The San Francisco Giants are coming off a second World Series championship in three years, but if you watch ESPN or any other mainstream sports channel, you probably weren’t aware of this.
What the Giants have accomplished over the last three years is an incredible feat in the realm of sports. Before the Giants won their first title in 2010, they hadn’t won one in 54 years. Then, two years later, they win a second one! This doesn’t happen often in baseball. Should the Giants win a third world championship this season, they will become the first National League team ever to win three World Series in four years. That’s the kind of stuff that makes you a dynasty but no one is talking about the Giants’ dynasty.
If you flip on ESPN, all the so-called baseball “experts” are talking about how great the Los Angeles Dodgers are, or how the Detroit Tigers are the best overall team in baseball. What have the Dodgers won in the last five years? Didn’t Detroit get swept in the World Series last year by the Giants?
These analysts make predictions based on stats they read off a piece of paper. They think Detroit and LA are the end-all-be-all of baseball because of all the big names and all-stars they have on their teams. Just because a team is filled with stars does not mean it will be successful. The Boston Red Sox tried this method in 2011.
The team acquired big name players like Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford, and was the favorite to win the World Series. What did the Sox do? They didn’t even make the playoffs. Then the following season they completely collapsed and finished near the bottom of the division. Then they got rid of Gonzalez and Crawford because their huge egos and couldn’t deal with the fact that they were a huge part of why the team lost. Where are those players now? Both are with LA.
Prognostication is one of the stupidest and overdone things a sports analyst can do. How can you accurately predict what a team will do over a 162-game season? Absolutely no one picked the Oakland Athletics to win many games last season. In fact, most people had them losing more than 100 games. What did the swinging A’s do last season? They won the American League Western Division with a record of 94-68, taking down the mighty Texas Rangers.
So you might ask how the “experts” at ESPN pegged the Giants chances of repeating as champions of the Western Division. Not a single person on “Baseball Tonight” had the Giants winning their division. Everyone picked the epitome of excellence: Dodgers.
I guess winning two world championships, having one of the best pitching staffs in baseball and also having a catcher who happens to be the reigning National League Most Valuable Player isn’t enough to get people to think the Giants might actually be good this season.
People can make all the predictions they want, but it all comes down to what happens on the diamond. The Dodgers can absolutely win the division this year, but so can the Giants, or any other Western team. It doesn’t matter how good a team looks on paper; it only matters how good they perform on the field.