Giants baseball: the Way of Torture

Okay, maybe my perspective is a bit biased.

I've been a Giants fan since day 1, basically, so every loss, every almost is as deeply personal is if it were family.

But Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper hit the nail on the head when he closed out a  May broadcast by intoning these three words:

"Giants baseball…torture."

Like nothing else I've seen in popular culture for the last five decades, those two syllables captured the hopes, dreams and frustrations, the existential imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Giants fans, young and old, male and female, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, liberal and conservative.

Torture.

This team is just good enough to keep you engaged, to keep you hoping, against all hope, against the fact that it's been longer since winning their last World Series than any other team except the Cubs or Indians, that somehow they might, though some lighting-in-a-bottle synergy of the increasingly iffy pitching rotation and the always-iffy-but-maybe-less-so-these-days offense, make it into the playoffs, and through to the pennant, and thence to an improbable championship. You hope it's kind of a 1980 49ers story, a team of scrappers, castoffs and nobodies no one saw coming, that comes together and shocks the world.

OK, sometimes they fail miserably. Like today. Or Sunday, for that matter. But you keep watching, as the Giants' bats fall silent or Timmy melts down again, because you know that they do have enough spark somewhere, enough tenacity, enough intangible synergy to come back from a loss, from a three-game slump, from a 6-2 deficit, to pull even and push a game into extra innings — do they have the most extra inning games of any team in the majors? They're gotta be damn close — but do they just win in the 10th? NOOOO. They keep you dangling, hanging on, exasperated, taking the oxygen out of the room, as the relievers give away runs and Uribe or Posey or Huff or Burrell takes them back, until the 12th, 13th, 14th inning, at which point you've missed dinner, stood up your date, gone way past your bed time, violated your curfew, until, maybe, just maybe, they win!

But at that point it doesn't even matter. Winning, losing…it's no longer the point. 

What's Giants baseball all about, then?

I think the best referent is Kafka. No — Marquis de Sade.

Yes, you could say baseball is a metaphor for the vanity of human ambition, where even the best players, even the heroes fail more than they succeed, where the champions win only slightly more often than they lose, and where teams like the Cubs have become deeply loved by turning mediocrity into a brand. All that Updikean, pre-2004 Red Sox crap.

But the Giants take the failure hyperbole to a new level. They flirt with it, dancing so long and so excruciatingly on that high wire between defeat and victory that it becomes an exercise in sadomasochism.

There's a big reason Kuip's quip became the biggest Bay Area sports meme since "Say Hey". Because Giants fans not only live the torture…they love it.