Ten best moments from the San Francisco Giants’ championship run
The San Francisco Giants are back on top of the mountain in Major League Baseball. With a 3-2 victory against the Kansas City Royals in World Series Game 7, they earned their third World Series championship in five seasons and their eighth in franchise history.
For the Giants, it was their toughest postseason road during this recent stretch of success. As the National League’s second wild-card team, they had to go through the Pittsburgh Pirates on the road just to make the NLDS. Once in the tournament, they eliminated the NL’s top two seeds, the Washington Nationals and St. Louis Cardinals, before running into baseball’s hottest team and best story, the Kansas City Royals, in the World Series.
The Giants won eight of nine World Series games in 2010 and 2012 but were pushed to the limit by this resilient Royals squad. In fact, if not for a remarkable and gutty Series performance by Madison Bumgarner, it’s possible the championship flag would be flying in Kansas City for the first time since 1985.
As it is, it’s time for Giants fans to celebrate again, while also reflecting on the many memorable moments and performances their champions provided along the way. And it’s with that in mind that we present the most important, interesting or just plain fun moments from another Giant October.
MADISON BUMGARNER’S POSTSEASON DOMINANCE
San Francisco’s run through October literally begins and ends with Madison Bumgarner. In the win-or-go-home NL wild-card game, he limited the Pirates to four hits in a complete game shutout. In World Series Game 7, he took the ball two days after pitching another complete game shutout in Game 5 and delivered five scoreless innings of relief. Bumgarner finishes this postseason with an MLB-record 52 2/3 innings pitched and a 0.43 ERA in the World Series, and he was quite rightly named World Series MVP.
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BRANDON BELT’S 18TH INNING HOMER IN NLDS GAME 2
No game personified San Francisco’s resilience better than Game 2 against the Washington Nationals. Down 1-0 with two outs and nobody on base in the ninth inning, the Giants pushed across the tying run on Pablo Sandoval’s double. What would have been among the fastest games in this postseason ended up as the longest postseason game in history at six hours, 23 minutes. Finally, in the 18th inning, Brandon Belt came through with the go-ahead homer that eventually gave San Francisco a 2-0 series lead.
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WILD PITCH GIVES GIANTS EDGE IN NLDS GAME 4
The Washington Nationals were a tough out even after dropping two at home. However, sloppy play in Game 4 opened the door and the Giants walked through to punch their NLCS ticket. After Bryce Harper tied the game with a seventh-inning homer off Hunter Strickland, San Francisco loaded the bases in the bottom half and scored the game-winner on Aaron Barrett’s wild pitch.
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HUNTER PENCE’S SPEECHES
Hunter Pence’s motivational speeches after each round have become a postseason staple in San Francisco. Not always suitable for young audiences, Pence gets in the moment and says what’s on his mind, as random as it may be. Pence himself doesn’t always know what the intended message was, but his teammates love it and the Giants can’t lose in October. Why change now?
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GIANTS WALK OFF ON ERROR IN NLCS GAME 3
In a pivotal Game 3, the Giants blew an early four-run lead before pulling out a 5-4 victory in the 10th inning. St. Louis Cardinals reliever Randy Choate fielded a sacrifice bunt attempt by Gregor Blanco and threw it down the right-field line, allowing Brandon Crawford to score the winner.
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YUSMEIRO PETIT PROVIDES RELIEF
Aside from a hiccup in World Series Game 6, Petit was lights out in important innings for Bruce Bochy. Petit logged six scoreless frames during extra innings in NLDS Game 2. He returned with a three-inning scoreless stint in NLCS Game 4, which allowed San Francisco to rally and win, and then three most spotless inning in their World Series Game 4 victory, running his scoreless streak to 12 innings. There was no single moment, but every out recorded by Petit was a big one.
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TRAVIS ISHIKAWA’S PENNANT-CLINCHING HOMER
A historic moment that paralleled perhaps the most famous moment in Giants franchise history. That being Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round The World” in 1951. Ishikawa’s ninth-inning, three-run homer off Michael Wacha secured a 6-3 victory and made him the fourth player in MLB history to deliver a postseason pennant-clinching homer.
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HUNTER PENCE STARTS WORLD SERIES WITH HOME RUN
Hunter Pence hadn’t homered in the 2014 postseason, but he quickly changed that in Game 1 of the World Series, taking James Shields deep in the first inning. Pence’s two-run homer put the Giants up 3-0, a lead they would never relinquish. Pence went on to record a hit in all seven World Series games and finished the postseason hitting .333.
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PABLO SANDOVAL MAKES POSTSEASON HISTORY
Sandoval reached base in 16 out of 17 postseason games, including four times in World Series Game 7. Sandoval actually started both of their run-scoring rallies in the clincher. He was nicked on the elbow starting the second inning and later scored on Michael Morse’s sacrifice fly. He reached on an infield single to start the fourth and scored what would prove to be the difference-making run on Morse’s single. He added an opposite-field single against Kelvin Herrera in the sixth and a double off Wade Davis in the eighth, giving him an MLB-record 26 hits this postseason.
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THE FINAL OUT
There’s no more satisfying feeling than recording a World Series-clinching out, especially in a winner-take-all Game 7. Fittingly for San Francisco, World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner was the man who threw the decisive pitch, and postseason legend Pablo Sandoval was the man who gloved Salvador Perez’s popup.
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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813
