It’s packing day in the Molina household – though Jamie has been filling and taping boxes for the past couple weeks. We’re almost done and about to take a break to get a bite to eat at Bubba Gump’s or Benihana then finish when we get back.

 

This is our autumn ritual. We move into a house in the spring and move out in the fall. This year we lived in a great place in the Marina, though the four stories started to wear on my knees as the season progressed. Still, we loved being so close to the water and to Crissy Field.

 

We’ll drive one car back to Yuma tomorrow — it’s about a 10-hour trip — and have the second car shipped. We loaded up a 16-foot U-Haul and hired two of the clubbies to drive it home for us, then we’ll fly them back to San Francisco. It will be great to see my girls every weekend and take some trips with them this winter. We plan to go to Puerto Rico for Christmas – both my brothers will be there, too.

 

Javier came up with a great idea. January 6 is The Epiphany, or Three Kings Day, in Latin American countries. We put some grass and a cup of water in a box or a basket and put it under a bed for the kings’ camels. The kings come to visit, and like Santa Claus, leave gifts for the children. So my two brothers and I are going to dress up like the three kings and give away toys to the poor. I think it’s a terrific idea and I’m looking forward to meeting all the children and their parents and maybe making their holiday a little happier.

 

What I’ll do first when I get home, though, is put ice on my knees – for about a month. I’ll rest a lot and let my legs get back to normal. Then I’ll start working out again. I work out in the offseason with a trainer in Yuma. We go to the gym from 11 a.m. to about 1:30 then I rest for a bit. Then we run the stadium steps and do agility exercises. Then I rest again. Then we do another hour of cardio in the evening. By the start of spring training, I’m working out seven days a week.

 

We couldn’t have asked for a better game to end the season yesterday. I’m so happy that we were able to get Timmy the win and give voters another reason to pick him for the Cy Young. I think he should win it but it’s not a slam dunk. There are other guys who make a good case. But he has my vote, for sure. He should have had about 23 wins instead of 18, but we just didn’t score enough runs for him.

 

It was really tough in the clubhouse after the game saying good-bye to everyone. You’re together for about 185 games, through a long season, and you become like a true family. You’re looking forward to the rest and relaxation of the off-season, but you’re sad to leave, too. I’m not very good at saying goodbye. It’s very uncomfortable. Sometimes I have so much I want to say but I can’t because it’s so overwhelming. So you just say goodbye.

 

Saying good-bye to Omar might have been the toughest one. I did manage to tell him how I felt about him. I told him how much I appreciated his friendship, his knowledge of the game, his help and his positive mind. I wanted to make sure he knows we all love him and hope he’ll be back. The ovation the fans gave him yesterday was unbelievable. I would have cried my eyes out, if it were me. But he was so gracious and composed. I don’t know how he did it.

 

I better get going if we’re going to have everything packed up by tomorrow morning. Thank you so much for taking this journey with me this season. I truly enjoyed writing this and reading all your posts. I will try my best to post some entries in the off-season, but if I don’t, I’ll start up again in spring training. I’m already missing baseball. OK, almost. Give me a month, then I’ll be counting the days until pitchers and catchers report …

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There’s a lightness to the clubhouse this weekend, our last
of the season. Everyone is joking around, teasing, signing baseballs and
baseball cards for the clubbies and the staff and each other.

 

We’re all feeling good about beating the Dodgers Friday night
and hoping we take them again tonight and Sunday to end the season on an up
note. I think everyone on the team knows that, despite our record, we laid a
great foundation for next season. We go into the offseason excited and
energized for what might come next year.

 

Everyone always says if you come to ballpark every day,
you’ll see something you’ve never seen. If you came to the ballpark Friday
night, you saw something nobody has ever seen. It happened in the sixth inning
with the Dodgers leading 2-0. Pablo Sandoval was on first. I hit a pitch that
bounced off the right-field wall. I stopped at first, and Pablo advanced to
third.

 

Bochy had already told Manny Burriss that if I reached
first, he’d go in as a pinch-runner for me. When I got to the dugout, I saw
Omar telling Bochy that he heard the ball hit the green metal roof above the
wall, which meant it should have been a home run. Bochy talked to the umpire,
who apparently felt confident in the call. Then Bochy saw the ball – it had
green paint on it. The crew chief called for a review under the new rule, and
he ruled it a home run,.

 

So now Manny’s standing at first, and I’m about to go back
out there to complete the run around the bases. But the umpire said that,
because Burriss was officially entered in the game, I couldn’t go back in. So
he ran the bases.

 

When he came into the dugout, I was laughing. “Nice swing,”
I said.

