Lists promise order, but baseball delivers memory. Nowhere does that collision feel sharper than when fans of the San Francisco Giants start arguing about the greatest starting pitchers the franchise has ever trusted with a season.
Call it a Mount Rushmore or call it a family debate that never ends. Either way, the names come with history attached and a little dust on the cleats. The conversation usually opens with Juan Marichal, because legacies often do. His high kick did more than distract hitters. It announced a city to the rest of the sport. Marichal didn’t just win games; he normalized excellence for a fan base that was still learning what its colors looked like in October.
Then comes the lightning. Tim Lincecum did not pitch so much as detonate. Two Cy Youngs arrived like receipts for a physics experiment nobody else could replicate. He shrank into himself and released a storm, teaching a generation that velocity has a heartbeat. For a few seasons, baseball bent toward him.
Inevitably, the room grows quiet when Madison Bumgarner enters the sentence. Old school in an age of new math, he treated the World Series like a recurring appointment. Big games did not make him bigger. They just revealed him. Bumgarner’s postseason work still reads like a dare to probability, the kind that dares probability to answer.
Not all greatness shouts. Some instructs. Gaylord Perry made deception an art form long before spin rate was a headline. He won with the same calm he packed into umpire arguments, which is to say, completely. Pitching for him was not trickery. It was persuasion.
And there is the glue guy, the one who steadied seasons that wanted to shake loose. Matt Cain rarely courted drama but often authored it. His perfect game stands as proof that unflashy can still be unforgettable. Cain pitched like a promise to arrive on time, and he almost always did.
The novelty of lists is that they pretend specificity is possible. Baseball resists it. Stats argue one language, nostalgia another. Win totals flex their muscles. Titles bring their own. But fans know the truth. Pitchers are remembered by how they made you sit down when things got loud.
Generations clash because memories do. Padres of one era and sons of another can’t agree on which brilliance burns brighter. It’s fine. It’s the point. The Giants are not a pitching program. They are a pitching novel with chapters written in different inks.
The fun is not in being right. It’s in being loud together. In choosing your arm and defending it like a home address. In learning that baseball, at its best, refuses to be curated.
If Mount Rushmore were real, it would change with the fog. Today might belong to high kicks and heavy sliders. Tomorrow to October stoicism. That’s okay. Greatness in orange and black never promised permanence. It promised argument.
And if the Giants taught the game anything, it’s this: certify your legends, then invite them to fight for the last word. Baseball will be better for the noise.
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