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This time, the Giants dole out the torture

Giants second baseman Freddy Sanchez set a record by doubling each of his first three World Series at-bats. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO – To the precision of Cliff Lee(notes) and Tim Lincecum(notes), the tenacity of 18 guys who’d spent their whole lives getting here, and the tautness of World Series baseball, the San Francisco Giants introduced their game.

Maybe “introduced” is too formal. They splattered the place with it.

They often call it torture here. They offer T-shirts that beg, “Torture Me.” And people buy them. Plenty of them. Then every day when the game starts, they pull them up over their eyes.

These folks believe in baseball torture the way people in other towns believe in sunsets, velvety puppies and Homecoming queens. The more tense the ball, the more exasperating, the more insanely satisfying, the fonder they are of it.

Dozens of nights every summer, the fog billows in from the bay, signaling game time and, for somebody, three hours of hell.

Now it’s World Series time and the Giants are still playing, which can mean only one thing for the Bay Area: A whole ‘nother month of torture.

Slap plastic beards on their faces, sound the victory foghorn and call them ecstatic.

On a mild Wednesday night in late October, the Giants didn’t play quite to their character or game plan, but AT&T Park was dripping in torment nonetheless. The Texas Rangers’, mostly. Cliff Lee’s, assuredly. Vladimir Guerrero(notes), oh my. Torture, it turns out, is contagious.

By the end of 8½ innings and an 11-7 Giants’ win, hardly anyone was untouched. Not most of the 12 pitchers, many of whom dashed in and trudged out. Not the Rangers’ defense, which kicked four balls. Not Lincecum, who not only gifted the Rangers a runner at third (“A little bit of a brain fart there,” Lincecum explained), but twice was struck by scalded comebackers, like he’d come dressed as an arcade duck.

“I think it’s just baseball,” Lincecum said. “That’s the only thing you can say. This is a crazy game.”

At about the time Tony Bennett stood near the Rangers’ dugout and spun a charming rendition of his signature tune, it seemed the Giants had left their hearts in San Francisco, and their heads in Philadelphia. The ball was everywhere. Lincecum was everywhere. Freddy Sanchez(notes), otherwise heroic, was doubled off second base on a popup … to the second baseman. The Rangers put up a couple of runs, primarily with the Giants’ assistance, and then surely would settle comfortably behind Lee and watch Game 1 pass without incident.

The Giants don’t do “without incident.” Mostly, they scrounge for every inch. Mostly, they stop everybody’s hearts and decide the game from there. In the first game of the World Series, when the Giants would have been happy with an inch, the Rangers gave away yards at a time. Against a pack of free-swinging fastball hitters, Lee insisted on early fastballs and cut fastballs, and generally stuck with that even in pitcher’s counts. It’s a strategy that served him splendidly in the past and will make him hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. Against the Giants, it cost him 104 pitches and seven runs in 4 2/3 innings. Behind Lee and those unfortunate souls that followed, the Rangers – to the station-to-station Giants – gave away bases at a time.

From the early innings when the night looked so dire for the home team (Lee had allowed more than one earned run in only one of his previous eight postseason starts), the Rangers found themselves dragged into a frantic game. The ball was in play. The basepaths were jammed. Pitchers came and went. This wasn’t entirely Giants baseball, but it was Giants personality.

“I can’t explain it,” Aubrey Huff(notes) said. “It’s the postseason. Weird things happen.”

They played the whole game like it was 2-2, and the fans were seriously considering eating their panda hats. They scored six runs in the fifth inning, when they sent 11 guys to the plate and Lee couldn’t keep the ball off their bat barrels. Then the Rangers couldn’t keep the baseball off the heels of their gloves, so the Giants scored three more in the eighth. None of it made sense. A lineup that had grinded its way past the likes of Hudson, Lowe, Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels was downright gifted against Lee. Afterward, however, the Giants were pretty sure all that regular-season agony had been good for something beside a division title and a nice October run. They believe they were primed for something like this, a series that counts for everything against a ballclub that whipped the best of the American League.

Cody Ross(notes) arrived from Florida late into the season, and immediately caught wind of this thing they call Giants baseball.

“I knew exactly what it meant,” he said. “A lot of tight games we either won or lost. And I think that’s the way it is when we’re playing games that mean something. I think it prepared us for this. That team, they’re one of the best teams in baseball. And we’re going back and forth. We had that big inning, but before that …”

Torture again?

“Exactly,” he said.