The Power of Singletary

The San Francisco 49ers lost badly on Sunday to the surprising Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a frankly humiliating 23-0 shutout at home. Gone was the optimism from the past week, gone was the somewhat adventurous play-calling, and in their place was a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the 49ers.

For lack of a better word, the offense was useless. The defense rushed from the outside in an effort to contain Troy Smith from rolling out, where he'd done most of his damage the past two games. In theory, taking at least two, maybe three guys to the edges of the field would suggest the middle would be easier to run through since less defenders would be there. Add in the fact that the Bucs had one of the leagues worst rushing defense and Frank Gore should have been in for a big day. Instead, he gained just 23 lousy yards. The passing offense was just as miserable, and Smith found himself sacked six times (almost doubling Tampa's total number of sacks as a team before the game - sigh).

The most disconcerting thing to me was something I've seen throughout this entire season:

This team simply isn't prepared for games.

It should be embarrassing to call a timeout on the first play of a period. A team should go weeks, months even without a delay of game penalty. These things happen all the time. The team is often openly confused, arguing on the sideline with each other or officials. The team talks as if it's a strong defense, power running team but has a woefully inconsistent offensive line, prone to drive-killing false starts and holding penalties, and the defense has barely stopped anyone.

Penalties, poor clock management and lack of creative game planning...sounds like the coaching staff has some answering to do.

After the game, Coach Singletary gave a press conference where he answered more than half of the questions with some variant of, "I have to watch the film" before being able to answer why things went so pear-shaped. But after looking at the film, he said that part of the problem was that Tampa Bay simply took some things away from them.

He needed the film to tell him that? It was obvious while it was happening, and even I'm not cynical enough to believe Singletary and his staff didn't recognize it immediately. Of course they did. But, what I do think is that this team simply isn't built to adapt during a game - if their game plan happens to work, as it largely has done a few times this season (New Orleans, Atlanta, Oakland and St. Louis were games where the offense largely 'worked' to various degrees - the team managed to lose two of these, though it won in Denver by just not being as bad as the Broncos were.) But if it doesn't, it's helpless.  I expected the offensive line to be inconsistent - starting two rookies will do that - but veterans like Joe Staley were making penalties week after week. That's coaching.

All of that - the lack of a flexible game plan, the lack of team discipline led by a head coach who does little but preach exactly that, the inability to harness talent on both sides of the ball ... this all falls on Coach Singletary, and those that put him into the position in the first place.

A Vision of Faith -- AND bad coaching!

There's no point in firing Singletary now - there's really no one to replace him on the staff, and the only harm could be him somehow turning things around completely which of course, as a fan, I'd be happy to see. I just don't buy it - Singletary doesn't know the modern offense or defense in the NFL; he is known as a delegator, letting the offensive and defensive coordinators do their thing. That's fine to do - but usually coaches doing that have spent time in one of those two positions themselves. Singletary never did that - he was a linebackers coach in Baltimore and San Francisco, though prior to his promotion he was also the "assistant head coach" to Mike Nolan, something that's never been terribly well defined. If you are going to hand over control of everything that actually happens on the field, you have to have a strong, detailed vision of how you want things executed.

It's fairly clear Singletary does not have that. At all. Instead? He believes in himself, in what I call the "Power of Singletary." Singletary is utterly convinced that he's a great coach, saying he "was born to do this," and seems genuinely put off by the fact that the media doesn't simply agree with this assessment. When the team got off to a rough start, losing game after game, Singletary would often say, "I just believe we're going to turn this around" and quotes of that nature. While one can read too much into quotes like this, it reflects mostly that he's unprepared; he's staunch in his belief that some good will happen, but desperately short of the how it's going to be corrected. And week after week, results reflect just that.Coach, we all want winners - and as a player, as a man, you are certainly the very definition of that. But as a head coach? Not even close. You've lost the fans, you've lost the media (both by your performance and attitude) and it's impossible to believe that you haven't lost your team. When you had them, it's true that you probably coaxed more out of them than others would have, and you've definitely helped mold Davis into the player he is and can be.

It's true, THIS franchise really won all of these.

It's not enough. It wasn't then, it certainly isn't now.

Guys like Wade Phillips and Brad Childress have been justifiably fired for poor coaching - and yet each of them can coach circles around Singletary.

