Bumgarner

At only 25 years of age, Madison Bumgarner has already appeared in three World Series. His performance in those series is even more impressive: 4 wins, 0 losses, 1 save, 31 strikeouts, 0.53 WHIP, .121 BAA, and most outstanding is a 0.25 ERA, the lowest ever. He could never appear in another World Series, and still be talked about as being one of the best World Series pitchers of all time!

San Francisco Giants Dynasty

For the third time in five years, the San Francisco Giants are World Series champions!

Wild Card World Series

This year's American League and National League representatives in the World Series feature the last two teams to qualify for the postseason: The Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants. These two wild card teams both posted sub 90 win seasons, marking the first time that both teams in the World Series won less than 90 games.

Grand Slam

San Francisco Giants' Brandon Crawford became the first shortstop to hit a postseason Grand Slam during their Wild Card game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at the beginning of this month.

Identical Records

This year, three different "cross-town" rivals finished with identical records. The Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals both went 96-66, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's went 88-74, and the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox went 73-89.

California Love

For the first time ever, four teams from California have made the Major League Baseball Playoffs.

Sorry San Diego.

The Lost Art Of The Autograph

Baseball and autographs go hand in hand. If you've been fortunate enough to have gotten a ball signed the last time you were at the park, you may have also asked the player to write down their number on it. Chances are, if you haven't, other people may have a hard time distinguishing whose autograph that actually belong to. Case in point, this autograph:

Figured it out yet?






This Johnny Hancock belongs to none other than former Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants. It would be hard for almost anyone who wasn't familiar with his style of signature to be able to say it belonged to him. He isn't alone. As players today are asked more and more often to sign autographs for fans, baseball card companies, and other promotions, they are forced to make a decision: With the small amount of time allotted for autographs, should I sign less autographs, or should I modify my signature to something quicker to sign, in order to increase the amount of things I can sign? Most players these days choose the latter.

It wasn't always this. Feast your eyes on these two autographs and see if you have better luck figuring out who they belonged to:

That was a lot easier, right? Up top, you have the dean of the dignified autograph, former Minnesota Twins great Harmon Killebrew. At the bottom? I really hope I don't have to tell you that that belongs to the Great Bambino, Babe Ruth.

For more reading, check out this recent New York Times article.

Masanori Murakami

Masahiro Tanaka has been on a tear this spring training season, giving New York Yankees fans hope that their newly signed Japanese star will help their team get back into the playoffs. While it has become commonplace for Major League Baseball to sign Japanese players from the Nippon Professional Baseball league, things were not always this way.

In 1964, three Japanese baseball players from the Osaka Nankai Hawks arrived in Arizona at the San Francisco Giants' Spring Training camp in Casa Grande, Arizona. These three pitchers were all headed to Single-A Fresno in what was termed an "exchange-student" type of event. It was expected the the Giants would eventually send over three players as well. On September 1st, one of those three, Masanori Murakami, was called up to pitch in the bigs (pitching a scoreless inning against the New York Mets), thus becoming the first Japanese pitcher in Major League history. In that final month of the season, the southpaw had nine relief appearances, a 1.80 ERA and a save. He came back the following year, where he appeared in 45 games, starting one of them, and going 4-1 with eight saves and a 3.75 ERA.

Alas, he would not return to MLB after 1965 and that ended what could have been a potentially good Major League career. There were still fresh wounds from World War II and resentment towards Japan, with Giants manager Herman Franks receiving death threats for pitching Murakami. In fact, Franks ended up needing FBI protection for a period of time. It took another 31 years for Hideo Nomo to become the second Japanese player to play for a Major League team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Double Rainbow!

A beautiful September evening in San Francisco gave us this wonderful picture of a double rainbow over AT&T Park during tonight's game. Enjoy!

Gotta love it

Days like these are why I love September Baseball so much. 4 of the 5 teams in the National League West are playing against each other. The San Francisco Giants have the lead, but the Los Angeles Dodgers are just 4.5 games behind. And then you get scores like these:

They're both in extra inning and the games are tied. Every game is that much more magnified this time of year, it's great!

The 2012 NL Batting Champion?

An interesting development is happening in baseball this season with regard to the National League batting champion.

All-Star Melky Cabrera of the San Francisco Giants was suspended for 50 games on August 15, 2012 for use of performance enhancing drugs. He was having the best season of his career, hitting .346 with 159 hits, 11 home runs, and 69 RBIs. And this is where things gets interesting.

Melky had had 501 plate appearances. He was in a tight race with Pittsburgh Pirate Andrew McCutchen for the National League batting title, with McCutchen leading. In order to qualify for the batting title, you need to have at least 502 plate appearances, so Melky fell one short, right? Wrong. The rules say you that a non-qualifying player will have as many hitless at-bats added to his total as it takes to get him to the qualifying number. So then Melky with have an 0-for-1 at bat added his number and this brings his batting average that will appear on the back of next year's baseball card too.... .346. No change at all.

Earlier this week, McCutchen's batting average fell below Melky's, and is currently at .344. Unless McCutchen raises it above .346 before the season is over, Melky will be this years batting champion, without having played the last 45 games of the season.

I can't wait to see what happens then!

Baseball is pretty amazing

I was all ready to post up a completely different piece, and then this happened:

Pablo Sandoval loses the ball in the air and makes a desperate scoop. Brandon Crawford comes out of nowhere to dive and save he catch. As teammate Sergio Romo described "Homeboy comes down diving. Baseball is pretty amazing." Just another one of those plays that makes you smile and feel good.

Barry Bonds was the greatest hitter ever.

I grew up a San Francisco Giants fan, and thus also a Barry Bonds fan. However you feel about the steroids things, I think it's undeniable that he was one of the best players ever. Craig Robinson over at Flip Flop Fly Ball makes some AWESOME infographics, and one of his recent ones about Barry caught my eye:

No one will ever be able to reproduce what he did between 2001-2004. Part of it will be that no one will ever be able to juice the way he (and the rest of MLB) did. Look at those ridiculous slugging numbers! And the amount of intentional walks in 2004! If he's not the best ever, he's certainly the best player I'll ever see live.