 

I heard the official scorer had to call the Elias Sports
Bureau to get a ruling on how to score it. They said I’d get credit for the
home run and the two RBI but not the run scored. So I am the only player in
baseball history who has hit a home run without scoring.

 

It was a crazy game, as Dodgers games often are. It was
great to come back in the 10^th and hear the fans go wild.

 

It’s been a really nice few days for me. I found out on
Friday that I had won the Willie Mac Award for the second year in a row. It
surprised me because there were other guys who couldn’t easily have been
chosen. Randy Winn, for one. When Jim Moorehead from Media Relations told me in
the clubhouse, I got chills. It means so much to me that my teammates and
coaches respect me and think so highly of me. That’s the biggest thing, that
they appreciate my effort and my friendship inside and outside the game.

 

I’ll write again tomorrow and share my plans for the offseason.
Thanks for reading.

Just to clear the
air after today’s story in the Chronicle about me being upset with Bochy
sitting me with Zito on the mound:

I shouldn’t have
said anything publicly, and I apologized to Bochy this morning. I apologized to
Zito, too. Everything’s fine. They understand that my heart and my competitive
spirit took over, and I spoke before thinking things through. Bochy wanted to
give me a day off either today or yesterday, and he chose yesterday because he
wanted me out there with Hennessey today. I never want to sit out, as I’ve said
before. I want to help the team win, so it’s always frustrating to watch from
the bench.

As I was sitting
at my locker this morning, I got a photo on my cell phone from my younger
daughter. She’s in a catcher’s crouch with a glove on her hand and she’s
wearing the uniform from her new softball team. She’s playing organized ball
for the first time. I can’t wait to watch her. She’s got great hands and a
great swing. Another Molina on the field . . . But really all I want is for her
to have fun and build her confidence as a young woman and learn all the great
lessons from sports that I did.

Someone asked me
recently about the relationship between a catcher and an umpire. Every umpire
is different, and as a catcher you come to know most of them over the years.
Some are quick to tell you why he called a pitch a ball — it was high, outside,
etc. — when it’s apparent I thought it was a strike. Some will even ask me
where I thought the pitch was. Some don’t say anything. Some like to rest their
hand on my back, which is fine except when they flinch and push me and I have
to say, “Hey, watch out.” But of course I do it nicely. There is no advantage
in getting on the wrong side of an ump.

I also have to
take into account, as I’m calling the game, the slight differences in the
umpires’ strike zone. If an ump isn’t calling the fastball away, I don’t call
that pitch.

Another thing you
might notice when I’m behind the plate: Between batters, I often groom the
dirt, smoothing out the divots left by a batter who stands deep in the box. The
smoother the dirt, the truer the bounce. The worst thing is to be expecting the
ball to bounce a certain way and it hits a rock or a divot and flies off in a
different direction.

I’ve also been
asked if I notice when the fans leave early. I can tell you, we all notice. I
understand why people leave early – they have to get home on a weeknight, or
they think the game is over because we’re so far behind. But it’s still
deflating. We want the fans to be a part of the game, and when they start
streaming up the aisles, it takes away a little of our energy. And we feel bad
that we’re not playing in a way to make them want to stay.

Another thing we
notice, of course, are the boos. Tyler Walker has been on the receiving end
lately, and we feel horrible as his teammates when it happens. He knows it’s
the nature of the job as a pitcher to get booed. I always think that if they
knew how hard that guys works to prepare himself, maybe they wouldn’t boo. But
the fans have no way to see what goes on behind the scenes.

After today, we go
on our last road trip then it’s the last homestand. Hope to see you at the
park. Thanks for reading and continuing to leave all your kind and encouraging
messages.

A great game against the Rockies yesterday. Timmy pitched
unbelievable — he’d get my vote for Cy Young, that’s for sure. And it was
great when I returned to the dugout after my home run only to see Pablo
Sandoval hit one out on the very next pitch.

This kid is the real deal. I love this guy. He wants to win games, and
that’s what I’m about. And he wants to learn. He’s always asking me
questions about what to do in different situations, and he listens. I talk to
him not just about playing baseball but about being an adult. Be humble. Be
polite. Be a human being first, a Major League ballplayer second. But he
really doesn’t need that advice because he’s already a really nice kid.

It was tough to lose the two games to the Rockies after winning five in
a row. Jamie, my girlfriend, thinks I take the losses too hard. I lay in bed at
night and recreate the game a dozen times, going over and over what we
could have done differently, how we could do better tomorrow.