I've always mocked guys like Herm Edwards, Mike Nolan and Mike Tice for being all talk - great at a press conference but useless as a coach - and Singletary has redefined that level of futility.

The organization is almost assuredly going to relieve Singletary at the end of this season, but more importantly, they need to understand why Singletary is a failure. They need experience, an offensive philosophy and plan, and someone who can bring a good team with him. It's a pipe dream to think they'll lure Jon Gruden, who in most ways would be the ideal hire (youth, experience, offensive mind and connection to the franchise) - but if he even wants to come back to coaching, he'll likely have a few other choices. (Sure, Jason Garrett is doing wonders in Dallas, but if Jerry Jones could get Gruden? See ya, Red.) Any coach worth his salt (and that includes other wishlist guys like Jim Harbaugh and Brian Billick would insist on more control, and would love to be in a professional organization. That is the very definition of this franchise used to be and simply isn't any more.

It's painful to see a team that has struggled for so long need to wipe the slate clean yet again, and start over to some degree. But a good coach, with a strong coaching staff, has plenty to work with. (Though, again, not at quarterback - for if this season has proven anything, it's that for whatever the reason, Alex Smith is simply not going to be the 49ers quarterback of the present or future. Looking around the league at guys like Aaron Rodgers, Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Sam Bradford and Matthew Stafford, among other QBs taken since Smith was drafted, makes me pretty queasy, to say the least.)

This is a proud franchise that has essentially become just another team that can't get it's act together. Let's hope the team can break the cycle and begin the climb back past respectability towards greatness.

The Greatest Video In The World

It simply has to be preserved here. In friggin amber.

WORLD.

SERIES.

CHAMPIONS.

Never stops not being true. I'm just going to keep saying it until April, at the least.

You Must Remember This...

Sure, a kiss is just a kiss, but also? A lie is just a lie. And the lie far too many voters fell for this past election is that the Republicans who won - in many cases, handily - actually give a hoot about the deficit. Some may, most could care less - and like all congressmen and women, they want their share of earmarks, too.

But forget about all that silly stuff - it's easier just to note this: The Republicans as a party waxed on during the elections about the deficit, which again, voters actually don't care about.  But they are just as unified on another thing - the extension of the so-called Bush tax cuts. What they don't want is to vote on whether to simply extend these mostly to the middle class, which is what the Democratic plan below proposes, because that would be much harder to argue against. But here's the difference between the Democratic and the Republican plans, expressed visually -- remember, these are the size of the tax cuts each taxpayer got under the Bush tax cuts:

To quote:

The Republicans' plan to extend the Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy would cost $36.6 billion more than the Democrats' plan, which extends cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and individuals making less than $200,000.

Remember, they hated the Affordable Care Act even though it lowers the deficit, but they have no qualms about adding $36,600,000,000.00 to the deficit, because it puts more money in rich people's pockets. Let's be clear - I'd love to give that to those folks (though I think there are better uses), but it's inexcusable to not find a way to pay for it - again. Fool me once, shame on you...well, I'll let the ex-President say it best:



The GOP won't extend unemployment benefits unless it can be directly paid for, but $36 BILLION for those who need it the least? No need to pay for that.

Happy Friday, folks.

Sunset Park by Paul Auster

As I've detailed previously here and elsewhere, Paul Auster is one of my all-time favorite authors. His New York Trilogy was a landmark book for me, and at least three others (Leviathan, The Music of Chance and The Brooklyn Follies) are also among my favorites.

Auster's books are usually dark and surreal, focused largely on a male protagonist that often increasingly seems like a projection of Auster himself.

David Mattin of The Independent describes the "essential Austerian concept" as this:

A male protagonist, often a writer, disillusioned and living in self-imposed, metropolitan exile; the exposition of some random, violent event that changed his life forever; intermittent baseball and other Americana; and, most famously, the intertextual, self-referential chink in all this dirty realism, which will be teased open in the final pages to reveal that nothing was what it seemed.

Some of Auster's novels haven't worked from me, and some where they veer from this structure (Timbuktu, which many love, is one that failed for me) are in this set. Sunset Park definitely veers from the above path in some ways, but to me it succeeds across the board.

