Barber: Giants' season has Bruce Bochy feeling like Charlie Brown

Every day is peanut day at the ballpark, but Saturday is Peanuts Day.

The Giants will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the musical comedy “You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown” by honoring the late Charles M. Schulz and his lovable cast of line drawings as the men in orange host the San Diego Padres at AT&T Park. The hoopla will include a commemorative Charlie Brown bobblehead.

For most of Giants fandom, Peanuts Day is a folksy prelude to a pillow fight between two of the worst teams in baseball. It's a much bigger deal here in Sonoma County. Schulz moved from Minneapolis to Sebastopol in 1958, at the age of 35, and then to Santa Rosa in 1969; he lived here until his death in 2000. As local heroes go, Schulz is sort of a combination of Mark Twain and Gandhi.

And let's be clear, the guy loved his baseball. Staff at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center have unofficially tallied 1,731 “Peanuts” comic strips that incorporated a baseball theme. Cesar Gallegos, the archivist, stresses that the total number is likely higher than that.

Schulz's baseball strips dealt with everything from groundskeeping to player trades to the lonely winter offseason. He made reference to changes in the height of the pitcher's mound, and to adoption of the designated hitter in the American League in 1973.

And perhaps because the Washington Senators didn't become the Minnesota Twins until three years after Schulz left the Midwest, he adopted the Giants as his team of reference. A Sunday “Peanuts” strip from 1964 starts with an empty locker room. The names on the lockers are WILLIE MAYS, ALVIN DARK, SNOOPY and ORLANDO CEPEDA.

Baseball was Schulz's great metaphor. He used it to illustrate hope and frustration, teamwork and boredom.

“I loved using baseball in Peanuts,” Schulz said in Alan Schwarz's book, “Once Upon a Game: Baseball's Greatest Memories.” “Baseball is the best sport for a cartoon strip, because you don't have too much action. … In baseball, humor can come in between the action.”

And not always humor. The recurring gag in “Peanuts” baseball is the hapless state of Charlie Brown and his team. They lose consistently, creatively and one-sidedly. Sometimes the failure is so abject that it's hard to find the joke at all.

One strip dated March 14, 1967, has Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, alone and forlorn. “Rats! We lost the first game of the season again!” he says. “Losing a ball game is like dropping an ice cream cone on the sidewalk,” he adds, walking with bowed head. He stops and explains, “It just lays there, and you know you've dropped it and there's nothing you can do…. It's too late….”

Then he's walking again, dragging his bat, mouth turned down. “Rats!” Charlie says.

Umm… ha-ha?

Paging through classic cartoons, I realized that the timing of the “Peanuts” tribute is perfect. Only a team as downtrodden as the 2017 Giants can adequately pay tribute to Charlie Brown's baseball exploits.

The Giants haven't lost 40-0 this year, as Schulz's characters did, but they did fall 13-3 and 14-2 to the Reds on consecutive nights in early May.

When I think about “Peanuts” baseball, the classic image that comes to mind is a line drive tearing past Charlie Brown with such force that it leaves him half-naked. I figured the most apt comparison would be someone like Saturday's Giants starter, Matt Moore, a nice guy who takes the mound against San Diego with a 3-10 record and an earned run average of 5.81. I'm pretty sure Moore has given up some hits this year that took several items of clothing through the box with them.

What I had forgotten is that most of Schulz's strips deal with Charlie Brown the manager, not Charlie Brown the pitcher.

It should have dawned on me earlier. That laconic style. That giant, round head. That lack of faith in his bullpen. Charlie Brown is Bruce Bochy.

“Casey Stengel doesn't have half the problems I have!” Charlie says in a 1964 strip after catching Snoopy asleep in the field. Bochy could say the same for the Dodgers' Dave Roberts and Houston's A.J. Hinch.

“No other manager in baseball has to do the things I have to do,” Charlie laments in July of 1967. He's holding Snoopy's food dish while the dog bats. And honestly, who besides Bochy has had to use a closer (Sam Dyson) who brought a 10.80 ERA from Texas, or bat backup catcher Nick Hundley in the cleanup spot, or bring up a 29-year-old Korean player (Jae-Gyun Hwang) best known for his bat flips?

Other “Peanuts” entries seemed to foreshadow specific events in 2017.

“Another game today …” Charlie Brown says in June of 1973, sitting up in bed. “If we win, we'll only be ten games out of seventh place.” If all the teams in the National League were lumped together, as they were through 1968, the Giants would have entered Friday's action 10½ games out of seventh place.

“I wonder if a little kid like ‘Rerun' should be out in left field,” Charlie Brown mused to Lucy in another 1973 panel. “A fly ball would kill him.” Bochy must have had similar trepidation when he sent 24-year-old Austin Slater out there in June.

In another strip from the early '70s, Charlie is hitting balls to his bumbling team in practice. After Rerun drops a fly, the manager benches him in favor of Snoopy.

“How embarrassing. I was replaced by a dog,” Rerun says. “You think you were embarrassed,” Lucy replies. “How about me?”

We see that she has been subbed out for Woodstock, the little yellow bird.

Oh, yeah? You think that's humiliating? It's possible that Eduardo Nunez, the Giants' third baseman, might soon be shoved aside for an overweight Panda.

The cartoons that really struck me were a multi-part series in June of 1973, in which Charlie Brown begins to see baseballs wherever he looks. When the sun comes up in the morning, it's not the sun at all, but rather a giant shining baseball. In the night sky, a glowing baseball has replaced the moon. Charlie becomes so obsessed that he sees a therapist.

Do you think Bruce Bochy sees a blinding baseball when he wakes up in the morning? Does he ride to AT&T Park on a baseball-shaped Muni trolley? When he looks at the San Francisco skyline at night, does the Transamerica Pyramid become the Transamerica Ball?

This dreadful season must be wearing on the Giants' well-meaning manager, making him a little bit crazy. And there are still 64 games remaining.

Rats!

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.