Buster Posey said it’s time, he’s ready to walk off the field. I’m not ready to see him go
I wasn’t ready for Buster Posey to retire from baseball.
The San Francisco Giants catcher was the one constant in a magical run of three World Series titles between 2010 and 2014 that transformed his franchise (and my team) from frustrated losers over 50 years in San Francisco to champions. He announced Thursday he was stepping off the diamond to spend more time with his family and leave behind the physical pain robbing him of some of the joy he felt playing.
Posey’s excellence in the biggest games, his fearlessness where previous Giants choked in the biggest moments, gave me joy and changed how I viewed the game of baseball, and how my team fit within the context of baseball as an American pastime.
Before Posey, the team I loved was a sad, bitter story from the time the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco in 1958. For more than 50 years in San Francisco, the Giants always came up short or were so dismal, they weren’t contenders at all.
After Posey, the Giants were winners, champions, icons, legends. A lifetime of bad luck and bad outcomes ended under his watch behind the plate, as catcher and captain, each time the Giants won baseball’s biggest prize against all odds.
He delivered me – and Giants fans of my generation – from our sad legacy of bitter defeats to something wholly unexpected, beautiful, and sublime. From 1972, when I was 9, to 1986, when I was 23, the San Francisco Giants didn’t reach the postseason once.
Before Buster, the bitter seasons
My childhood was spent freezing before crowds of less than 5,000 people at the now-demolished Candlestick Park. My childhood was defined by Sunday outings at the ballpark ruined by Los Angeles Dodgers stars such as Ron Cey and Steve Garvey, rounding the bases while my Dodgers fan father stifled a smirk as he sat next to me in barely concealed satisfaction. I seethed with the fury of all sports fans unfortunate enough to hitch their emotions to losers.
I was once the most bitter baseball fan you could imagine. Before Buster Posey, my greatest moment as a Giants fan was in 1982, on the last day of the regular season, when the Giants knocked the Dodgers out of playoff contention via a momentous home run struck by the late, great Joe Morgan.
Did you catch that nuance? We didn’t celebrate a great Giants win in those years. We celebrated keeping another great team, the Dodgers, from reaching the postseason. We were pathetic.
In 1987, we were better than the St. Louis Cardinals and yet they went to the World Series and not us. In 1989, the Oakland A’s swept us in four games in the World Series. In 1993, we won 103 games and missed the postseason. In 1998, the pitiful Chicago Cubs knocked us out in an elimination game. In 2000, we capitulated to the lousy New York Mets. In 2002, we had the World Series won before caving to the Anaheim Angels. In 2003, we fell to the Florida Marlins. Each failure had its own specific tale of players coming up small in huge games.
By 2010, when Posey arrived on the scene, I was middle-aged and bitter. The filmmaker Ken Burns used me as the sad sack in his beautiful 2010 PBS documentary, “The Tenth Inning.” I was the guy whose fandom for the Giants symbolized futility.
After Buster, the championship seasons
I had given up. I was 47 in 2010. Angry. Venomous. Hopeless. The chance of winning one World Series – just one! – didn’t seem possible.....until the Giants won the National League West on the last day of the season.
The full-time baseball writer for the Bee had left the paper that autumn and my boss asked me, the local news columnist and former sports columnist, if I would cover the Giants in the playoffs.
Sure, I thought, this will be quick – the Giants will lose to the Atlanta Braves in the first round.
But they won. The Giants surely would lose to the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series. But they won. The Giants would be demolished by the powerful Texas Rangers in the World Series.
But they won.
Posey was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2010. He batted .300 with a home run and two RBI in the World Series. He called every pitch in a dominant performance by the Giants that ended in five games, on Nov. 1, 2010, in Arlington. I stood dumbstruck in the press box, too shocked to move or speak.
I had kept waiting for the Giants to fail, and they didn’t. The moment the last out was recorded, my phone buzzed in my pocket with a gracious, congratulatory text. Who was it from?
Ken Burns.
“How did I feel,” Burns asked me the next day. I couldn’t answer. I had kept waiting for the collapse, the bitter defeat, and it never came. The Giants were stoic, fearless, clutch, poised – just like their young catcher.
When he was asked afterward if the Giants could do it again, Posey said, “Yes, why not?”
The Giants did it again in 2012 and 2014. Each time, Posey was there to run to the mound and embrace the pitcher he helped get to that magical final out with his mind for calling pitches and his ability for hitting them in key situations.
Posey was the glue, the backbone, the brain, the heart, the soul of all three titles. His belief became our belief. When he went down with a serious leg injury in 2011, an entire fanbase went down with him. When he came back in 2012 to be the National League Most Valuable Player – when the Giants won the World Series again – he became a legend on the order of Giants greats who never achieved one championship, let alone two.
Then the Giants won another in 2014. Three World Series titles are all defined by a ruthless zeal to win by performing big in the biggest games. That’s what Posey did. That’s what the Giants did with Posey as their leader.
They celebrated with three championship parades and enough joy to lift the spirits of legendary Giants who never achieved one title in San Francisco: Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Will Clark, Barry Bonds.
They all warmed their hands on the championship fire lit by Posey’s professionalism, his fearlessness, his desire, his talent. If the Giants were a dynasty – and they were – they were created in Posey’s throwback image of a player who was about winning and giving his all over everything else.
The legacy
His accomplishments: Rookie of the Year, MVP, seven-time All-Star, Silver Slugger awards, three World Series rings. These would be impressive if achieved in 20 years. But Posey accomplishments came in a little more than 10. He performed while never being controversial or divisive or distracting or negative.
His last year was one of his best. The sum of his career was a thrilling joy ride of winning baseball achieved on the biggest stage and in contrast to everything we knew and believed about the Giants since they came West.
When Posey said goodbye on Thursday, I couldn’t watch. I’m almost 60 now. My sports writing days are behind me. I’m just a fan now, remembering how I felt on that night in Arlington, Texas. And how I felt on that night, in 2012, in Detroit. And how I felt when the Giants beat the Kansas City Royals for their third title in 2014.
Each time, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Each time it did, with Posey right in the middle of it – calling the pitches, getting the big hits, providing the belief that all of us climbed aboard like a magic carpet, on a ride we couldn’t believe we was real.
It was. It happened. Buster Posey was the key figure for all of it and now he was telling us he was going home, retiring. He said he emptied the tank in his final season. He hit .304 and decided, that was it.
This was more than just a player walking away. This was a beautiful era slipping away as watched, grateful, and greedy for just one more year that will never come.
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