The story has several "main" characters, which get dedicated sections of the novel to themselves, but at the core is Miles Heller, a man in his late twenties who is purposefully rudderless, moving from city to city and intentionally cutting himself off from his family. Scarred by tragedy, Miles begins the novel in Florida working to clear out foreclosed homes, and taking pictures of the things left behind as either a hobby or obsession.

As an Auster fan, the location of Florida and not New York is jarring enough, and Auster quickly sweeps us into this different world:

For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things. There are at least two jobs every day, sometimes as many as six or seven, and each time he and his cohorts enter another house, they are confronted by the things, the innumerable cast-off things left behind by the departed families. The absent people have all fled in haste, in shame, in confusion, and it is certain that wherever they are living now (if they have found a place to live and are not camped out in the streets) their new dwellings are smaller than the houses they have lost. Each house is a story of failure—of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure—and he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses.

Soon, Miles relocates back to New York (for reasons I'll leave you to discover), where he grew up and his publisher scion father still lives, and his mother, a famous actress, is opening a play in Manhattan. Miles instead shacks up with Bing Nathan, a childhood friend and two others (Alice Bergstrom and Ellen Brice) who are squatting in a foreclosed home in the neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn.

There, Miles begins to reconnect with his family after seven years of silence, and we see the story unfold as told by all of the characters including his parents. Though this could lend itself to a Rashomon/Mr. & Mrs. Bridge device where different perspectives tell different stories, Auster largely tells a straight, lovely story here. Set just two years ago, the tone rings true and along with The Financial Lives of the Poets seems like a book that captures a specific moment in time.

It's not a book that will work for everyone - those looking for the surreal will find this far too grounded, while others may not like that certain important moments in the book happen "off-camera," referenced and described as a recollection by one of the characters rather than seeing them unfold narratively like the rest of the novel. But it absolutely worked for me, and is absolutely worth your time.

Rating: 9.0/10.0

A note: This is also the first book I've read on my new Kindle, a gift I got for my birthday. I had my concerns about how quickly I could transition to reading an electronic book. It turns out that time was almost nil, and the fact that I can also read on my iPhone through the Kindle app? Huge bonus. I suspect these eBooks are not going away any time soon.

This Is $100,000,000 worth of apathy

Courtesy of Oliver Willis, this picture says so very much:

Yes, he's really just lying there, doing nothing. And during that time, he's probably making your annual salary. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Albert Haynesworth!

Congratulations, Gerald Dempsey Posey III

That is the actual name of Buster Posey, winner of the 2010 National League Rookie of the Year award.

I'm surprised it was this lopsided (20 of the 30 first place votes went to Posey, nine to Jason Heyward and one to god knows who, probably Jaime Garcia.)

To me, a biased Giants fan, it was the obvious choice despite Heyward's talent, season and future - this guy will be a stud for years, just like Posey. But as a rookie catcher, to manage the Giants pitching staff as well as he did? That's the thing that should have - and apparently did - push him over the top.

On a related note, two voters didn't include either Posey or Heyward on their ballots. One, Dejan Kovacevic, is a writer for the Pittsburgh newspaper and included Heyward as his top vote, and two Pirates as #2 and #3. I'm sorry, but that's SOLELY a biased opinion and a not too veiled way of currying favor with Jose Tabata and Neil Walker - yes, those are the guys he voted for.  The other, a Los Angeles writer, didn't include Posey because he wasn't called up until May 29. This is a suprisingly popular sentiment though others resisted the stupid urge. I can't quite figure out why this matters - if what he did WHILE he was in the majors is enough, it's enough, right?

Honestly, if you are one of the thirty writers in the country entrusted with this vote, and you leave Heyward or Posey off your ballot entirely, I think MLB needs to give your vote to someone who isn't monumentally stupid.

Happy Veterans Day

I don't have much to say except to add my thanks to all who serve and served.

In fact, I only add this at all in order to repost this photo, courtesy of Kelly Oxford, whose Tumbler blog eject should be part of your daily reading.

In so many ways, this really says it all and slightly crushes me each time I see it...

This is a photo that definitely does NOT need a caption.

