Buster Posey, Travis Ishikawa reflect on Giants’ 2014 World Series run ahead of Saturday’s reunion

SAN FRANCISCO — The Giants will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 2014 World Series team on Saturday, and if that doesn’t challenge your concept of time, then here’s another for you to process:

Travis Ishikawa, new grandfather.

“Her name is Braelynn and she just arrived in May,” Ishikawa said over the phone recently.

It was just one decade ago that Ishikawa hit the pennant-clinching home run that he’d tell his grandchildren about someday. Now he already can, and he won’t be the only one. His shot into the right-field arcade at the waterfront ballpark in China Basin was such a monumental and dramatic moment in franchise history that a generation of Giants fans will be telling their grandchildren about it, too.

It’s not as if the Giants faced elimination in Game 5 of the NL Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. They weren’t even down to their last gasp. Ishikawa batted with two runners on base and nobody out in the ninth inning. A bloop single over the second baseman’s head might have netted the same result.

Ishikawa did a little more than that. The Giants’ waterfront ballpark set decibel records when the ball landed in the right-field arcade. Ishikawa, stiff-armed and in a stupor, roared around the bases after hitting the franchise’s first pennant-clinching home run since Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in 1951. The television cameras panned to general manager Brian Sabean in his booth as hands covered his sobbing face.

The fact it was Ishikawa, a former top prospect who had a respectable if less-than-remarkable career, who was in his second stint with the club after bouncing around the league, and who ended up the postseason starter in left field by providence or circumstance or because of a random assortment of injuries, made the moment all the more emblematic for a franchise that was headed to its third World Series in five seasons. No matter what Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy did, no matter who they plugged in or what roster improvisations they had to make, it all kept clicking into place as if guided by fate.

A decade later, Ishikawa, reached last week while coaching on the road with the Giants’ Low-A San Jose affiliate, reflected on that unforgettable night.

“That one swing really changed my life from a baseball perspective,” said Ishikawa, who is in his eighth season as a minor-league hitting coach. “Still being in the Bay Area, I’m always running into people who tell me that they were at the game or they tell me where they were at when it happened. That’s such a huge privilege. It will always be really cool to know that moment had a huge impact on people.”

The Giants couldn’t commemorate the 10th anniversary of the raucous 2010 team, which won the first World Series title in the franchise’s West Coast era, because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They had a solid turnout when they celebrated the 2012 championship team two years ago, but several notable names couldn’t attend because they were still active big leaguers playing elsewhere. That conflict remains for a scant few from 2014, most notably St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Brandon Crawford and Los Angeles Angels reliever Hunter Strickland. Infielder Matt Duffy is on the injured list for the Texas Rangers’ Triple-A club in Round Rock. Pablo Sandoval might never hang up his cleats; after the Giants released him in spring training, he signed with the independent Staten Island FerryHawks.

But otherwise, the Giants are expecting an impressive turnout.

It’ll include Brandon Belt, who hit the 18th-inning home run at Nationals Park that helped the Giants escape a hard-fought NL Division Series. Belt, who planned to play this season but didn’t sign with a club and hasn’t officially retired, was behind the batting cage in San Francisco on the Giants’ last homestand. He wore a field pass, not a uniform, along with former Giant Darin Ruf; their two families were just starting a summer vacation together in Sonoma County.

And yes, the Giants anticipate that the attendees on Saturday will include another officially unretired player: Madison Bumgarner, whose dominant and unyielding October in 2014 ranks as arguably the greatest single postseason performance by a pitcher in major-league history.

Bumgarner has kept a low profile since April of last season when the Arizona Diamondbacks released the struggling left-hander and absorbed the two years that remained on the five-year, $85 million contract he signed prior to 2020. He hasn’t made any public appearances since then. The Giants began the gentle process of pushing and prodding for this weekend many months ago.

Even Bumgarner had to appreciate that it wouldn’t be the same to get the 2014 team together without the pitcher who threw a shutout against the Kansas City Royals in Game 5 of the World Series, then came back on two days of rest to throw five more shutout innings in relief on the road and hoist the Giants to a Game 7 victory.

Bumgarner’s former batterymate is among those eager to reconnect with him.

“We caught up on the phone a couple weeks ago,” Buster Posey said. “He sounds like he’s doing well. I’m most definitely excited to see him.”

Bumgarner’s unrelenting force of will and Ishikawa’s pennant-clinching home run might have been the defining moments of the Giants’ last World Series championship run. But they weren’t the only memories that result in frisson when the players recall them.

For Posey, it was the NL wild-card game at Pittsburgh when Bumgarner threw a shutout and Crawford’s grand slam cracked open a scoreless game in the fourth inning and slipped noise-canceling headphones on a road atmosphere that was as loud and frenzied as any the Giants had experienced in their previous two championship runs.