She’s always trying to take my mind off the game, which I appreciate
because you can drive yourself crazy. So we play these marathon sessions of
Boggle. I think I tied her once in about 250 games. She gets 30 or 35 points
in a game, and I get about 7. But every new game, I think I’m going to win.
Maybe that’s why I made it to the Majors — I always believe I’m going to
win. We also walk from our house in the Marina to Crissy Field with our
dog, Chico. I love throwing the ball to him and watching him run around.
Jamie and my two daughters took Chico to the ballpark for Dog Days of
Summer and sat in the bleachers with him. Everybody, including Chico, had
a great time.

Now that school has started, I see my daughters only on the weekends
when we’re in San Francisco. Otherwise, they’re in Yuma. If there is one
downside to baseball, it’s being away from your family. It’s something you
never get used to.

Somebody asked me about my pregame preparation. So I’ll take you
through what I do before the first game of a series. That’s when there is the
most work because we’re refreshing our memories about the players we
have already faced during the season and learning about the new players we
haven’t seen. (The subsequent games in the series don’t require quite as
much homework.)

If it’s a 7:15 p.m. game, I usually arrive to the ballpark around 2. I go
into the hot tub for about 10 minutes to warm my body. Then I go to the
trainer for treatment on whatever body part is sore — there is always
something, and usually more than one thing. I’ve been taking a pounding on
my glove hand from foul tips. My hands look like they belong to two
different men. The fingers on my glove hand are about one-and-a-half times
as thick as the ones on my throwing hand, and they’re a different color —
more red than brown. The knuckles look like misshapen knots on a tree. I’m
guessing I have at least two fractures, but they’ll have to wait until the end
of the season to heal – not that there is really much to be done anyway. They
just have to left alone.

As you might imagine, I have bruises all over my body from pitches
and foul tips that didn’t make it into my glove. One constant sore spot is the
tendinitis in my right heel. Every day before games, the trainer treats it —
and other problem spots — with ultrasound to get more blood circulating to
the area.

After the training room, I go the video room, which has monitors for
all the players and coaches to use. Danny Martin on the Giants staff does a
great job of putting together clips of every hitter and pitcher on the opposing
team. I can look at all the recent at-bats of every player on their team. I can
watch them just against righties or just against lefties. I can watch what they
have done on certain pitch counts. It’s amazing the information that is
available to us.

I follow this up by studying the thick packet of charts and statistics
that breaks down the tendencies of each batter — the paper version of what I
had just been watching on video. I can see which pitches most often get a
particular batter out on particular counts. And I can see which pitches they
tee off on in different situations.

Then I check my mail, listen to my phone messages and maybe
watch a little TV before going to a meeting for the pitchers and catchers
at 3:30. With Rags, Bochy, Gardner and the other coaches, we go over all
the hitters. Then I eat — maybe a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich and a
Diet Coke — then get dressed for stretching and batting practice. After that,
I’ll have another meeting with the starting pitcher. We’ll go over the
opposing team’s starting lineup. A half-hour before the game, I’ll run a
little and throw the ball around to keep loose.

Then it’s “Let’s go!”

I know I’ve been away from these pages for a while, and I apologize. The blog kind of fell through the cracks at the end of the first half of the season. But I’ve had a few days off during the All-Star break, and I feel like I have a second wind and can’t wait to get back on the field.

My girls flew out from Yuma to spend the week with my girlfriend Jamie and me. They’ve been out many times since I joined the Giants last year, but we never did all the tourist things. So we went ice skating at Yerba Buena, flew kites on the Marina Green, rented those little Go-Cars on Hyde Street and drove them — Jamie and Kyshly (who’s 13) in one car, Kelssy (who’s 9) and me in the other — through the Marina, down to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge (where we saw a dolphin in the bay), through the Presidio to Baker Beach and Sea Cliff. We had clam chowder in bread bowls at the Wharf. We went to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, bought souvenirs like Kelssy’s “Alcatraz Psyche Ward Outpatient” jacket.

Most nights we spent at our home in the Marina playing Scrabble and Boggle and Rummy and taking our 10-month-old Samoyed dog, Chico, for walks.

Now it’s back to business.

I look back at the first half of the season feeling really lucky that we’re in the division we’re in. We’re still only seven games out of first place, despite the number of games we lost. It’s a great opportunity for us to come back. We have a great shot at winning this thing. I really believe that. And here’s why.

First, we didn’t play horribly in the first half. We were in a lot of those games we lost. There were games that could have gone either way. We have a lot of young players in the big leagues for the first time. They’ve gained a lot of experience these past few months and should have their feet wet now. They made some mistakes that young players are always going to make. But in truth, we all made mistakes. It wasn’t just one guy or another. So I think we’ll make few mistakes overall, and in part that’s because we have had the first half to come together as a team.

