Thanks to jponry at McCovey Chronicles, I read something on Sunday that makes Jeff Seidel seem like a rich man’s version of Joe Posnanski. In a newspaper called The Thomastown Times, an earnest rag printed in the heart of Georgia, some guy wrote the worst article about the San Francisco Giants you’ll ever read. Who wrote it? I couldn’t find his name anywhere, but there’s a big picture of him so I’m going to use it.

While you’re pondering why a guy would let a newspaper run a huge color photo of himself with some sort of … ummm … lower lip blemish, I’m going to add my own Fire Joe Morgan-esque commentary.

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SF Giants are champs – Really?

Courtesy of some newspaper that won’t exist in 10 years

The 2012 baseball season is finally over and the San Francisco Giants are your World Series champions. If you are a Giants’ fan you probably aren’t going to appreciate the rest of this column. I’m not a Giants fans and am not drinking the Kool-Aid about how good they are.

This guy is “not a Giants fans,” people. And here are his Kool-Aid rankings:

1. Grape
2. Strawberry
3. Cherry
N/A. About how good the Giants are

Admittedly I am standing on very shaky ground here. The Giants won the championship in one of the most boring and uneventful World Series ever, but they did win. They beat the teams that they were required to beat, including the Steven Strasburg-less Nationals.

Still not sure how the Giants prevailed against all that Natitude. I still found myself amazed while watching Game 6 of that classic series against Washington on MLB Network last night, before they showed the replay of the Giants beating the Yankees in Game 4 of that boring and uneventful 2012 World Series.

Yes, I’ve heard about their great team chemistry and about the closeness and unselfishness of their players. I’m just not buying it. There were other teams with more talent that also had these unmeasureable traits. The Giants were just a “good” team that was playing well at the right time. In many cases, that is the most important trait for a champion. The best team does not always win, just the team playing the best at the right time.

“Unmeasureable.”

Oh, yeah, the Giants had pitching! Really? What I saw was professional hitters looking amateurish swinging at pitches a foot out of the strike zone and then taking a strike “right down the middle.” Why? Who knows? They just slumped at the wrong time.

Back in my day, hitters only swung at pitches in the strike zone and never let a good strike go by. AND WE LIKED IT!

The Giants hitters were nothing to be proud of, either. Other than Pablo Sandoval’s three-homer outburst in Game One, the Giants showed very little offense at all. Their few clutch hits provided the difference in the other games. It was just a boring series!

Don’t you get it? The Giants won despite playing poorly in every phase of the game. The World Series wasn’t close because the other team (Which team was it again? Ah hell, who gives a crap…) slumped at the wrong time. And that yawn-worthy excuse for “baseball” preempted X-Factor, too!

The one area in which the Giants lead the universe is in hair! What an unsightly bunch. Tim Lincecum’s long girlish locks are laughable. Brian Wilson’s outrageous beard should be banned before he steps on it. Sergio Romo, Hunter Pence, and Sandoval also had facial hair that has no place on a baseball field. Just an opinion!

The last sentence of this paragraph and the previous one make me feel like “The Onion” is playing a little prank on Giants fans. The Thomaston Times can’t be a real paper, can it? Actually, according to Wikipedia the newspaper was founded in 1869 and has a circulation of 4500. I stand corrected.

The one man on the Giants that I really admire is their manager, Bruce Bochy. He is a smart baseball man and an excellent tactician. He seems to make the right moves and make solid decisions at every point of a game. He is certainly a championship skipper.

But that goatee has no place in a baseball dugout. Just an opinion!

The San Franciscans do have a budding superstar, if he hasn’t already reached that level. That is Buster Posey, a baby-faced assassin with a bat. This Florida State grad is a stud and is the best player on the Giants squad without question. He may even be the MVP of the National League in 2012. He would get my vote!

Perfunctory compliment for the hero from Georgia … check. Very gracious, but I’m still reeling from the news that this guy doesn’t have an MVP vote. Hopefully it’s not because of his cold sore. That would be mean.

Aside from Sandoval and Posey, the Giants are a bunch of spare parts that morphed into a workable machine at the right time. Baseball experts who are much smarter than I may disagree, but I’ll stand by my opinion. You can have the Giants, I don’t want them.

I’m starting to get the feeling that this guy wants another baseball team. Perhaps another National League squad that also won 94 games during the regular season…

And keeping with the baseball theme, I see that the Braves exercised the contract options on three valuable members of their team. Atlanta secured Brian McCann, Tim Hudson, and Paul Maholm for next season at a combined cost of $27.5 million. These guys will once again be important cogs in the Braves’ drive towards another playoff appearance and I am glad they will be back. McCann will not be ready until the season gets started, as he recovers from shoulder surgery, but the Braves think he will be 100 percent by May.

I bet if you asked this guy about this column in three months, he’d swear it consisted of two paragraphs about the Giants and nine about the Braves’ off-season moves.

With about $25 million to spend on free agents the Braves will have the money to pick up some vital cogs to replace Chipper Jones and probably Michael Bourn. Hopefully at this time next year I can write a column about the Braves winning the 2013 World Series title. It could happen. As the Giants showed, you just have to play good at the right time.

See Braves fans? It’s easy. Just play good when you’re supposed to.