You guys sure you're up to this?

Sloppy. That’s the best word I can think of to describe the way the Giants played tonight in Los Angeles. Someone watching tonight’s game who missed the 2010 postseason would never guess that the Giants are defending World Series champions. Is it that they had too much fun celebrating late last year and they aren’t yet back into the groove of taking baseball seriously? I doubt it; they played seriously enough during Spring Training this year and, after all, this isn’t Little League. These guys are professionals.

Still. Still. What happened to Aubrey Huff, so solid at first base last year, who seemed unable to run down almost anything hit out to right field tonight? Or Freddy Sanchez, who the Chronicle described last year as having played second base “like he invented it,” and who crucially missed a throw from Miguel Tejada tonight that would have been an easy double play? Last year’s National League Rookie of the Year, Buster Posey, allowed the Dodgers to score the game’s first run, on a wild (and unnecessary) throw to third baseman Pablo Sandoval. Tim Lincecum drilled his former teammate Juan Uribe in the elbow, a beaning that by no means looked intentional. What gives?

The most solid defensive playing tonight came from Brandon Belt, the rookie first baseman playing in his first Major League game.

But it’s far too early to worry. I once read a music critic’s review of some band or another’s debut album, in which he said something to the effect that, on a band’s first album, it doesn’t matter so much whether they play great music; they just need to sound good. A similar theory applies to baseball. For the first game of the season, it is not essential that a team plays great baseball, as long as they look good.

With that in mind, the Giants looked… pretty good tonight. In terms of potential to be a great player this year, Pablo Sandoval looks great. As in the recent Giants-A’s exhibition series, the Panda made a few defensive plays that would have been impossible with the extra 40 or so pounds of weight he was carrying last year.

By the way, I’m not yet convinced that the Dodgers have the hitters to be a major competitor in the N.L. West this year, but if Clayton Kershaw can continue to pitch as well as he did tonight, any team facing him on the mound should be in big trouble.

Side notes: Saw a few Giants fans in the stands tonight, which is to be expected for the defending World Series champs. Still, I’m not sure I’d feel brave enough to wear Giants gear to Dodgers Stadium. I saw one poor guy in line for the bathroom at a Giants home game last year, and he was taking a pretty epic heckling from his fellow bathroom-mates.

Bleeding Orange and Black

The San Francisco Giants are the reigning World Champions of Major League Baseball. This is the first time in my entire life I have been able to make that statement. I could have said it in 1989, had the crossbay rival team Oakland Athletics not swept the Giants in a ho-hum World Series whose most dramatic moment was the Loma Prieta earthquake that hit Candlestick Park just moments before the players were to take the field for Game Three. I could have also said it in 2002, had the Anaheim Angels not overcome what seemed like a safe 5-0 Giants lead in the final innings of Game Six to force a seventh game.

No, in 2010 the Giants really did win it. A hundred thousand more qualified writers than I could tell you why they won. Most of them will tell you it was because of superior pitching, which is quite a compliment when your vanquished opponents include the likes of Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, two of the best arms the modern game has ever seen. To be fair, this analysis isn’t entirely wrong; the Giants do have some great pitchers. But the fact of the matter is, you can’t win a game unless you actually score more points than the other team does.

Game Six of the National League Championship Series between the Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies might have been tied and gone into extra innings, for example, if not for Juan Uribe’s eighth-inning solo home run. That single score, added to closing pitcher Brian Wilson’s brilliant demolition of Philadelphia’s best hitters, secured the Giants their first National League pennant since 2002. The World Series was won in a similar fashion - this time, it was Edger Renteria’s three-run homer against the Texas Rangers in Game Five, again combined with Wilson’s shut-down pitching in the game’s final inning.

Great pitching and clutch hitting - so why shouldn’t the Giants repeat in 2011, am I right? Except… well, Juan Uribe is with the hated Los Angeles Dodgers now, and Edger Renteria has found a new home with the Cincinnati Reds. As for that closer? Brian Wilson is on the Disabled List, with a back injury. Great!

In the offseason, though, the Giants made a few moves that should help out. They acquired veteran Miguel Tejada, formerly of none other than the Oakland Athletics, at shortstop, and gave a lot of work to up-and-coming minor leaguer Brandon Belt, not yet twenty-three years of age. (The work paid off; Belt, to the surprise of many, made the team’s opening-day roster, and is expected to be the team’s everyday first baseman.) Both Tejada and Belt should add some pop behind the plate, in addition to the already formidable hitting power of Buster Posey, Aubrey Huff, and Pat Burrell.