So that’s the second thing: We are a tight team. We’ve developed trust in each other. That’s how you become a team. You trust each other. If one guy is down, he taps the guy next to him to pick him up. Then it’s OK, let’s go. Not one guy has to be the hero. If one person tries to do it all himself, you’re not going to win.

As for our pitching, I think the main thing is we have to improve location on the fastball. But we have a great staff — an All-Star in Timmy, All-Star skills in Zito and Cain, and developing All-Stars in Sanchez and Correia. And in the bullpen, same thing: We need to locate the fastball.

I know some of you have lost confidence in Zito, but I have to tell you that what I’ve been seeing the last few weeks has been great. Don’t look at the numbers. Just look at how he’s pitching. He’s been giving us a chance to win every time. He’s a true professional and he’s going to be fine.

One tough thing in the last few weeks was watching Holmy get sent down to Fresno. He earned a spot in Spring Training and he earned it how he played this season. He played really great, but things don’t always work out the way you expect. Alfonzo’s a great guy, too — this is no rap on him. But you get accustomed to one guy’s style and personality and you develop a relationship and then he’s just gone. It’s one of the things about pro baseball that maybe you never get used to.

People ask if I set goals for myself for the second half of the season. I never set personal goals. I think they can do more harm than good. For one thing, you can put a lot of pressure on yourself when you fall behind your goals. Let’s say you set a goal at the beginning of the season to have 100 RBIs and you only have 50 with a month to go. The last two years in a row I had 19 home runs with a week and a half to go. I tried to hit that last one but having that kind of focus on a single thing takes away from the game as a whole.

It’s a team game. You have to play every day to win, not to add to your own numbers. I know the reality is that people — and management — look at the numbers. That’s how you’re measured. But hopefully they’ll also look at how you play with all your heart every single day. Hopefully, they recognize all the things that don’t show up in your individual numbers — all the little things you do to help the team’s chances of winning.

Thanks for continuing to leave your kind comments even while I wasn’t writing. OK, if I have one goal for the second half — breaking my own rule of no personal goals — it’s to be better about updating my blog…

I’m going right to your questions. I’ll try to cover all of them, but if I miss yours, please post it again. I promise to answer.
 
I was asked why I chose the song, “Can’t Be Touched,” to play over the PA when I come to bat. It was the 2000 season in Anaheim and I was struggling at the plate. So I was looking for a song to listen to that would motivate me. Roy Jones, Jr. is my favorite boxer, so before a game one day I listened to his recording of “Can’t Be Touched.” I went 3-for-4 that day and ever since then it’s been my song.
 
One young man asked if he could be a catcher even though he is left-handed. He said he was told all his life he couldn’t do it, so he gave it up. Coaches never should tell a kid he can’t do something that he really wants to do. He can be whatever he wants to be. There aren’t any left-handed catchers in the big leagues, but that doesn’t mean there CAN’T be. It means it’s going to be harder for a lefty. And that’s no reason not to do something you really want to do.
 
Several people asked about the play the other day at the plate in the ninth inning. Jack Taschner was pitching. The game was tied. There was a man on third. The batter hit a fly ball to left field. Freddie Lewis threw a bullet to the right side of home plate. With the runner bearing down, I knew I had a split-second to grab the ball and swipe. The ball hit my glove but didn’t stay in. The umpire called the runner out, then saw the ball on the ground and changed his call.
 
I watched the video afterward. If I get the same play today, I’d do the same thing. It’s the only play. If you wait to secure the ball in your glove, the guy’s safe anyway. The truth is, I thought the guy was safe even if the ball had stayed in my glove. We were going to catch a break. That was a tough day all around. I didn’t feel like I was at my best. I left guys on base. All I wanted to do after the game was get out of the park, hole up in my hotel room, watch some TV and recharge my batteries.
 
OK, another question was whether hitting or catching is easier. That’s easy. It’s a lot easier to catch a ball than hit it. A ball comes hurtling at you at 90 mph and you have a stick in your hands that you have to swing at just the right moment and at just the right angle, not only to make contact, but to make contact well enough to hit it past the fielders. It’s a lot easier to squat down and catch it.
 
Another question was: What is your favorite thing about being on the Giants? Everything, really. But if you want something specific, I’ve always been so impressed by the Giants’ appreciation of the team’s history. We have amazing owners here who really honor the past. So as a player you’re always reminded that you’re walking in the footsteps of some of the greatest men who ever played the game. And you know that, as a player, you won’t be forgotten. You’ll always be part of the Giants family.
 
There are a few more questions to answer, but I have to go. My two girls are here for Father’s Day and I want to get back to them. I’ll answer the rest of the question in my next post.
 
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers — enjoy the day.