On Errors, Fielding and Gold Gloves

I've been a long advocate of the stupidity of errors -- indeed, the name of this very blog, Reign of Error, stems from my fantasy baseball team name (which is how this blog actually started) in my league where errors were sadly a stat we used to care about.

I railed against this year-after-year, pointing out that this is a subjective stat, and not a good measure of fielding. The easiest way to make this clear is that if a fielder is quick but poor handed, he'll get to a lot of balls and kick them, getting awarded an error. If he's slow, he'll never get there in the first place - the ball will go as a hit, but the fielder won't get an error. Does that make him better in any way? Of course not. I used to use Jeff Kent as the example here...but today, a better example is Derek Jeter. He had "only" six errors this season, but most Yankees and baseball fans alike would tell you that's at least partially due to his decreased range, not his slick fielding.

Well ... Jeter won a Gold Glove today. Now, Gold Gloves are not always great, but this seems to have sparked a lot of shock, disgust and anger - when guys like Elvis Andrus of the Rangers are infinitely more deserving.

My friend Paul Bourdett put it simply and succinctly:

Apparently, the smart folks at Baseball Reference think similarly -- this is from the front page of their website right now:

Good stuff.

Cue John Turturro

Surfing through the Olde Twitter Feed, I came across this note from Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy:

Simmons was referring to the below YouTube clip, and I must say, I haven't watched Wheel of Fortune in years, but the one hallmark of the show was that the contestants were dumber than a bag of wet hair. That doesn't seem to be the case here, and Pat Sajak is woefully confused.  

But seriously ... what IS going on here? If she's cheating, it's the worst play ever (way to draw attention to yourself). If she's not cheating ... well, she's playing terribly (she could have easily spun a few more times).

And note: Though the title of this post is a reference to Quiz Show, I'm not actually insinuating that there's cheating going on here. I would like to think I live in a world not where cheating doesn't occur (I'm not that naive) but where cheaters are, at least, proud of their work.

Thoughts? What do YOU think is going on here?

Updated! Apparently, the entire Internet is all aflutter about this, and Esquire Magazine posted an article on line about this...here are some excerpts, but check out the whole fascinating story here.

Caitlin Burke is an eliminator. And Wheel of Fortune, at its heart, is a game built on the process of elimination.   ... Burke's boyfriend ... knew what every avid game-show watcher keeps tucked away in the back of his mind: They're simple systems, and they're made to be broken.

"I really believe that luck is preparation meeting opportunity," Burke says. "Gymnasts might be naturally talented, but they can always make themselves better. I wondered what I could do to improve my own ability." When Burke first sees a puzzle, she immediately begins breaking it down into smaller pieces — "chunks," she calls them. Each word becomes its own miniature puzzle. In Burke's case, she was given a couple of leads during the Prize Puzzle of last Friday's episode. The third word was a single-letter word, which had to be either A or I. And more important, there was that apostrophe in the opening three-letter word, between the first and second letters.
 ...

Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts. They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either. Her brain can't possibly work that way, that fast. There's no way she solved that puzzle on her own. The game must be rigged.

Or Burke has a gift, and she improved it with study. She practiced. She found the little edges and secrets that make large-size success possible; she did every last bit of the math. She earned her way to her place behind the wheel, and then, on that fateful day, in that particular pattern of rectangles and lights, she saw all that she needed to beat it.

Read the whole crazy story, in its entirety, here.

The 2010 San Francisco Giants: Mea Culpas

I'm still basking in the glow of the 2010 World Series Champions - your San Francisco Giants.(It feels good to write, it feels good to think, it ... well, it feels good.)

It's not shocking -- anyone who roots for a team is pretty happy when that team finishes a season with a championship -- but it's extra special for at least two reasons:

1. It was, as you may have heard, the first championship for the Giants since they moved to San Francisco.
2. At the start of the season, even the most optimistic fans didn't see this coming. 

Now, that last bit is at least somewhat debatable -- after all, the 2009 Giants finished 88-74 and entered the season with the two-time Cy Young award winner Tim Lincecum fronting a pitching staff also manned by Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez and Barry Zito. It's not like there weren't strengths to the team -- but the offense ended 2009 with a paltry, insipid offense that didn't seem to get materially better before this season started.