All in all, the Giants are expected to at least be competitive in the National League West Division in 2011. (For what it’s worth, living baseball legend Hank Aaron thinks they’re going to return to the World Series.) Personally, as long as they don’t sink like a stone, I expect this to be one fun baseball season.

Not that there is no reason to worry - in 1989, they won the National League pennant and made it to the World Series, then placed third in the N.L. West the following year. In 1998, the year after their only postseason appearance of the ’90s, they finished nine and a half games behind the San Diego Padres in their division. And, although they made it to the playoffs two years in a row in the 2000s (2002 and 2003), their 2004 season was a heartbreaker, as they lost the division to the hated Dodgers.

Speaking of the Dodgers, the Major League season officially begins in just half an hour or so, as the Giants visit their longtime rivals (dating back to when both teams were in New York, women couldn’t vote, and the number-one world power was the British Empire) in Los Angeles. San Francisco’s two-time Cy Young Award winning pitcher Tim Lincecum squares off against young L.A. pitcher Clayton Kershaw. It’s a shade under 80 degrees here in south Sacramento, and I’m about ready to crack open a beer, lean back, and watch the defending World Champions try to repeat. Yes, baseball season has arrived.

Full disclosure: this is approximately the third or fourth blog I’ve started, not counting the various LiveJournal/Xanga-type online “diaries” that inexplicably exploded in popularity among members of my generation in the early years of this young century. I had a few of those, too, and the juvenile expressions of wannabe frustration, anger, and self-loathing contained within are so embarrassing to even think about these days that I’m glad to be done with them.

In terms of my blogs, they’ve mostly veered toward the political, which makes sense; I’ve been a political junkie since my teens, as an undergraduate I studied what most universities call Political Science, and I’ve worked on several political campaigns, mostly in a volunteering, licking-stamps, knocking-on-doors, hi-how-are-you-have-you-heard-about-the-upcoming-State-Assembly-election sort of way. But those blogs fell by the wayside, too. Reviving any of them would probably be inappropriate at this point, since I work for the legislative office of an official entity of the California government, which requires me to at least maintain the appearance of objectivity in State political matters.

And so we come to this blog, which is to be about baseball - the national pastime, they call it, although growing up my family members only liked football, my friends seemed to all be into basketball, and all the rage in the wide world of sports these past couple of decades seemed to be about soccer (don’t ask me why; I prefer sports where teams actually, you know, score points). But baseball is my sport, for better or worse. I can’t necessarily explain it in the most eloquent of manners - although, on this blog, you will certainly see me try to do so - I just happen to like it more than any other sport. I like watching it on television, I like listening to it on the radio, I like seeing it played in person, I like talking about it with fellow baseball fans (and a few unlucky not-so-fans who happen to be within earshot when I start running my big mouth), so why not write about it?

Another tidbit I feel compelled to disclose early: I am, relatively speaking, a new fan to the world of baseball. It has probably always been my favorite sport, but for most of my life, saying that I liked baseball more than any other sport would have been like George W. Bush bragging that he was more successful at drilling oil than at any other enterprise he was involved in. I wasn’t much of a sports kid growing up - I was a Batman kid, a video games kid, a Star Trek kid, a movie buff, and a big reader. I watched sports very rarely, and played them even less often; I’m pretty sure I never even owned a bat or a baseball glove.

And yet, here I am, writing a blog about baseball, because it is what I love. Part of the reason I love baseball so much is that it doesn’t really matter when you start loving it. At the beginning of Ken Burns’s excellent documentary Baseball: The Tenth Inning, Keith Olbermann says of baseball, “If you come in at the beginning of a game, or at the start of the season, or at the start of your own fandom, you feel as if you are joining the river midstream, and all that has gone before, you can enjoy as much as if you were there.”

I agree with Keith, and with that, I begin my journey through a single season (and, if the one season is something I enjoy doing, even more) as a baseball blogger. I will be going to, watching, and listening to games all the way from the college level up to the major leagues, and putting my thoughts about them here. I’m a Giants fan, at heart, but here you will read about my musings on not just the Giants but other major league contenders (including the Orange and Black’s friendly crossbay rival, and potentially serious division contender, the Oakland Athletics), minor league baseball’s Sacramento River Cats, and much else. If you like it, stick around, and feel free to add your own comments. If you don’t like it, well, I’ve got good news for you - the internet has something for just about everyone to enjoy, so hopefully there’s something out there for you.

Coming soon (as in, within the hour): a preview of the San Francisco Giants’s opening game and 2011 season, and what the Giants mean to me.