TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -Former San Diego second baseman Marcus Giles arrived at the Colorado Rockies clubhouse on Tuesday and had no desire to search out Matt Holliday to needle.
Didn’t he want to give Holliday grief about that phantom game-winning run in the NL wild-card tiebreaker over the Padres last October?
He did that already.
Giles and Holliday happened to run into each other at a resort in Maui over the winter.
“My brother and I and our family, we went to Hawaii in November,” he said. “We were at the pool hanging out and here comes Matty walking in. So we said, ‘You were still out at home.”’
Holliday never seemed to touch home plate before catcher Michael Barrett retrieved Brian Giles’ throw and tagged the slugger who was splayed on the ground, his chin bleeding and his head dazed from the headfirst dive.
Umpire Tim McClelland didn’t see it that way, though, and his delayed safe call gave Colorado a thrilling 9-8 win in 13 innings, just one of many memorable moments in the Rockies’ 21-1 run-up to the World Series.
“You never want to lose, ever, and especially in that kind of game. But they earned it,” Giles said.
The Rockies went on to win their first NL pennant before getting swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.
Giles went back to San Diego, packed his bags and went about looking for work elsewhere.
A former All-Star in Atlanta and one of the best offensive second basemen in baseball just a few years ago, Giles lost his stroke and his starting job in San Diego last summer, when he hit .229, 50 points below his career average.
Giles signed a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training with the Rockies, who lost free agent Kaz Matsui to Houston. He’ll make about $1 million if he beats out farm system products Jayson Nix, Clint Barmes, Ian Stewart and Jeff Baker to serve as Troy Tulowitzki’s new double-play partner.
Giles said he welcomes the wide-open competition.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, and maybe it’s just what I need, a little kick in the butt, and a little challenge,” he said.
Giles is eager to hit in Denver’s thin air, too, where the baseballs aren’t as heavy as they are at Petco Park, which favors pitchers. So many times he saw Khalil Green, Mike Cameron or Adrian Gonzalez blast baseballs that settled into leather gloves instead of the bleachers.
“I mean, you hit a ball to right-center 400 feet, it’s supposed to be a home run,” Giles said.
Not that many of those shots came off his own bat, mind you.
“Unfortunately, that means I didn’t hit the ball really good if I never got robbed, huh?”
Giles hasn’t hit that well since 2005, actually, when he batted .291 with 15 homers and 63 RBIs with Atlanta.
Mechanically, physically, mentally, Giles said he feels like he did in his salad days with the Braves.
“I cleared my mind and I got that feeling that I need to prove something again,” he said. “Maybe I lost that for a little while, that I didn’t have anything to prove, and that’s unfortunate. My numbers reflected that.”
After all, that prove-the-world-wrong attitude is what fueled him in the first place.
“Because I was a 53rd-round pick, everybody told me I would never get out of A-ball, I would never hit for power with a wood bat, defense was horrible,” Giles said. “So all I did was make me work hard to prove to them that I could do it.
“And then when I proved it, maybe I lost that edge a little bit as far as proving something. It’s nice to have that feeling back of proving somebody wrong again.”
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