Final Jock Blog of 2024 and I’ve got bad news for you, Bay Area:
No championships this year, kids.
(With apologies to Stanford women’s sailing, of course. The canvas can do miracles. Just you wait and see.)
The 49ers huffed and puffed and couldn’t blow the Super Bowl house down in February in Las Vegas. They spun out this fall, and could never turn over the engine in an inevitably crestfallen season, physically and mentally.
The Warriors got run out of the gym by the Sacramento Kings in the play-in game in April. They have begun the process of piecing together something this fall, but a 14-11 start doesn’t exactly have you planning parades through Thrive City.
The Giants? Man, Madison Bumgarner coming out of the swinging bullpen gates in Kansas City feels like a century ago. In reality, it was a decade —and a decade is a long time. The Giants won 80 games this past summer, bored the bejesus out of us, and gave Farhan Zaidi his walking papers.
Merry Christmas!
I’d like to leave 2024 with a positive message. I don’t have one. Would you take two negative messages instead? (That was for my people.)
Here’s the Jock Blog question: Which Bay Area team of the Big Three has the best chance to break out the champagne in 2025?
And if your answer is the Macklin Celebrini Sharks, I will consider it at a future date.
We’ll take them from least likely to most:
3) GIANTS — Listen, you all know my Candlestick blood runs orange and black. I’m as happy talking 1978 Giants as I am sitting by the fire on Christmas Eve. So the idea of Buster Posey running baseball operations is a *huge* plus. No question. Already, he landed the best shortstop on the market and has locked down the left side of the infield for the next half-decade, stocking it with gamers and leaders in Matt Chapman and Willy Adames. And there’s probably more to come: Corbin Burnes?
But let’s be honest. The Giants ain’t winning the World Series in 2025, as I was just saying to Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman as we rollerbladed in Venice Beach. Until Bryce Eldridge arrives as the next Will Clark, and until those Kyle Harrison-Hayden Birdsong pitchers arrive as the next Bumgarner-Matt Cain, it’s still a couple of years away,
The best-case scenario is a Posey-infused roster plays better baseball, wins in the 85-86 game region and makes our summer more fun. I’ll take that.
PROGNOSIS: Check back in 2026 and we’ll see.
2) WARRIORS — This is the team with the most championship pedigree, of course. It was only two-and-a-half years ago that Bob Myers was walking around barefoot on the parquet floor in Boston, chugging a bottle of bubbly. Myers has stepped aside for a saner lifestyle, and now Mike Dunleavy is charged with trying to squeeze one last championship for Steph Curry. I mean, four championships for one Bay Area icon is pretty heady company, as I was just saying to Ronnie Lott and Joe Montana over some Dungeness crab and white wine. To get to five may be too much to ask. It reminds me of the New York Yankees somehow getting Derek Jeter ring No. 5 after a nine-year absence in 2009. Can the Warriors get their “Captain” one for the thumb?
Dunleavy gives me some hope, in the sense that he seems like he is the anti-Farhan. By that, I mean he’s a dude who embraces big moves. Farhan’s tenure was marked by the never-ending “small move”. And while Blink-182 made a iconic hit out of “All the Small Things”, Mark and Tom weren’t trying to build a championship roster; they were just trying to find new Vans at the mall. Dunleavy has already traded Jordan Poole, tried out Chris Paul, moved on from Klay Thompson and now made a move for Dennis Schroder — and his biggest move may yet to be.
The Warriors are competitive in the West right now, and in the short term should improve their standing in the standings with Schroder. And I am not ruling out a big swing for the fence from the lean, angular gangster that is Dunleavy come February.
PROGNOSIS: Not likely in 2025, but not entirely out of the realm.
1) 49ERS — It’s now or never, sports fans. As a caller said to us a couple of weeks ago: the 49ers missing the 2024 playoffs is not the worst thing in the world. It was a cursed season ever since Dre Greenlaw crumpled to the turf in Las Vegas. That injury set off a year-long storm of very bad things, as I was just saying to De’Vondre Campbell as we headed to the Levi’s Stadium parking lot mid-game.
But! I hear tell a gentleman named Christian McCaffrey may be healthy next year. And a gentleman named Brandon Aiyuk. And perhaps, with a savvy re-sign, a gent named Dre Greenlaw. And Trent Williams. And Nick Bosa. And on and on.
You get my drift. This Jock Blog will be the first of many coming in 2025 that addresses the “Refreshed, Refueled and Revenge-Minded 49ers” of the next 12 months. That’s the assignment, and that’s what gives them the best chance of all our Bay teams to get it done soonest.
PROGNOSIS: Rest up, heal up and make a legitimate charge at in 2025.
See you next year!
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