Four Tiny Tidbits On: The Giants

We're just more than a month from Opening Day, so it's time to start previewing the season. Inspired by an old feature on The Black Table, we're going team-by-team and distributing Four Things You Don't Know about them. We're not sure how this is gonna work, but if you have suggested oddities on your team, send them to us at [email protected]. Today: The San Francisco Giants.

• 1. They made Charles Schultz sad. The closest the Giants ever came to winning a World Series in San Francisco came in 1962 (if you don't count being up 3 games to 2 to the Anaheim Angels 40 years later). Let's set the scene. Yankees ahead 1-0 in the seventh game of the World Series at Candlestick Park, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Giants have a runner on first (Matty Alou). Willie Mays strokes a double down the right-field line, with Alou holding at third (due to an excellent play by Roger Maris). Willie McCovey follows with a hard line drive ... speared by second baseman Bobby Richardson, ending the Series. What you probably don't know is that earlier in the inning, the Giants tried to move Matty Alou into scoring position, but a certain Mr. Felipe Alou — Matty's brother — failed in an attempt to bunt him over. The sequence inspired the only real-life baseball moments in a Charles Schulz Peanuts comic strip, as Charlie Brown was seen to lament on a couple of occasions: "Why couldn't McCovey have hit that ball just two feet higher?" • 2. All politics are local. The BALCO labs of Vincent Conte steroid fame are located in Burlingame, Calif., just 12 miles or so from the Giants' stadium, AT&T Park. And Burlingame is just a couple of miles from Junipero Serra High School, which Barry Bonds attended (as did Tom Brady and Lynn Swann). According to several eyewitnesses, Bonds could often be seen emerging from a van in the student parking lot on game days, very Jeff Spicoli-like, along with a smoke cloud of undetermined origin, making it to the field just in time for warmups. • 3. They inspire sportswriters. It was in the Giants' N.L. West Division title-winning year of 1987 that Ray Ratto, then a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, dubbed Giants' outfielder Jeffery Leonard with one of the best nicknames in baseball history: "Penitentiary Face." • 4. They Devil Rays are their fault. The Giants came very close to moving from San Francisco on two occasions — in 1976, when Bob Lurie's purchase of the club at the 11th hour prevented it from moving to Toronto, and in 1992, when a proposed move to St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) was blocked by Major League Baseball. As compensation, MLB granted an expansion franchise to Tampa Bay. Seemed like a good idea the the time.

(Tomorrow: The Toronto Blue Jays)