The Lunatic Fringe

#RallyZito

I’m giving the Internet credit for that one.

Don’t get me wrong, Barry Zito himself had a little something to do with that.  So did Hunter Pence, and Marco Scutaro on defense.  So did Pablo Sandoval and Brandon Crawford on offense.

But among those who showed up to this game, even if they weren’t at the game, were Giants fans.  It would’ve been easy to defeated.  However, the fans made their presence known on the Internet.  The #RallyZito hashtag, and the Avatar replacements took on a life of their own.  They were everywhere.  I can’t remember seeing a presence like that made by any other team’s fans.

I tried to explain the phenomenon to my father last night.  His response was “I don’t know what any of that means, but it sounds good.”

Good it was.  I love this fanbase.  As Jayson Stark of ESPN wrote after the game:

By the time the Giants finished off a win that forced the NLCS back to San Francisco with the Cardinals now leading three games to two, the mystical powers of #rallyzito-ism had pretty much taken over modern civilization.

Among trending Twitter topics, it ranked No. 2 in the entire world — un-huh, we said the world — ahead of even #SoyTanRebelde and (yes, it’s true) #AdrianaEstevesDeservesAnOscar. We’re not sure what that says about the world. But apparently, there are a lot of Giants fans tweeting in it.

There’s no one to take credit for this.  I heard KNBR’s post-game show claim it started with them the day before, but other reports said the hashtag had appeared as early as midgame Thursday.  It doesn’t matter who started it.  It just mattered that no one ended it, more than 25,000 tweets later as Zito exited the game, and the tag continued through the evening.

The team took the momentum back, but I swear you could hear the echoes in St. Louis of the fans back in California, and across fiber-optic lines crossing the country.

And now, there’s baseball on Sunday.  And it’ll be back in San Francisco.

October is insane.

*-Quick Lunatic Fringe history check.  Don’t know who that guy is with the Mustache?  He’s Barry Zito’s Driver.  The (probably) fictional character got debuted with Barry Zito after Zito’s accident at the start of last year, and he’s been hanging out with Barry ever since!