Let's check out the boxscore from this season's Opening Day:

Those names in yellow? Not starters by the end of the season...in their places were (respectively): Andres Torres, Freddy Sanchez (in at 2B, where Uribe slid over to SS), Pat Burrell, Buster Posey and Cody Ross.

Nobody knew that this team would gel - that Aubrey Huff would be a fantastic Giant, that Posey would need no adjustment period once he got called up, that Andres Torres gave the team a legitimate leadoff hitter for the first time since ... seriously, I'm not even sure. Brett Butler? It's been awhile. We didn't know that Madison Bumgarner, who looked lost in Spring Training, would figure things out and become a lock-down stud by the end of the year. We couldn't have predicted that Pat Burrell and Cody Ross would come over, fit in immediately and seem like true Giants from the first time they slipped on a uniform.

We didn't know that - on the flip side - that Pablo Sandoval seemed committed to eating himself out of the league at the tender age of 23, or that Mark DeRosa, the biggest free agent signing, would never be healthy all season and be an afterthought by mid-season. We didn't know - though certainly we could have guessed - that Zito was gearing up for a late season implosion that relegates him to a fifth starter going into 2011.

And we didn't know that because of some of these slips, other guys had moments to shine - Bumgarner where Zito failed, Renteria getting playing time at SS when Uribe had to slide over to 3B because Sandoval was so bad, DeRosa's injury being a main reason the team need Burrell ... we didn't know that. We couldn't know that.

But ... and those who know me know that it hurts to say this -- maybe Brian Sabean knew. I'm not saying this was all part of the grand plan ... but I think that the grand plan was something like this:

Get great pitching. Don't trade great pitching. Get just enough offense to make the playoffs and then have your pitching dominate.

This worked because Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez and Madison Bumgarner are potentially the best starting four pitchers in the league since the Atlanta Braves of the early 1990s. Brian Wilson is the most dominant closer in the National League and a freak about fitness and self-improvement. If they are all pitching well - and, even with a few hiccups by Sanchez, they were this post-season - they have a chance to win any playoff series. 

I guess I didn't see that, or I didn't believe in the real potential of this staff past Lincecum and Cain. So, kudos, Brian Sabean -- when folks like me implored you to trade one of these starters for a bat, you refused. And while you will undoubtedly make more moves (or not make ones I think are 'obvious') ... you now get a moratorium on my complaints.

Sure, signing Pat Burrell was a desperation move mid-season that you sort of had to make (nobody else wanted him, the Giants had no offense at the time, and he wanted to play here)...but then Burrell exploded on the field and became (with his college teammate Huff) one of the clubhouse leaders. Sure, you signed Cody Ross more to block San Diego than any expectations of him playing a vital role here ... but he did, and his power streak during the playoffs was one of the key reasons the Giants are now Champions. Sure, you grossly overpaid Edgar Renteria a few years ago ... but if all that money only bought his two World Series homeruns, they were worth every cent. Sure, Aaron Rowand was equally lousy, but ... okay, he wasn't all that critical this year, but he made some very nice plays in the playoffs including a great throw at the plate. 

OK, that last paragraph is proof that this is hard -- I can't quite give a full mea culpa here, but I can give thanks. However lucky it was, however planned it was ... the result is awesome, a World Series Championship and a team that frankly is just as poised to contend for the next few years on the back of that incredible, young and talented pitching staff.

Sometimes, it's nice to be wrong.

LeBron James: Call And Response

For those who missed it, NBA star LeBron James, who famously fled Cleveland this off-season for Miami in perhaps the most selfish, asinine manner possible, released this Nike ad:

 

 Well, some folks in Cleveland thought about it ... and provided this pitch-perfect response:

 

As they say ... ouch babe.

I Did Not Know That

I was over at the AV Club, and saw this photo paired with an interview of Michael Douglas from a few years back. I know the guy is sick and I hope he's doing better, but it really struck me:

Is Michael Douglas ... THE MOST INTERESTING MAN...IN THE WORLD...? The Dos Equis guy?

I report, you decide. Stay thirsty, my friends.

The Rally Thong NAILED It!

I saw this on MLB. com yesterday during the rally, and tried to explain it to a few folks -- but it's really much better to see it yourself. Aubrey Huff likes to use the expression "nailed it" and let's just be clear, he nails it here (and if there's a funnier freeze frame than the one below, haven't seen it):



Go Giants! Thanks to Deadspin for the video.

