built around pitching. Vogelsong’s work Tuesday night indicates he should be No. 3. And then?

Maybe the Giants obtain another starter — without Zito or Lincecum’s salaries on the ledger, there will be room financially. More likely they go after a left fielder, someone with power.

Yet whoever is on the mound or in left, the fielding must improve. There are 30 teams in the majors. The Giants rank 29th in defense.

“It’s hard to explain,” said Bochy.

He didn’t need to explain his choice of Zito, who a month earlier had been pulled from the rotation.

“I think (Zito) has earned this,” Bochy said Tuesday. “He’s a guy who has done a lot for us. I know it’s been an up-and-down year. He’s been waiting for his turn, so he gets to go first. My hope is he goes out and throws the ball great and stays in the rotation.”

He didn’t. He won’t.

Newsday (N.Y.): Everybody loves Giants catcher Buster Posey

By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

SAN FRANCISCO — The statistics and fan votes for the All-Star Game tell more about the man than the man chooses to tell us. "I don't like talking about myself,'' Giants catcher Buster Posey said.

So others must talk about him — his manager, his teammates, a Giants radio and television commentator, and an executive from a sports drink firm.

Read the full story here.

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