Steward: Casilla exit shows how cruel baseball can be.
Baseball is a cruel game, like the world.
Out of the hundreds of responses I received on the story I wrote about Santiago Casilla weeping at his locker following the Giants’ mortifying playoff exit Tuesday night, that one hit just the right sad, somber note.
Baseball is so very cruel. How cruel? Casilla converted 31 of 40 save chances as the Giants’ closer this season, yet to many fans, that made him a total failure, a bum and the scourge of the team for only being successful 77.5 percent of the time.
We should all be so lucky to be successful 77.5 percent of the time in our daily lives. The thing about Casilla is his percentage was so much higher than that during his previous six seasons as a Giant. He was one of their pillar players during this still-magnificent era, one of just eight to be part of all three World Series championship teams.
Many fans can’t remember past last week, unfortunately. They don’t remember, or appreciate, the countless impossible jams Casilla worked out of as a setup man for Brian Wilson and Sergio Romo, or taking the ball as the ninth-inning man when Romo wasn’t up to the task after 2012. They don’t remember his filthy 97-mph two-seamer, or the power slider that locked up opposing hitters and turned them to strikeout salt on so many occasions.
There’s an easier way to sum it up. Without Casilla, the Giants do not have three world championships in the last seven years. They’d very likely still be stuck on zero. Alas, too many will only remember his 2016.
With that in mind, it was truly heartbreaking to see Santiago at his locker, bent over in a chair, face in hands, quietly weeping over the large Bible he takes everywhere he goes. Even as a reporter who is supposed to be objective and unfeeling, I felt like putting my hand on his shoulder.
This little piece of writing, I suppose, is my hand. I’ve known and chronicled Casilla since he was a talented, but raw, top prospect with the A’s going by the name of Jairo Garcia. He wanted to get to the majors so badly he falsified his true identity and backdated his age three years so he could get a fairer look from scouts.
“When Americans come to the Dominican Republic, they like young guys,” he said in 2006 after his true identity was revealed. “They’re not going to sign guys who are too old.”
Casilla didn’t become a full-time major leaguer until 2007, at age 26 (we think). He pitched three years in Oakland, and after the A’s inexplicably cut him loose following a rough 2009 season, the Giants quickly snapped him up. It turned out to be the biggest theft Brian Sabean ever made against his cross-bay counterpart Billy Beane. Still is.
At least until this year, anyway. Casilla had a bad season. There is no denying that. He didn’t deny it as he faced the music with the media — language barrier and all — every time a game he pitched in went awry (Wilson, it should be noted, frequently didn’t). But he always believed, even up until that last fateful inning Tuesday night, that he’d get the ball and would get the job done. He craved the ball. That’s why Bruce Bochy loved him so much and gave him so many chances.
This time, though, he didn’t get the chance, and that might have hurt him even more than getting booed off the mound, as he did on Sept. 17 following his ninth and final blown save. That night, he told reporters through interpreter Erwin Higueros, “I’m having bad luck. I try to do my best. I’m not going to be sad or kill myself. It’s a game.”
I drove home that night thinking I was glad he told us that, because Casilla takes the game so seriously, wears his emotions so outwardly, wants to perform so badly for his team and the fans and competes so fiercely that you feared a bit for him if he hadn’t said it. That was a rough one.
Sadly, after that night, public opinion essentially forced Bochy’s hand not to use him again in an important situation, particularly at home. Erratic as he was in 2016, maybe Casilla could have protected that three-run lead in the ninth, drawing from the experience of 25 prior postseason appearances over 10 series in which he compiled an 0.92 ERA.
We’ll never know. But Giants fans will have to live with the fact that they played a caustic role in creating that eternal what-if.
Baseball is a cruel game, like the world. So few get to go out like David “Big Papi” Ortiz or Derek Jeter. Most go out the hard way, even distinguished veterans. Many, like Casilla, go out the door for the final time with the toxic scorn of idiot fans nipping at their psyches, and yes, it’s even worse in the social media era. Before Game 4, Chicago pitcher Jon Lester reflected on a tweet he’d once received that read, “I hope you get cancer again and die.”
I read such brutal drivel about athletes on my Twitter feed all the time. We can only imagine some of the vitriol Casilla has encountered this year from the stands, on the street, on his laptop.
We so often forget that athletes are human beings. And most of them are really, really good human beings like Casilla. So it was heartening, amid the usual obnoxious Twitter trash, to see some of the feedback to my story come from fans who said they were saddened and moved by it, sorry they were so hard on him, and relayed messages that he was a great Giant, a player and teammate of great character and competitive spirit. That he was.
In time, the wounds will heal. Casilla will return someday to take his most rightful place on the Giants Wall of Fame outside AT&T Park. People will cheer him again, and he will smile that broad, infectious smile and thank them.
But as one of the first to leave the ballpark Tuesday night, not likely to ever return as an active player, Casilla was still wearing a distressed expression even though he’d dried his tears. It just didn’t seem right for a man who’d done so much for this team, and for a city so far from his native land, to walk off into the night like that.
Baseball is a cruel game, like the world.