The Only Question Is...

How many copies of this am I going to have to buy?

It still feels awesome. The Giants are the World Series Champions.

The San Francisco Giants are The World Champions!

The best in baseball, the World Series CHAMPIONS.  It's hard to write that sentence but amazing -- I'm such a superstitious, nervous fan that because I hadn't written about the Giants after they started their real run at the title, I didn't want to jinx anything and write about it during that hot streak.

Because, apparently, I can hurt my team's chances by writing a blog post (or by wearing or not wearing clothing I've deemed lucky or unlucky, etc.).

That doesn't matter now - the pain of 2002 is now just a memory, and the joy of watching THIS TEAM ride this out, play together and utterly DOMINATE in the World Series is ... it's incredible. Never had the chance to experience this in baseball, and it's been years since I really experienced it in football.

Regular readers of this blog, all three or four of you, will remember many posts - including some earlier this season - where I castigated GM Brian Sabean, and essentially assumed this team had no chance. A lengthy post will come later about all of this.

But in fact, that's what makes this doubly special - of all the Giants teams I've rooted for, the fact that this team was the one that broke through is amazing because I expected it the least.

The Giants didn't just win this one - they flat out dominated the Series, outscoring the Rangers 29-12, and absolutely shutting down feared sluggers Josh Hamilton, Vladmir Guerrero, Nelson Cruz and Ian Kinsler, among, well ... the whole frickin team. If you were going to do a position-by-position fantasy draft of each team's offense, the ONLY Giant that makes that final roster is Buster Posey. And they outscored that offense by more than three runs a game.

Their offense was so strong that their crazy closer Brian Wilson was really only needed tonight (he pitched in two other games, but not in save situations). "FEAR THE BEARD" was clearly a storyline of the post-season, but this "ragtag bunch of misfits" on offense made him secondary. (Though he controlled the post-season, is just weird in the best way and a major part of the way I'm sure I'll remember this title run.)

And right now? This moment?

THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS ARE THE WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!!!

A few more photos I appropriated from across that world wide web:

MVP Edgar Renteria -- and seriously, who would have called that? Three DL stints during the season, and really only in the Series at all because of how awful Pablo Sandoval played. Fate's tricky - Renteria's three-run HR off Cliff Lee was all the offense the team would need to clinch the World Series title, and his Game 2 HR off C.J. Wilson helped begin the offensive explosion of that win. Crazy game, baseball.

I love this. Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner - two rookies and future stars - celebrating a World Series win in their first season. Amazing.

One nice thing about the Fox coverage was showing each position players reaction at the clinching out. This was a great one - so hard not to like Cody Ross.

Tim Lincecum could have been named MVP, and flat out confused the Rangers, continuing the incredible shutdown pitching performance of the entire Giants squad. Two Cy Youngs, a great post-season performance ... the world is Timmy's, we just live in it.

Two huge parts of the playoff run and World Series victory (so nice writing that), Cody Ross and Matt Cain each take their turn with the trophy. The rest of the country found out about Cain this post-season, and Ross -- the NLCS MVP -- hit in ten straight post-season games and will certainly be the right fielder next year. And with Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner and Jonathan Sanchez (the ancient of the four at age 27) all signed through 2013, this pitching staff could continue to dominate for years.

Yes, that's Will Clark - in uniform (pants), no less - celebrating with the trophy. A Special Assistant (or whatever his title is) to the Giants, The Thrill was asked in a post-game interview whether he minded celebrating this for the first time while not as a player - and he laughed, said, "Heck, no!" and held up his beer that he was drinking out of a Gatorade cup. Love The Nuschler.

Maybe my favorite photo I've seen yet - so happy for Aubrey Huff, a gigantic part of this season and someone who came up huge in the first playoff series of his 11-year career. Posey got his ring in his first season. We call a photo like this a "nice juxtaposition."

I'll undoubtedly write more later - but this has been an amazing ride with a crazy, fun team, managed deftly by Bruce Bochy, who I'm also thrilled gets his ring. This is a team whose core strength is a dominant pitching staff - and they're all young and locked up on the team. 

World Series Champions. It feels pretty damn great.