Robb Nen

I can still hear the opening riff of "Smoke on the Water" coming out of the speakers, and I can still feel what it did to my stomach. That song meant Robb Nen was jogging in from the bullpen, and for five seasons it meant the game was about to be over. Giants fans started calling the ninth the Nenth inning. They put it on his plaque. I'm not exaggerating any of this, I promise you, I lived it.

He was born on November 28, 1969, in San Pedro, the son of Dick Nen, who played first base in the big leagues. Robb went to Los Alamitos High down in Orange County, where one of his varsity teammates was a kid named J.T. Snow. Nen mostly played third base back then and only pitched some. He's said his dad told him, "it must have been a thousand times, 'let everything you do show your respect for the game.'" You'll see how literally he took that.

Texas grabbed him in the 32nd round of the 1987 draft and he skipped college. The minors weren't kind. Bone spurs and a stretched nerve ate up most of three seasons, and when he finally debuted on April 10, 1993, against Boston, it didn't go great. He posted a 6.35 ERA for the Rangers, and on July 17 of that year they shipped him and Kurt Miller to the Florida Marlins for Cris Carpenter.

Florida moved him to the bullpen in 1994 and that's where he found himself. Fifteen saves in the strike year, then 23, then 35 and 35 again. He saved 108 games for the Marlins and won a ring with them in 1997, and yes, I have to admit it, he got the win against us in Game 2 of that year's Division Series. I've mostly forgiven him. Mostly.

Then the Marlins blew the whole thing up. On November 18, 1997, Brian Sabean sent three minor leaguers, Joe Fontenot, Mike Villano and Mick Pageler, to Florida for Nen. Rod Beck had just walked to the Cubs and left a hole the size of the bullpen. Nen filled it in one year: 40 saves, a 1.52 ERA and 110 strikeouts in 88 and two thirds innings in 1998. It's one of the best trades this franchise ever made.

The stuff was nasty. A fastball up in the high 90s, a hard slider people called The Terminator, and that weird little toe tap in his delivery that nobody could time. He's said he literally stumbled into the tap while trying to fix his mechanics, and it felt right, so he kept it. Coaches wanted him off it for years. Hitters wish they'd gotten their way.

The 2000 season was ridiculous. Forty one saves, a 1.50 ERA, 37 hits allowed in 66 innings, 92 strikeouts and a 0.85 WHIP. He finished fourth in the Cy Young voting and 12th for MVP, which a closer basically never does. In 2001 he led the National League with 45 saves. He was an All Star in 1998, 1999 and 2002, and he saved at least 40 games in four of his five years in San Francisco.

Then came 2002, and the shoulder. A few weeks before the All Star break, after a game in Toronto, he woke up on the plane with the top of his shoulder aching, and it never really got better. He kept taking the ball anyway. He saved 43 games that year. By October the Giants were switching off the ballpark radar gun when he pitched at home so nobody could see how much velocity was gone, and he'd play catch under the stands to get loose where nobody could watch. He still saved seven games that postseason.

Game 6 in Anaheim is where it ended. He came in with the tying and go ahead runs on base, gave up the double to Troy Glaus, then struck out Adam Kennedy to end the inning. That was the last out he ever got in the majors. Three surgeries followed, for a torn labrum, a torn rotator cuff and the capsule around the joint, and two years of rehab that went nowhere. He retired on February 20, 2005, at 35. What bugged him most was that he couldn't pitch out the contract the Giants were still paying him.

The Giants threw him Robb Nen Day on July 9, 2005, and there's a bronze plaque for his 300th save out on the walkway behind the right field wall, near McCovey Cove. When the club opened its Wall of Fame in 2008, he was in the first class. His 206 saves as a Giant are still the franchise record in 2026. Beck sits at 199 and Brian Wilson at 171, and nobody's passed him.

After he retired he came back into the organization in baseball operations, working as an instructor and helping Sabean when he was needed, and by 2020 he was a special assistant to general manager Farhan Zaidi. He isn't listed in the club's front office directory in 2026, and that bugs me more than it probably should. I'd still hand him the ball. Bad shoulder and all.

Closers get remembered for the one they blew. I get it. I've spent a lot of years being mad about Game 6, and the Glaus double is the last thing on his line. But you don't get to Game 6 without him. The Giants don't get out of Atlanta, they don't get past St. Louis, and they don't take two of the first four in that Series without Nen closing the door, and he was doing it on a shoulder that was coming apart.

Look at the 2002 postseason with that in mind. Ten games, seven saves, a 1.00 ERA, one earned run in nine innings, while the club was hiding the radar gun from the other dugout. He got Chipper Jones to bounce into a double play with the tying runs on in Game 5 in Atlanta. He struck out Albert Pujols and J.D. Drew back to back to save Game 4 of the NLCS. He did it with less than he'd ever had.

And it wasn't new. Five years earlier, in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, he walked into a one run game with runners on the corners and one out in the ninth, got Sandy Alomar thrown out at the plate, then struck out Omar Vizquel, Manny Ramirez and David Justice in the tenth to keep the Marlins alive. That's the guy we traded for.

Dave Righetti said watching him that fall was his biggest high in the job. Mine too, honestly, as a fan sitting on my couch with my hands over my face. He gave his arm for a ring he never got with us. I don't know how you rank clutch if that's not at the top of it.