by Richard Booroojian, EEEEEE! Contributing Editor

It is a recurring vision, a sadly enduring one that pops into my mind every time I reflect on the great and yet ill-fated 2000 season for the San Francisco Giants. It's a vision, or really more of a nightmare, of Marvin Benard swinging wildly at a ball above the bill of his cap. Bobby Jones throws his arms in the air, his improbable series-clinching one-hitter sure to be enshrined into the annals of baseball postseason history. The Mets celebrate wildly on the field, while the Giants sit sadly in their dugout. The Giants' 97-win season, like every other Giants' season that has preceded it during my lifetime, is once again for naught.

History, of course, will record that Marvin Benard did not make the last out of the 2000 divisional playoffs; Barry Bonds did. Benard did not even strike out in that last inning, although he did ground out harmlessly to first to lead it off. Still, although Bonds and a myriad of others were also in no small part responsible for the anemic showing by the Giants' offense during that four-game set, the one vision from that series that will always be with me is that of Marvin Benard swinging at a pitch far out of the strike zone... and missing.

Once the Giants lost the playoff series to the Mets, I almost immediately went to my computer and unsubscribed from the Giants' newsgroup. This hardly qualifies as a drastic reaction on my part; after the Giants were shut out by the Cardinals in the last game of the 1987 playoffs, I took the video tape I had been making of the game and destroyed it with a hammer. My motives for unsubscribing seemed fairly clear in my mind; I didn't want to read the obnoxious postings that Met trolls were undoubtedly sending through the ether at that very moment. Happily, I missed each and every one of them; it does my heart some good to know that those fools who thought they could make me feel even worse than I already did ended up wasting their time.

But after a month or so, long after the trolls had likely gone away to bother someone else, I was surprised to realize that I had no burning desire to resubscribe to the newsgroup and start conversing about the Giants again. Considering that its daily banter had been a big part of my life for the previous four years, this was unexpected. Further, whenever I would start to go through the process of putting it back on my browser, I would visualize Marvin Benard, and I would stop.

History tells us that Marvin Benard struck out seven times in 14 postseason at bats in the 2000 playoffs. I don't recall it quite that way, though. All I can seem to remember, aside from Shawn Estes flopping off second base at a key moment in game three, is Marvin repeatedly hacking wildly at pitches above his eyebrows, then looking blankly at a pitch right down the heart of the plate for a called strike three. I can't reconcile history's stats to the 15 or 20 strikeouts I'm sure I saw him deliver during the four games.

I have been a Giants fan for most of my life, and I mean a fan, not just a fan. My summers have revolved around the Giants, regardless of their performance or their place in the standings at any particular point in time. I still take crap from my family for the Mexican cruise we all went on in 1987, during which I haunted the streets of Mazatlan, looking for a day-old USA Today so I could see what was happening in the pennant race. It was only in 1985 that the fires of my fandom ever threatened to sputter out, and that was due to as sorry a bunch of poor excuses for major leaguers as only a knotheaded executive like Tom Haller could have pulled together. The poster child for that apathetic, whining, uncaring group was Manny Trillo, who was so unmotivated by playing in San Francisco that he delivered a .577 OPS and scored a grand total of 36 runs in 451 at bats. I'm not sure how he justified his performance in his mind that year; perhaps he was so unhappy with his lot in life that exposing a lack of character and professionalism to an appalled public was almost cathartic to him. To me, it was sickening, and to this day I am sickened by the memories I have of Manny Trillo moping up the first-base line or halfheartedly waving his glove at line drives hit in the direction of second base.

And yet, it was as soon as 1986 that my faith in the Giants was renewed before it barely had time to falter, as a new regime showed Manny Trillo and his ilk the door and brought in many new, eager young faces to give Giant fans something to be proud to claim as their own once more. The ability to claim a team as your own; that's as much a part of what makes baseball great as is listening to soothing radio broadcasts and getting caught up in riveting pennant races.

Marvin Benard may not have had a very good postseason in 2000, or even a very good regular season, but he was certainly no Manny Trillo. I never sensed he wasn't trying; if anything, he was probably trying too hard. Certainly he did not strike out at least twice per game like I keep seeming to remember; the statistics firmly advise me that he struck out 97 times in 560 at bats while posting an OPS of .738, numbers that, while not very good, do not completely wipe out the value of the 102 runs he scored or the 22 bases he stole. To even mention Marvin Benard in the same sentence as Manny Trillo would be to besmirch Marvin's character to an extent that only petty criminals and welfare cheats truly deserve. History and I do see eye to eye on this.

