fifthlinehockey:
Perfect. That is the 2012 San Francisco Giants. All around the world, at every level of competition, coaches and players try to figure out how to create a true team — how to mesh, how to play for each other, to take isolated sets of individual acts and piece them into one. And then a team like these Giants comes along, and it all happens so naturally. Scutaro and Pence arrived and it was like their parts in the play were already written. They just had to read the lines.
“The smile on my face does not mean as much to me as the smile on my teammates’ faces,” Romo said. “It makes it more special when you are not playing for yourself.”
… The Giants believe. Cain said he doesn’t know how much their closeness contributed to the championship. But look: When the Giants needed Barry Zito to set aside six years of criticism and failure, and pitch like an ace again, Zito did it — twice. Pitching coach Dave Righetti sat with Tim Lincecum in the weight room one day and had a tough talk about yanking Lincecum from the starting rotation. Tim Lincecum! The freak, the two-time Cy Young Award winner, maybe the most recognizable player on the team even today.
“That wasn’t the easiest thing,” Righetti said, but Lincecum responded by willingly becoming an essential bullpen weapon.
When Righetti worried about the location of Madison Bumgarner’s pitches (“I really thought he was going to finish up in the ‘pen,” Righetti said), Bumgarner recognized if he didn’t do it, they would lose. He found a way to hit his spots again.
Individual acts, individual fixes, individual successes. Collectively, it seemed like magic. And so came the time for one final act: Sergio Romo on the mound in the 10th inning, clinging to a 4-3 lead, pitching to the reigning American League Triple Crown winner, facing a genetic mismatch….
Then Sergio Romo threw an 89-mile-an-hour fastball to the best hitter in baseball. It would be the final pitch of the 2012 season. Strike three. Game over, World Series over, and Romo would later say he felt “blessed … beyond blessed.” It was the culmination of a dream so big, he dared not dream it, back when his father gave him his first glove when he was 2 years old. His father’s name is Francisco.
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/michael_rosenberg/10/29/san-francisco-giants-chemistry-word-series-title-detroit-tigers/index.html#ixzz2AiSgfzvS
Goosebumps, everytime.
