About
Four Bay Area teams, covered properly by one person who reads too much.
Grab Some Pine covers four teams: the San Francisco 49ers, the San Jose Sharks, the San Francisco Giants, and the Golden State Warriors.
That is the whole list, and it is not going to grow much. These are the teams I actually watch. Writing about a fifth would mean writing about something I follow casually, and you can already get casual coverage anywhere.
What this is
The premise is simple. Most team coverage is either fast and thin (a recap generator with a byline) or slow and paywalled. There is a gap in the middle for someone who does the reading, shows the work, and is willing to be specific enough to be wrong.
So: contract structures with the actual terms. Roster projections with a confidence number attached to every player. Prospect pools ranked with the reasoning visible. Post-game analysis that tells you what the line combinations were before it tells you how it felt.
And jokes, because 82 hockey games is a long season and nobody has to read this.
The rules
Every call gets graded. The Takes Ledger is a running list of predictions made here, dated, left up permanently, and marked held-up or missed when reality settles them. Nothing gets quietly deleted. The 53-man roster projection gets scored against the real 53 on cut day, including the misses.
This is the part of the site I care most about. It is easy to sound smart in July. The ledger is what makes it cost something.
Reported and analyzed are different things, and they get labeled. When a beat writer reported something, they get the credit by name. When it is my read of the tape or the cap sheet, it says so. "Per the coach" and "here is my guess" are not the same sentence and they should never look alike.
Uncertainty gets stated, not hidden. If a number is a model projection rather than a signed contract, it says that. If a claim rests on one source, it says that too.
Sources get credited by name. This site reads a lot of excellent work by people who do this for a living: The Athletic, San Jose Hockey Now, NBC Sports Bay Area, and others. When their reporting informs a piece here, they are named in the piece. Original reporting belongs to the people who did it. What you get here is synthesis, analysis, and opinion built on top of it, which is a different job.
Who writes it
One person, in Marin, who has been watching these teams for a long time and started keeping organized notes because the alternative was losing arguments.
There is no staff. There is no insider access. There are no sources in any front office. What there is instead is a lot of reading, a spreadsheet habit, and a willingness to write down a falsifiable number and let it be checked later.
The name
Mike Krukow says "grab some pine, meat" when an opposing hitter strikes out, and has for long enough that it belongs to Giants broadcasts the way fog belongs to the Sunset.
Here it means the friendlier version. Pull up a bench. Sit down a while. This site has no affiliation with Krukow, the Giants, or anyone else; the name is a tip of the cap from someone who grew up with that voice on in the other room.
Contact and corrections
Corrections are welcome and get made in the open. If something here is wrong, it gets fixed in the piece and the fix is noted, rather than edited away quietly.
This site has no affiliation with the San Francisco 49ers, San Jose Sharks, San Francisco Giants, Golden State Warriors, the NFL, NHL, MLB, or NBA.