San Francisco Giants: Magic is Real

The San Francisco Giants won the Wild Card game Wednesday night, reviving frightening memories of even year Giants teams of the past. Are they really going to do it again?

I always thought that magic wasn’t real. As a child watching a creepy magician do magic tricks, I knew he wasn’t really using magic. He was using some sort of illusion to trick my eyes or my brain into thinking it was magic. And then I met the 2010 San Francisco Giants. I guess I didn’t technically meet them, but I watched them on TV a fair amount of times, especially in October.

Taylor Swift had just released her third album and the Giants had just won the World Series. As I was jamming along to “Mine,” “Mean,” and “Better than Revenge” on my 22nd birthday I had no clue what was in store for the next six years of baseball. The Giants had just won the World Series, but that was of little importance to me. They were a good team that certainly seemed deserving of winning a World Series title despite not being the best team in the postseason.

This is where it gets weird. The Giants in 2011 weren’t that good, thanks to Buster Posey getting knocked out for the season after a collision at home plate, along with a plethora of other issues.

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In 2012, the San Francisco Giants won the NL West to reach the postseason. From there they came back from 2-0 in the best of five series and 3-1 in the NLCS. The magic was awakening. They finished the postseason off with a clean sweep of the Tigers en route to their second championship in 3 years as Taylor was en route to her second great album in 3 years. I was on the verge of turning 24 years old listening to “Red,” “Holy Ground,” and the ever so sad “The Moment I Knew.” The Giants had become an annoyance, but teams being successful for a short period of time was not foreign to someone who had lived in the St. Louis area most of his life. Surely they would fall soon.

Indeed they did fall. For a single season. The 2013 Giants, like the 2011 Giants before them were not gifted with the magic of the previous years. You see, magic always has a twist. It is not simply handed out without consequences or special rules. The genie only grants Aladdin three wishes, Cinderella had to return home before midnight, and Ariel is granted the gift of legs for three days but must give up her voice in exchange for being a human. Likewise, the Giants are granted the magical gift of even year World Series Championships with the stipulation that in odd numbered years they must tumble through a season of failure and misfortune.

The magic had hardly begun in 2010. It was awakening in 2012. By 2014, the magic was more alive than ever before. The Giants didn’t enter the playoffs as favorites. No, they were just a Wild Card team with an ever so slight chance at making it three championships in five seasons. In their way were the Cardinals, Dodgers, and plethora of teams in the American League that seemed ready to take them down. Instead, we were gifted a World Series with two unlikely teams. The Royals were beginning to summon their own evil Missouri magic, but it was no match for the Giants. Their magic was at its peak intensity. It was coursing through their veins. They won that World Series Championship and suddenly their magic was painfully obvious to baseball fans around the country.

As with the other championship years, it was marked by a release of a Taylor Swift album. I listened to “New Romantics,” “I Know Places,” and tried to shake off the feeling that Taylor had a hand in the Giants deep, dark magic. Certainly someone so good, so talented couldn’t be part of the evil magic the team in the bay was concocting.

The 2015 magical lull came and past without anyone blinking an eye. At this point it was routine. Baseball fans were waiting in anxious preparation to see if they would have to endure yet another year of Giants magic. As 2016 rolled on, believers in even year magic jumped on the bandwagon while others jumped off when their bullpen was sucked into a black hole of disastrous blown leads. When Michael Baumann of The Ringer wrote about Taylor Swift’s connection to the Giants, I became painfully aware that this was almost certainly Taylor’s doing. Like it or not, she was the secret behind the magic. She controlled it all. And yet, there wasn’t news of a new album during 2016. Perhaps the magic had indeed reached its peak in 2014 with the release of Swift’s best album and was gone forever.

It seemed entirely possible that the magic was banished. Until Buzzfeed wrecked the party just over an hour before the start of the National League Wild Card game with a list of reasons that Swift may actually have an album ready that she will secretly release at the end of the month. Mets fans tried to choke back the horror of possible lingering magic as they watched their ace pitch seven incredible innings. Certainly that would be enough. Inning after inning passed. They escaped the 8th with runners on base thanks to Addison Reed and felt confident in Familia for the 9th. They just needed to score some runs. They didn’t score those runs.

The 9th inning came, but the even year magic came as well. Conor Gillaspie, who toiled with the White Sox and Angels in recent years, became the unlikely hero. The even year magic was alive. Giants players walked off the field with tempered emotions. There was no hooting and hollering. No, they knew. It was magic. And it was far from over.

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The next step for the even year magic is against the Chicago Cubs, a powerhouse from the Central division. Can Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Dexter Fowler banish the magic for good? Do they have the power to end a Taylor Swift/San Francisco Giants reign of terror? The magic currently hangs in the balance. Still weak enough to be banished forever. Maybe the Cubs are the team that banishes it. Or maybe Taylor Swift does drop a secret album, leading to the Giants reviving their magic and winning the World Series once again.

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