But rooting for Benard in 2000 was a troubling experience for me, not just because he wasn't very successful (heck, if Ray Sanchez, Steve Frey, Alex Diaz and a host of other talent-deprived idiots who have worn a Giants' uniform in the last dozen years or so haven't put me off, Marvin Benard's 2000 season wasn't likely to), but because Marvin seemed so belligerent towards the world about his relative lack of success. At times last year, Marvin seemed to be denying that there was anything wrong with his output while simultaneously blaming everyone but himself for his lack of production. "Everyone else" was often us, the Giant fans, because of our loud and continual expressions of discontent regarding his lack performance. And Marvin wasn't the only one to cast a stank-eye our way. Manager Dusty Baker was also routinely critical of the fans' impatience with Marvin Benard. This was, of course, only one season after Baker was extremely critical of the fans' vocal desire to see Joe Nathan replace an ineffective Mark Gardner in the starting rotation, and a few months before Baker became livid with everyone, fans included, because they questioned his decision making during the 2000 playoff series against the Mets. The message from Dusty Baker was clear: we, as fans, had no right to criticize this team. As long as they were winning, we should do nothing more than simply sit back and enjoy the ride. And when things weren't going so well, we should sit back and let the memory of the good times tide us over. Criticizing any player when we hadn't walked a mile in their spikes was not acceptable.

I am glad Baker eventually calmed down enough to re-up with the Giants for another two years, and I do expect that the team will be very competitive in 2001 and provide an adequate amount of thrills for their followers. But the notion, so often repeated by Baker, that fans should just support their team by feeling nothing but blank-eyed love still rings hollow to me. Not only does it fly in the face of traditional fan interaction with the game over the 100-plus years of baseball history, but it is in complete conflict with my belief that after many years following a team, a fan earns the right to have a meaningful opinions about that team, and to express them any damn way he or she feels like.

Put it this way: of all the men who have been part of the Giants over the 33 years since I became a fan, who has been with me from the start? Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, intermittently? Jim Davenport (frighteningly)? Lon Simmons? Mike Murphy? And of these, only Mike Murphy, the clubhouse manager, has been with the team without interruption since I first came on board in 1968.

I'll throw in Mike Krukow as well, since he seems to be settling in as a lifer even though I predate him with the Giants by some 15 years, and then point out that except for these six gentlemen, nobody associated with the San Francisco Giants has anywhere near as long a tenure associated with the team as I do. Not Peter Magowan. Not Dusty Baker. Not Marvin Benard. They're all transient short-timers, ready to ride off into the sunset the moment it is economically or emotionally advantageous for them to do so.

But fans, now; fans pass their passion for their favorite teams down through generations. Who's to say that, in a way, that fans don't eventually come to have a sort of ownership interest in their favorite team, at least in an emotional sense? So where does Dusty Baker come off telling any fan that he or she shouldn't express a negative opinion about the San Francisco Giants or its players? I am one of many who has supported this franchise economically over the years, and my lifetime investment in them is certainly in the tens of thousands of dollars. The fact that I don't hold an ownership certificate shouldn't wipe out my standing with the franchise, which I will still care about long after Dusty Baker leaves San Francisco to manage the Atlanta Braves or Marvin Benard starts tormenting the Giants (and only the Giants) once he signs with Milwaukee as a free agent following the 2004 season.

I don't go to a game to see Dusty Baker manage, even if he is the reigning Manager of the Year. I go to see the players, and thus rather than brood on Dusty's words, I instead continue to dwell on Marvin Benard and his 560 generally ineffective at-bats last season. This was the second highest at-bat total on the Giants (behind only Jeff Kent) during the 2000 season. For better or worse, we were seeing a lot of Marvin Benard. I don't understand how it was that we weren't supposed to have an opinion on the value of those at bats when there were so many of them. And considering that the money in our wallets and the eyeballs we train onto TV screens are the fuel that runs the engine of baseball, I'm not sure what the reason is that we are supposed to keep the opinions we do have to ourselves.

It's funny that, after the great, almost magical season the San Francisco Giants had in 2000, I thought very little about them this offseason. I obviously didn't have a strong urge to talk about them, or I would have certainly been typing away madly in the Giants newsgroup. Somehow, after all was said and done, I seem to have lost a little of my connection with the team. A cynical New York Mets fan would undoubtedly sneer that this indicates I am a front-running loser; probably some of the Giants faithful would agree. Likely Marvin Benard and Dusty Baker do as well. But when Street and Smith's 1986 edition spoke skeptically of the Giants' chances of ever becoming competitive again, even the fresh memory of Manny Trillo sullying the uniform of the team I loved didn't keep me from disagreeing loudly and proudly to anyone and everyone whose attention I could get. I have never been a front-runner.

Nobody knows exactly how Marvin Benard will perform this coming year, but history suggests that at 31 he won't be all that much better than he was last year. History also suggests something else: if Marvin continues to post substandard numbers in 2001, our cries of anguish are going to fall on very deaf ears in the front corner of the Giants' dugout. In fact, the occupant of that corner will likely shoot us a few more stank-eyes if we don't toe the line. And this fact, frankly, makes me a little unhappy.

At a time when it has never been so glorious to follow the San Francisco Giants, I find myself, at least at the moment, not feeling so much like a fan as I do just a fan. It's been a long time since I had to say that; in fact, I'm not sure it's ever been true for me before. All things considered, it's kind of strange.

But as we head into a new season, it will be interesting to see what being just a fan is like.

Richard Booroojian knows better than to submit an article to EEEEEE! without putting his own author's note at the bottom. Call it a protective measure.