The business of bringing the Giants back officially began with bringing a great Giant like Buster Posey back.
Baseball knows what all Giants fans know: Posey was more than just a great player, more than just one of the most popular players the team has ever had. He was the face and the everyday star of what became the best Giants team of all -- the one that won three World Series in five seasons (between 2010 and '14), something no Giants team had ever done all the way back to the Polo Grounds 100 years ago.
Posey was that kind of star behind the plate, catching the ace of that team -- Madison Bumgarner -- in those years. Now he is back, and the Giants are back, at least for now, near the top of the best division in baseball, the National League West, on their way back to New York for a weekend series with the Yankees. They bring with them a 9-3 record that is the second best in baseball behind the Padres, and also good enough to have them ahead of the Dodgers.
It is only a start, made even more surprising by the fact that only Mike Yastrzemski (.344) and Jung Hoo Lee (.333) have been hot so far at the plate, and Willy Adames, the shortstop who was their big free-agent buy over the winter, hasn¡¯t gotten his own batting average over .200 yet. But the Giants have gotten pitching -- both from their starters and from the bullpen -- and they have been a team of grinders like Posey¡¯s old Giants were. And in what has been a very small sampling from a very long season, they have managed to hang tough in the West.
Will it last? The long season will tell us that. The Giants sure are in there with the champs, which means the Dodgers. The Diamondbacks, currently in fourth place in the NL West, were in the World Series the season before last. The Padres? They came as close to beating the Dodgers last October as either the Mets or Yankees did later, leading them 2-1 in the NL Division Series and basically holding two match points before they stopped hitting.
The last time the Giants were really in play was four years ago, when they won 107 regular-season games when Gabe Kapler was the manager, and they were a game better than the Dodgers in what turned out to be a historic divisional race. But then they started to go one way while the rest of the division was going another. Last year, they finished 80-82, 18 games behind the Dodgers, 13 behind the Padres and nine behind the D-backs, at which point they brought Posey back to run baseball operations. Suddenly, the kid catcher who was the NL Rookie of the Year at 23 when the Giants were winning the first of those World Series is a front-office kid at the age of 38.
And this was a rare thing in baseball, an iconic player like this, a future Hall of Famer like this, taking over the team for which he played. In so many ways, it would have been like Derek Jeter becoming president of the Yankees. Posey absolutely mattered that much in San Francisco. Two years after the first World Series, the Giants won again in 2012. All Posey did that year was hit .336 and become MVP of the National League. In ¡¯14, Posey hit .311 and the Giants won again, finally winning a memorable seven-game series against the Royals. Again: That kind of baseball star, on a team like that, the first team to win three World Series in five seasons since Joe Torre¡¯s Yankees won four in five years between 1996 and 2000.
Giants manager Bob Melvin, a former catcher himself, said this when Posey got his new job:
¡°It¡¯s kind of the right player at the right time for the Giants.¡±
Posey himself was speaking early in the season about the process of holding a job like his in modern baseball, and the obvious responsibilities that come with it, especially for him in San Francisco -- just because of who he was with the Giants and what he always meant to the team¡¯s fanbase.
¡°It¡¯s been kind of fun,¡± he said. ¡°We¡¯ll see in a year if it¡¯s fun or not.¡±
He retired early at the age of 34. But even in his last season, that 107-win season for the Giants, he hit .304, hit 18 home runs and was an All-Star and did something else that was quite remarkable: He was voted the NL Comeback Player of the Year for a second time. The first was back in ¡¯12, when he¡¯d come back from a violent home-plate collision with Scott Cousins of the Marlins that fractured Posey¡¯s fibula and tore ligaments and resulted in baseball changing the rule about plate-blocking -- now known as the Buster Posey Rule.
So that was the greatest year for a great Giant, MVP and Comeback Player of the Year and another World Series. You wonder if any player, much less a catcher, will ever have a triple crown to compare with that.
Now the Giants have brought him back, asked him to bring the Giants back. Bob Melvin is right: right player, right time. But then Buster Posey always was in San Francisco.