No Karma
I have some mixed feelings about Jonathan Sanchez. Even during the 2010 season, even knowing he was the first Giants pitcher to throw a no-hitter in my lifetime, I thought he was the weak link for the to-be-great Giants rotation. He just didn’t have the consistency, he had an arm-slot that wandered and needed constant work to stay effective. When he got traded, I wasn’t very upset. I thought it was a good move, two guys who needed a change of scenery.
The Giants got Melky Cabrera, who was great and was a lie. Jonathan Sanchez got the Royals…and really, no new scenery that did anything for him. When Sanchez made a single Triple-A appearance in 2014 before disappearing from baseball, I didn’t notice, and no one I know noticed.
But I’ll still remember Dirty’s time with the Giants fondly. The first Giants World Series Championship of my time came with him on the team. He was a big part of the team I covered as a minor league journalist and a big part of the Giants turnaround in the late 2000’s.
And there’ll always be that night I was driving from Boston to Norwich, Connecticut, after a late flight, hoping that the AT&T connection was enough to listen to the Giants game on the MLB app, and hearing the crowd cheer something that AT&T Park hadn’t seen before.
I hope Sanchez gets another shot. He might be high-maintenance, and a little wild, a member of the Giants’ past…but he deserves better.
