You’ve all seen it before if you’ve watched baseball for any period of time – it’s called “playing hungry.”

Playing hungry has a definite look to it.
(Photo credit – itsnature.org)

If you were watching Fox Television at 5 PM PT (8 PM ET) last night, you saw playing hungry at its absolute finest. They were the guys dressed in orange and black and they played hungry from the very first pitch. In fact, the Giants have been playing hungry since going down three games to one in the NLCS in St. Louis.

Teams that play hungry expect to win.
(Photo credit – Christian Petersen)

You also saw what playing hungry looks like last week in game-3 of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium when normally flamboyant Detroit Tigers closer Jose Valverde gave up two 2-run home runs in the bottom of the 9th, thus blowing a 4-0 lead. But Valverde’s teammates continued to play hungry and rallied to score two runs in the 12th inning to win the game 6-4 and eventually swept the Yankees in four games.

Playing hungry is nothing new to the game, in fact it’s been around since the game was invented shortly after the Civil War. It isn’t a technique or a mechanical thing that can be taught (much like that ‘stepping on their throats’ thing that I wrote about a few days ago), but rather a mentality or an attitude. It is yet another important cog in the wheel of that killer instinct that winning teams always seem to have.

The polar opposite of playing hungry is, of course, playing scared, which was found right across the field in Sunday night’s game. It’s not that the Cardinals were afraid to play, not at all; but they were clearly hoping to win as opposed to expecting to win, as the Giants obviously were (and did).

Teams that don’t play hungry hope to win.
(Photo credit – David J. Phillip)

It’s one thing to say that you expect to win and an entirely different thing to play like you expect to win. I heard Dodgers manager Don Mattingly say many times that he expected to win every game this past season. Apparently his players never got the memo because they played most of the season hoping to win rather than expecting to win (except for the final week when it was too little, too late) – I know… I was there, I saw it in their faces every day.

To add insult to injury, when a team doesn’t play hungry bad things tend to happen to them and last night’s game was a classic example of this when normally flawless Cardinals shortstop Pete Kozma made an uncharacteristic fielding error which led to three unearned runs for the Giants. Granted, the Giants still would have won without those three unearned runs, but that ‘momentum changer’ (as Kevin Kennedy affectionately calls it) allowed four runs to score in the 2nd inning instead of only one; and who knows what spark that should-have-been 6-4-3 double play would have done for the Cardinals.

Make no mistake about it, I absolutely loath the Giants and their rude and obnoxious fans. But as it stands right now, the Giants seem to be the hungrier of the two teams – and the team that plays tonight’s 7th and deciding NLCS game the hungriest will be the team that moves on to the 2012 World Series.