A tribute to Mike Yastrzemski and the other Giants heroes of the Farhan Zaidi era

New York Times

a day ago

You watch baseball to make your time on this planet more enjoyable. Boy, are you doing it wrong.
That's a tongue-in-cheek response to the Giants' brutal ninth-inning collapse on Monday night, but it could also be true. Don't know you, don't know how you consume sports, but there's at least a chance that you are doing it wrong.
Advertisement
This has been the herkiest and jerkiest season in recent memory, but after the medium-soft sell and the admission from the front office that this team doesn't have what it takes, there has been a little time to reflect.
Mike Yastrzemski, Camilo Doval and Tyler Rogers are a part of a new class of Forever Giant, the kind that hasn't felt the tickle of confetti by their ears as they ride down Market Street. It's easy to point to George Kontos, Yusmeiro Petit or Grégor Blanco and say, 'Yeah, I remember those guys … from all of the CHAMPIONSHIPS' and then make little finger-gun motions and pew-pew sounds until they kick you out of the Chipotle.
That's not the default in Giants history, though. Ahead Giants game telecasts, you might hear from Shawn Estes or Rich Aurilia, two Forever Giants who didn't win a World Series. There are almost countless reasons why none of those Giants teams won a title, from tired bullpens to the ridiculous home-field advantage rules for the Division Series in the '90s, but the main reason why is it's ludicrously hard to win a championship. Also, according to my research, they only play one of these things a year, so even a player with a decade of service time — an upper-percentile outcome for anyone who reaches the majors — will get only 10 shots or so. The odds are against every player winning a ring, if only because they're against every team.
So let me try the opening again: You watch baseball to make your time on this planet more enjoyable. If you're the type of fan who can't find that enjoyment without your team winning it all, boy, are you doing it wrong. For the rest of us, there's so much more to the sport, so much additional enjoyment to be found in the daily grind. There are little victories to celebrate everywhere, from the granular (a well-executed pitch) to the obvious (a walk-off, come-from-behind win). The 2018 Giants season isn't remembered fondly by anybody, but it still gave us a 21-pitch at-bat from Brandon Belt. That's something that's still making my time on this planet more enjoyable.
Advertisement
This is the kind of context where players like Yastrzemski, Doval and Rogers are best appreciated. There's one All-Star selection among them (although Rogers has been deserving), and because they've all played in only three postseason games, none of them have had much of a chance to have a signature moment. Yastrzemski comes the closest with his three-homer game, but that was in 2019, which feels like several hundred lifetimes and baseball teams ago. If I'd described it offhandedly as 'the Mike Yastrzemski Game,' would you have known which one? Probably not.
That's a good thing. It's less about specific moments and more about their overall Giants careers. Every rookie, every veteran free agent and waiver-wire journeyman, when they're presented to us for the first time, are subjected to the same scrutiny and asked the same question: Are you here to make my life more enjoyable? It's almost crass and transactional when it's put like that, but it's accurate. You're always looking for a better baseball experience, and every new player is auditioning for a featured role.
Start at the beginning for all three. It's May 25, 2019, and the Giants stink. The day before, they'd lost to Robbie Ray and the Diamondbacks, 18-2. Their starting outfield was typically some permutation of Steven Duggar, Mac Williamson and Kevin Pillar, which wasn't offering much in the way of offense. Mike Yastrzemski came up, and we were treated to an entire news cycle of 'YEP. IT'S HIS GRANDSON,' which was fun and amusing, but he was just another Band-Aid for a Giants outfield that needed a tourniquet. This was the season where Michael Reed and Connor Joe became Opening Day starters about 54 seconds before the season started. Yastrzemski would be a fun trivia question in a few years, but he'd be gone soon, like all the rest of them. He wouldn't even be the first or second outfielder named 'Mike' to get released. How quickly we forget Mike Gerber.
Then it started happening. Shortly after Yastrzemski was told to pack his bags for Triple-A Sacramento, just in case, he went on a monstrous hot streak. There was the three-homer game, sure, but there was also a game where he stuck it in the eye of Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers, which had to feel good. There was the return to Fenway, with the first pitch with his grandfather and homer in his first game. There was the 12th-inning walk-off homer, back before the automatic runner, when the game could have gone on for several innings yet.
