Sunday is the decade anniversary of my father’s death.  It could be Game 7 of the NLCS. Or it could be yet another off day in the run up to a Giants trip to the 2010 World Series.

Either way, I’ll be thinking about my dad and the Giants and the relationship between the two. And how much my father would love this team.

My dad loved baseball, and he loved the Giants. It was a steady, unfluctuating love. He grew up in a place without baseball (Minnesota), moved to San Francisco long before there was a baseball team. He got his fixes where he could. He saw games at Seals Stadium, seeing Joe Dimaggio hit there. And he waited for a baseball team to come to him.

His team arrived in 1958. He stood on Market Street to watch the players ride through a ticker tape parade, with my older brother perched on his shoulders. It was the start of a relationship that would last 42 years.

By the time I came along, he had created a household in which we knew, without question, that Willie Mays was the greatest player ever and it was a privilege for all of us to watch him.  My father was a lapsed Catholic – baseball became his religion and he believed in Saint Mays.

He loved athletic excellence, like Mays and McCovey. But he also liked characters. I remember watching the 1997 Brian Johnson game against the Dodgers with him – he loved Rod Beck and that swinging arm.  He loved the unsung hero like Johnson who came through with the big hit. Before that, in the late ’80s, he liked Candy Maldanado and Mitch. What he really liked were homegrown talents that San Francisco could claim as their own. When Will Clark came along, he was, well, thrilled.

Which means he would love this team. He would love the vibe and the characters and he would think that Buster Posey was only the greatest young player he’d ever seen. He would have extolled the virtues of Saint Buster to his grandkids.  He would have been thrilled.

Well maybe he is thrilled. And has a great view of the action.

After the game last night, I went out to eat with some of my great sportswriting friends from Philadelphia. And I realized something frightening:

I suffer from Bonds Fatigue Syndrome.  I wonder if there’s a cure?

I’d already filed a column for SI.com on Barry Bonds throwing out the first pitch in Game 3, and how – more than anything – it just provided a contrast between this 2010 team and those dour, mostly humorless Bonds-centric teams of the early 2000s.  That was the focus of my column, not unbridled outrage that Bonds had sullied the Giants feel-good NLCS home moment.

But talking to my Philly friends, I got a reminder of how the rest of the world views our little Bonds bubble. They were repulsed by the adulation Bonds received from the crowd and slightly disgusted that the Giants chose to honor Bonds who has a trial date in March for perjury. They think everyone in black and orange is still clearly in denial about the cloud Bonds cast over the game.

I’m no fan of Bonds or the never-ending adulation of him by the Giants front office.  I do think it’s weird that the Giants would bring Bonds back in the midst of this cool run, that is so anti-Bonds at its very soul. Fun, team-oriented, footloose.  Again, for narrative purposes, I appreciate the ability to compare and contrast. But why bring up a reminder of how long it’s taken to recover from the team’s debilitating Bonds addiction?

Sure, I know that Bonds has become a scapegoat for an entire era, and that’s not particularly fair. But, fair or not, he is a symbol of that era. The biggest symbol. While shunning him would be hypocritical, embracing him is unnecessary. Just as ill-advised as the Cardinals’ embrace of Mark McGwire.

But I guess I’m just used to it.   I know that when Bonds shows up in San Francisco the crowd will chant his name. I know that the Giants will act like he invented baseball every time he’s around. I can’t get outraged about it.

But the rest of the world thinks the Giants and their fans are crazy, sheep, in denial. Pick your pejorative.

Bonds Fatigue Syndrome. Is there a cure? It actually might be this 2010 Giants team.

Mike Singletary and his 0-4 team take the field tonight before a national television audience and – at this point – you have to wonder what odd thing Singletary might do next.

Last week, he didn’t shake the hand of Atlanta coach Mike Smith after the game. Singletary conceded that it was “poor sportsmanship” on his part. That’s troubling on a fundamental level.

Singletary is all about leadership, values, motivation. All those things that go into sportsmanship. Without that, what does he have? A yellow Hall of Fame jacket, but in terms of coaching credentials, not too much.

Other coaches skip the handshake on rare occasions. Bill Belichick comes to mind. But Belichick is a brilliant coach. His calling card isn’t leadership, its Xs and Os. Pretty much no one would want him to come talk to room of boy scouts. But everyone would like him diagramming plays late in a tense game.

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Back at the ballpark for Game 2 of the Giants-Braves series but still thinking about Game 1. It was that kind of a night – an instant classic, burned into the memory banks forever.

My first takeaway  will, of course, be Tim Lincecum’s look. He was locked into the kind of zone that only elite athletes at the top of their craft can penetrate.  Overmatching professional baseball players, who were  whiffing away at his stuff like minor leaguers. It was something to witness.

But my other takeaway moment is the postgame press conference. Buster Posey and Lincecum sat side-by-side at a table. Two All-American kids – one cut from an old-school cloth with his short hair and Captain America looks, the other a scruffy new generation skater dude. The fresh faces of the Giants. On a truly historic night.

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