(First off, that title was the single-most difficult sentence I have ever written as I have fervently argued the opposite of that point an embarrassing number of times.)
As a child who was obsessed with the statistical side of baseball, I never could understand what people were talking about when they referred to “intangibles.” As someone who believed that every relevant aspect of baseball could be captured on a piece of paper, unquantifiable skill sets such as “baseball IQ” and “team chemistry” always struck me as made up terms used by people who wanted to justify their statistically-contradictory opinions. It wasn’t until I was much older, and reflected back on some of the greatest teams of my lifetime, that I realized how wrong I was, and how relevant and crucial these intangible qualities are. Not just in terms of wins or losses, or even World Series rings, but merely for basic like-ability factor, something that often is lost in the ruthless procession of time, yet is nonetheless important.
In the early 2000s, I was living in the East Bay, and being a Giant’s fan on the “A’s side of town” (Ha! Oxymoron, if you have no fans, it can’t be your side of town) there was an unavoidable prevalence of “A’s vs. Giants” arguments between my friends and I (with the occasional sprinkling of a pathetic Met argument or two). At the time, I would have argued for the Giants to my deathbed. But there was always an undeniable layer of envy hidden beneath comments. I could argue wins and loses, Bonds vs. Giambi, or point out that there seem to be like 10 million A’s fans, yet they can’t seem to sell out 53,000 seat stadium (oh, no wait, it’s 35,000 seats because they had to cover all the seats that no one ever sat in. I’m going to try to get as many of these as I can before I get to my point), but I could never find a way to vault over the inherently metaphysical argument that the A’s were simply a “cooler” team. But was a point that was as true as it was frustrating. Everything about the A’s in the early 2000s was awesome. The young, home-grown talent. Giambi’s tats and greasy flow. The Big Three. Miguel Tejada’s crazy stretching routine. T-Long’s jousting helmet. There was no way to quantify the coolness, it just was. It seemed like even if they weren’t millionaire baseball players forced to play on the same team, they would have been friends anyways. The Giambi bros throwing pool parties, Hudson doing underwater beer bongs in the jacuzzi, Byrnes swan diving off the roof, Zito getting stoned out of his mind and playing the guitar all night. This visual does not seem too far out of the question. No cliques, no hierarchy. Just a bunch of young guys having fun and playing baseball.
Now let’s take it across the Bay and enter into No Fun Zone that was the Giant’s clubhouse of the early 2000s. Without a doubt, the Giant’s teams during the Bonds era were some of the most stuffy, awkward, and least fun teams ever assembled. I picture Bonds as girly-voiced version of Denzel in Remember the Titans, minus the charisma, inspirational speeches, and regard for human life. Aurilia, I better not catch you smiling again! or JT, why are you saving little children? Did little children ever hit 73 homers in a single season? I didn’t think so. With Bonds at the helm, only his buddies could speak their mind (aka Dusty Baker and Shawon Dunston), and everyone else was given the straightforward edict to either be quiet or be traded. This is not an environment conducive to fun or friendship. I picture hushed conversations in the clubhouse late at night like this, long after Bonds had left, and the roar from his personal movie theater had died down, just between Kirk Reuter, Tim Worrell, and like, Chad Zerbe.
The A’s were Rocky I, young and hungry, unheralded and under-appreciated. And, like Rocky in his first bout with Apollo Creed, the A’s didn’t win it all, but you couldn’t help but root for them. On the other hand, the Giants were Rocky III, old and accomplished, rich and complacent. They let their high-profile status go to their head and lost to the more hungry Angels aka Clubber Lang (although Rocky wins the rematch against Lang after Creed whoops him into shape, so...does Bochey equal Apollo Creed in this analogy? And, then does that make Mickey equal Bonds, because once he left, then they won? Then, Adrien would be like Matt Cain’s super hot wife right? Oh god, this analogy fell apart quick). The point is, the Giants thought they were cool, they thought they were the shit. Whereas the A’s just were weird, they were quirky, and they embraced every part of it with arms wide open. And that’s what made them actually cool. And maybe that’s the convoluted point of this article, if you think you’re cool, you’re probably not. If you think your team is cool, they’re probably not. And maybe that’s a lens we can all use to look at our own lives with, because it can be so damn tempting to feel like you’re apart of something cool. To trick yourself into believing. And maybe, just maybe, it all boils down to the immortal words of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, “it’s cuz they make you feel cool, and, hey, I met you, you are not cool.” My god, how self righteous of a turn this article suddenly took.
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