The damn Giants I'm forced to collect

I always say I'm a baseball fan first, and then after that I'm a Padres fan and a fan of certain other players I like. I don't really hate any teams. When the playoffs roll around, I always seem to root for the underdog.. the team who's gone the longest without a championship. And I usually find myself rooting against the Yankees, Cardinals, and Giants (The Red Sox get a pass since they had such a legendary dry spell).

As a player collector, of course I've got a lot of cards from these teams in my collection. Yanks I love include Reggie and Mickey. With the Cardinals, there's Gibson and Musial.

More Yankees I collect.

But now let's talk about the Giants. A division rival of my Padres, they might be my least favorite team. I'm even cool with the Dodgers these days, perhaps a result of Stockholm Syndrome from reading so many LA card blogs.

But despite my dislike of the Giants, I find myself a player collector of an inordinate number of guys who spent quality time with San Francisco. It's almost silly!

The latest tragic turn involves Jake Peavy, cruelly sent cross-country by Boston in a sick joke of a trade. I've got a soft spot for Jake from his days as the last great Padres pitcher, before they cut him loose rather than pay him competitively. (His numbers haven't been quite so good since leaving San Diego, so I suppose in hindsight it wasn't necessarily a bad move by the front office.) I don't really build PCs for many active guys, but Peavy is one of the few.. Probably the biggest collection I've got of a current player, with 60 unique cards.

The only other current Giant I like these days is manager Bruce Bochy, again thanks to his Padres ties (Hey, he and Jake will be reunited; that's kinda cool.) I don't really have a PC going for Bochy, but I probably should start. One of my collecting focuses is Pads in the Hall, and Bochy will likely get in as a manager. Winning 2 World Series Championships seems to be the magic number for managers, much like 300 wins for a pitcher, or 500 home runs or 3000 hits for a batter. So he's pretty much punched his ticket, even if it might take a while to go through. So yeah, I'll likely be obligated to collect him eventually. That's cool. He seems to be a great guy by all accounts and I'm glad he's had some success.. I just wish he could have won it all down on the opposite end of California instead.

Speaking of other Giants I'm self-imposed "forced" into collecting, you've also got Willie McCovey and Gaylord Perry.. a couple Hall of Famers who spent many years in San Francisco, with relatively brief stints in sunny San Diego.

The cards in this post are all from an awesome PWE I just received from Dime Box Nick.

Bill Madlock is another favorite of mine. No Padre connection here. While most associated with his time on the Pirates, he spent 2 and a half years as a Giant. I've also got a sizable collection of Vida Blue cards, who played 6 years in San Francisco.

I'll post the rest of the cards Nick sent that I couldn't shoehorn into this post soon.

In recent months, I've started collecting a couple other former Giants: Rod Beck (Padre connection again) and Hoyt Wilhelm (they were still the New York Giants when he played with them, so I guess that sorta gives him a pass).

Donruss kindly omitted the Giants stats from Hoyt's career. Thanks for the great cards, Nick!

So that's a whopping eight guys I collect who were Giants. That might be the most for any team after the Padres.. Just so happen to be my least-favorite team. And of course I'd never turn down cool cards of Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, George Foster, and the like. Damn Giants.