“I feel like that team had the attitude, and a lot of it came from Tim Hudson and Jake Peavy, that if we could go into Pittsburgh and win that wild-card game, we were going to be in a really good spot,” Posey said. “The Nationals had a great team that year. But the wild-card game definitely stands out. To me, the crowd noise and atmosphere felt similar to Philly in 2010. Every playoff atmosphere is great but those had a different energy. And then Craw’s grand slam silenced it and Bumgarner shut them out.

“If you don’t win that game, you don’t have a chance. That’s probably a game that gets overlooked sometimes, the importance of going in there and winning that game.”

For Ishikawa, the moment that gives him the most chill bumps — even more than the game-ending home run — happened an inning earlier in Game 5 of that NLCS. It was when Michael Morse hit a tying blast off Cardinals right-hander Pat Neshek in the eighth. It was the Giants’ own Kirk Gibson moment: Morse was battling an oblique injury that reduced him to pinch-hitting duties and Neshek had held right-handed hitters to a .176 average with two home runs all season.

Ishikawa was in Rancho Cucamonga with the Low-A club a few days ago when Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” began to play over the stadium speakers. It’s among the most ubiquitous rock songs in history. Ishikawa had to explain to another coach why he’s still affected by it.

“I get chills every time we hear it and I get chills whenever I think of Morse’s homer,” said Ishikawa, who will be able to take a break from his coaching duties to attend the reunion. “The Giants would play it when we were tied or down in the eighth, so that night, they’re playing the song and all of a sudden (Journey lead vocalist) Steve Perry is on the big screen, singing to his own song, getting the crowd riled up. He was just so into it, throwing his hat off the balcony. The crowd is going crazy. Then three pitches later, Morse hits the homer to tie the game. And that was after I’d given up that bonehead run in the fourth inning when I misplayed a ball.

“So that was like redemption for me. I was so ecstatic. That was one of the coolest baseball moments that didn’t happen to me. I knew right there that we were going to win. For Morse to hit that homer off Neshek, who was probably the nastiest right-on-right pitcher in baseball that year, I was like, ‘There’s no way we can lose at this point.’ I was confident we weren’t going back to St. Louis.

“The rest, obviously … well, the stars had to align. Right?”

That’s how ripped-from-the-storybook everything seemed to be in that 2014 run. When a team wins Game 7 of the World Series, those final moments tend to blot out everything that came before it. But so many moments that led up to that last game in Kansas City remain fixed in franchise lore.

That last game, though, is what makes the 2014 title distinct from the two that preceded it. The franchise’s most recent championship team didn’t have to win six elimination games in the NLDS and NLCS, like the 2012 team did. But until that night at Kauffman Stadium, Game 7 held nothing but heartache for generations of Giants fans. There was Willie McCovey’s line drive at Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson to end the 1962 season. There was the tumult of Thunderstixx and the Rally Monkey in Anaheim in 2002.

Maybe those teams just needed someone like Bumgarner to bully their way to the end.

“It was a dream come true,” Posey said. “As a kid growing up, loving baseball my whole life, it’s backyard Wiffle ball stuff, to play in Game 7 of the World Series. I don’t know that I appreciated it in the moment as much as I probably should have, just because you want to win that game so bad. At that point in the season, it’s like, ‘Gosh, after all the work that’s been put into this …’ It was one of the more nervous games leading up to it. Once we got in the game, they went away once the game started. That was the nice thing.”

Of all the stats and accolades that defined Posey’s career, this one might stand out: He caught 56 postseason games and 14 of them — exactly 25 percent — were shutouts.

“Pretty wild,” Posey said. “It speaks to how good our pitching was. Bumgarner always told me I was lazy. He’d say all I had to do was sit back there. No, we had a good rapport. We had a good game plan. I trusted him to throw what he was comfortable with more than anybody.”

Posey and Ishikawa have remained as connected to the organization as anyone from the 2014 team, one as part of the ownership group, another setting up the hitting cage for freshly drafted players. San Jose received a couple of them this week when first-rounder James Tibbs III and sixth-rounder Robert Hipwell, among others, joined the roster. Last year’s second-round pick, teenage shortstop Walker Martin, was promoted from the Arizona Complex League as well. Ishikawa looks forward to working with all of them. And he predicts great things from last year’s first-round pick: Bryce Eldridge, who more than held his own as a 19-year-old in the Cal League before the Giants promoted him to High-A Eugene at the end of June.

“This is a guy who will be a leader in the big league clubhouse,” Ishikawa said of Eldridge. “I’m not sure when that’ll be, but you can see an aura and maturity level around him that you don’t see from a lot of 19-year-olds. He’s way beyond where I was (as a high school draftee).”

Perhaps Eldridge will make a memory that Giants fans will tell their grandchildren about, too.

“It’s created opportunities for me,” Ishikawa said. “I’ve had the opportunity to speak at churches and baseball camps, to help others who might be going through a tough time in baseball or life in general. We’re all facing challenges and trials and there’s no guarantee everything will always turn out well, but you have to keep grinding with the right mindset. That’s the message when I share the story.”

(Top photo of Travis Ishikawa: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)