The 2010 San Francisco Giants will always be one of the flukiest teams to ever win a major sports championship. I know this to be true because their starting lineup from Game 5 of the World Series, when they clinched the title against Cliff Lee and the Texas Rangers, looked like this:
November 1, 2010
RF Andres Torres
2B Freddy Sanchez
C Buster Posey
LF Cody Ross
3B Juan Uribe
1B Aubrey Huff
DH Pat Burrell
SS Edgar Renteria
CF Aaron Rowand
As a reference point, here's San Francisco's current lineup from a game just a few days ago against Colorado:
May 18, 2013
CF Angel Pagan
2B Marco Scutaro
3B Pablo Sandoval
C Buster Posey
RF Hunter Pence
1B Brandon Belt
LF Gregor Blanco
SS Brandon Crawford
P Tim Lincecum
Remarkably, just two and a half years later, only one player from that Game 5 lineup in 2010 is still starting for the Giants today: the mythical prepubescent creature known as Buster Posey. That's amazing, and a testament to how utterly random that 2010 lineup really was. Comparatively: today's Red Sox still have three starters from their 2007 championship team, which won the World Series three years before the Giants did (their names are Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz, and Jacoby Ellsbury). The Phillies still have four from their 2008 championship (Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Ruiz). And the Yankees still have four from 2009 (Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, and Robinson Cano). But the 2010 Giants -- the most recent of all these champions -- are already left with just one.
Even more amazingly: not only are most of the 2010 Giants no longer with the franchise; many of them are completely out of baseball altogether, or headed that way (again, less than three years later). There exists an assumption that a championship-winning team will have multiple young, elite hitters still in the prime of their careers. The 2010 Giants, though, were mostly an assembly of mediocre or even downright-terrible veterans on the downside of their careers who somehow collectively caught lightning in a bottle for a few months. A closer look at that Game 5 lineup:
RF Andres Torres. Before 2010, the 32-year old Torres had never once played even a full half-season in the majors. Yet that year, he led off for the Giants, played in 139 games, hit 16 homers, stole 26 bases, and posted a .823 OPS. In the three subsequent years since 2010, Torres' OPS totals have plummeted back down to .643, .664, and now .578. Andres Torres has been an above-average MLB starter in exactly one season since arriving in the majors in 2002; it happened to come in 2010 for the World Series champions. This will be a recurring theme.
2B Freddy Sanchez. Acquired in a trade in mid-2009, Sanchez hit .292 as a 32-year-old second baseman for the 2010 Giants. After Game 5 of the World Series, his major league career only lasted for 60 more games before chronic injuries forced him out of baseball. It's as if Freddy Sanchez's body let him play just long enough for the Giants to win the 2010 championship before it ultimately gave out.
C Buster Posey. The only player from that Game 5 lineup who's still starting for the Giants.
LF Cody Ross. Cody Ross hit cleanup in Game 5 of the World Series for the Giants just two months after he was cut by the Florida Marlins. That's all you need to know about the 2010 Giants to understand what their deal was. At least Ross is still a useful platoon outfielder today.
3B Juan Uribe. Only played two seasons with the Giants, and hit 24 home runs in 2010. Since leaving the team after that year, he's hit a grand total of eight home runs, with an OBP of .279, and has assumed the mantle of Perhaps The Most Useless Player In Baseball.
1B Aubrey Huff. One of these things is not like the other:
Aubrey Huff in 2009: .241/.310/.384
Aubrey Huff in 2010: .290/.385/.506
Aubrey Huff in 2011: .246/.306/.370
So Aubrey Huff was unabashedly terrible at baseball in 2009 and 2011, but was briefly infused with hitting talent for a random isolated season in 2010. Because why not. Like Freddy Sanchez, Huff is now basically retired from the game.
DH Pat Burrell. Burrell spent all of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 with the Tampa Bay Rays. His stats with that team: .218/.311/.361. That's a .625 OPS. The Giants picked him up in the middle of 2010, and for the rest of the year he hit .266/.364/.509. That's a .872 OPS, which is quite a bit higher than .625. A year later, he retired from baseball.
SS Edgar Renteria. From 2008 through 2010, Edgar Renteria's OPS was a dismal .676. But in Game 5 of the 2010 World Series, Edgar Renteria hit a game-winning three-run homer off of Cliff Lee and was later named World Series MVP. Yep. Like several of his former teammates, Renteria has been out of baseball since 2011.
CF Aaron Rowand. Wasn't a good baseball player in 2010 and he hasn't played baseball since 2011. So basically, a perfect fit to be the center-fielder for this championship team.
It's unlikely we'll ever see something like this happen again. Somehow, a random assembly of on-the-brink veterans, mediocre bench players, and desperate waiver wire pickups happened to end up on the same team at the same time for a very short period of time, and happened to win a championship. Some were awful players who happened to have career seasons (or half-seasons) at the exact right time; others were just awful players who happened to hit game-winning home runs against opposing aces. Only two of them were under the age of 30; only one of them is still starting for the Giants. And most impossibly of all, six of the nine players in that Game 5 starting lineup are now completely out of baseball, less than three years after clinching the World Series. In other words -- a lineup that was good enough to win a baseball championship in 2010 wasn't good enough to play professional baseball in 2013. That doesn't make any sense. And neither do the 2010 San Francisco Giants.
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