Even Year or Not, Giants Not Accustomed to Being Favorites

The San Francisco Giants and their calendar-worshiping fans are reunited Thursday for their annual meeting, that peculiar mixing of work with being gawked at by the see-and-be-seen crowd.This is made even better by the first visit of the best Los Angeles Dodger caricature ever –- a spectacularly moneyed, horrendously injured and television-resistant team that could win 105 games in secret or never be healthy and give manager Dave Roberts the kind of migraines that don't fit in the overhead bin. It's Christmas with beer -– which, if you think about it, is actually a redundancy. Giants Play Dodgers in San Francisco Home Opener But let's be truthful here. Baseball folks do not dig the Opening Day thing at all. They do have the good sense not to snap angry about it the way the normally calm and rational Arizona manager Chip Hale did, but they definitely find it a mild but required irritant. They would much prefer Game Two, or in this case, Game Five.But it is a duty dance that must be done, and in a year such as this, when the Giants are considered ahead of time as having one of the sport's elite rosters, it must be done with particular delicacy. The Giants were not in the...