For the second time in three years, the San Francisco Giants are baseball’s World Series Champions.
The Giants beat the Detroit Tigers 4-3 in 10 innings. They completed a four-game sweep in the best-of-seven series.
That means they won four games in a row, which gave them the championship.
Former Toronto Blue Jay Marco Scutaro singled home the go ahead run in the 10th inning with two out.
Pablo Sandoval (a.k.a. Kung Fu Panda) was awarded Most Valuable Player (MVP). That’s because in game one of the World Series he hit an amazing three home runs and, overall, he had eight hits in 16 at-bats.
Interestingly enough, though, the Giants hit the fewest number of home runs in the Major Leagues this year. It takes more than just hitting to be a championship team.
Great pitching was key to the Giants’s success.
Starting pitcher Matt Cain led the Giants in all three of their series-clinching games. Relief pitcher Sergio Romo saved three games in the World Series.
The Giants’s pitching staff allowed just six runs in four games. The club that pitches best in the post-season usually prevails.
The Giants’s key ingredient to success, though, may have been the strong character of their players. This was a team that played with its back against the wall on six different occasions this post-season.
During the entire playoffs, the Giants played in six elimination games. That means the Giants could have been knocked out of the playoffs six different times–but they weren’t.
Down 2-0 in the best-of-five division series, they rallied for three straight victories in Cincinnati versus the Reds. Trailing the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals 3-1 in the National League Championship Series, they again took three in a row, in turn advancing to the World Series. Six elimination games, six wins.
The Giants’s win marks the third straight season that a National League team has won the World Series.
This is the first time since the Toronto Blue Jays of the mid-1990s that a team has won two World Series Championships in a three-year span.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Jonathan Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
Have you ever won a championship? Can you imagine what it would be like to hoist a championship trophy after playing so many challenging games? Draw a picture of yourself winning the World Series as a player on the SF Giants. Include a speech bubble, like those in comic strips. Share and compare your picture with your classmates.
Reading Prompt: Reading Unfamiliar Words
Sportswriters often write differently than news writers. They often use phrases and short-forms that people who love sports would likely know. At TKN, we try to explain or spell out most sports words and phrases. However, sometimes there are sports phrases that are best left as-is.
What do you think these sports words mean?
Most Valuable Player award _________________________________________________________________
series-clinching games _________________________________________________________________
National League team _________________________________________________________________
best-of-five division series _________________________________________________________________
16 at-bats _________________________________________________________________
Primary, Intermediate, Junior
Predict the meaning of and rapidly solve unfamiliar words using different types of cues, including: syntactic (language structure) cues (e.g., word order, language patterns, punctuation) (OME, Reading: 3.2).
Grammar Feature: Compound adjectives
An adjective is a word that describes a noun. For instance: She has a red car. (Red is the adjective that describes the noun, car.)
However, two or more words can be strung together to form a compound adjective. For instance: She has a super-fast red car. (Super describes fast and they both describe the car.) Super-fast is known as a compound adjective. Compound adjectives are often hyphenated for clarity.
For instance, take a look at the sentence without the hyphen: She has a super fast car.
Is her car super and fast? Or is it very fast (super-fast)?
Circle all of the compound adjectives in the article. Underline the nouns they describe.
Are there any non-hyphenated compound adjectives in today’s article? Why do you think they don’t have hyphens?