Giants fans watched him progress from human-interest story to potential bench piece to right-field fixture, and he did it by making the baseball more fun to watch. He did it long enough to climb some impressive lists:
Look at those names! Each of them worth their own chapter in a book about the San Francisco Giants. That's the company Yastrzemski ended up keeping. And he did this, again, while making the overall Giants baseball experience better than it could have been, which is very important to you. There are naysayers out there, and we were about a one-year deal away from the start of the Yastrzemski Wars, but, sorry, the numbers have it. He was pretty good at a lot of the things you want a player to be good at, and it was a delight to watch.
Advertisement
The problem with relievers is that championships are an absolute must for a signature moment. It's why of the three closers in the championship era, it's hard to pick the defining Santiago Casilla moment (on the mound, at least), but you don't have those problems with Brian Wilson or Sergio Romo. So when it comes to someone like Camilo Doval, who appeared in only one postseason series and contributed to the painful result, it's even trickier. Now his signature moment becomes when he didn't trust his fastball against Cody Bellinger, who was one of the most fundamentally broken players in baseball history at that point.
What a shame, though, if that's all you can remember. Doval wasn't the first hard thrower the Giants offered up in the hyper-velocity era, but it was still incredible entertainment to watch him mix his cutters, sinkers and sliders when he had his command. Sometimes I'll kill time by searching for videos of his corner strikes on Baseball Savant. There are over 600 to go through, so here's a random one:
(True Doval aficionados know that when he uses a slider to strike out the final batter of a game, he does that little hop. He doesn't do it for fastballs or for important inning-ending strikeouts. Just game-ending sliders.)
When he came up in 2021, Doval was a total enigma. He had a reputation as a wild-but-live-armed prospect before the pandemic, but it was easy to forget about him after the 2020 minor-league season was canceled. He was aggressively placed in Triple A in 2021, suggesting he was impressing folks in the complex, but he couldn't throw strikes. He walked 24 batters in his 30 Sacramento innings, and he was still very much a work in progress.
The Giants didn't care. They saw a pitcher blowing cheese and figured it could work against major-leaguers, and they were right. There were too many hilarious and enjoyable storylines in 2021 to keep track of, but this was a doozy. The Giants already had a bullpen filled with relievers having their best seasons, and here comes some lithe, 103-mph-slinging, late-inning demon out of nowhere to help them even more.
There were ups and downs after that, sure, some the kind that come with the role, and some that were much more pronounced (the command struggles that led to his demotion last year), but you can also play the same game with Doval that you could with Yastrzemski:
Like Yastrzemski, Doval will leave people wondering if he's really worth a tribute (his ERA counterparts are a less exciting Jean Machi and Tim Worrell), but forget them. How can you not marvel at the raw talent and how much fun he is to watch when he's right. All you want from a closer is the ability to make you chortle, and he was one of the best at it.
Advertisement
As for Rogers, he got something of a tribute in this article about his trade, and he probably deserves an even bigger one when he comes to town with his new team. Unless he's deserving of a tribute when the Giants re-sign him. All of this applies to him, too, though.
You don't turn on the television every night because you're hoping to watch a championship. You'll even watch when it's clear they're most certainly not winning a championship. If you'll pardon the technical jargon, you'll watch to see fun baseball stuff and cool baseball things, and Rogers was one of the most reliable at delivering those things. He was the kind of guy non-baseball fans would ask about. Once I was at a restaurant, and there were two people at the bar who didn't follow baseball at all, and they had a loud, drunken conversation about Rogers, occasionally looking around to see if the whole place knew what was happening. Do you see what's going on here? There's some sort of circus freak on the television!
Apologies for the Homeric epic, especially considering all I'm trying to say is here were three baseball players who made Giants baseball more fun. They did it in different ways, for the same teams and mostly at the same time, and they'll be missed. You watch baseball to make your time on this planet more enjoyable. These guys did just that.
(Photo of Yastrzemski: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)