I’ve known Andy Baggarly since he was a kid from Upland who was going to school at Northwestern. He was good right out of the box, like so many Northwestern J School people are. Maybe we gave him some room to grow, back in the L.A. market, but it wasn’t like we had to mold him. He was to journalism born.

And now he has written a book, which I have just finished reading.

It is … “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” … which pretty much tells it.

My reaction?

First off, I’m proud of Andy, and very impressed, that he wrote the book. In the journalism business just about everyone thinks they will write a book (me included), but very few of us actually do it, and fewer still get it published.

Andy did that. Bravo.

It is fair to say that he was in a perfect situation, and that basically no outsider knew the 2010 Giants the way he does.

He was one of the handful of reporters who covered the Giants home and road during the 2010 season. The traveling beat writers always, always know more about a baseball team than anyone else. Ultra inside stuff, like who is bad at cards, who drinks too much, who’s probably nuts, who the smart guys are … they spend eight hours or more with a baseball team nearly every day of a 162-game season. The traveling beat guys know where the bodies are buried.

So, Andy was good enough to be one of that handful of survivors on the beat (lots of ex-ball writers around, in this post-print meltdown era), and when the Giants suddenly turned into a great story, he already had reams of material on how they came together and what Person A did on May 7, some of it from his blog — because he was there and had written about it.

It occurred to him during the National League Champions Series that he might have a book here, and Jayson Stark of ESPN, a former beat writer with the Phillies, encouraged him to go forward, and here we have what I believe is the most authoritative book of the 2010 Giants — the team that ended 56 years of futility for the franchise.

In this video clip, he talks about the making of “Misfits.”

He has organized the book cleverly. It is generally chronological, but most chapters are pegged to a back story on one of the key people with the club. Buster Posey here, Cody Ross there, Tim Lincecum over there.

The device allows him to move the narrative along while putting flesh on the bones of players who so often to outsiders seem like little more than scratchin’, spittin’ baseball caricatures.  Andy takes you inside the clubhouse, that Holy of Holies that “civilians” never see. He creates the image of, say, Aubrey Huff wearing his thong underwear, which you may not really want in your head, but Andy has seen it. Often.

He is, of course, sympathetic to just about everyone in orange and black; a guy covers a team, he comes to at least respect nearly everyone, and like more than a few guys, or else he goes nuts. Hard to hang around guys you hate for 162 games.

He is an enormous fan of Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum and Aubrey Huff and Brian Wilson and … well, several others. But he explains why they are admirable characters, and he does it in a case-building way that you don’t see in the run-of-the-mill fawning sports book. Andy remains a journalist. An impressed journalist, perhaps, one who is thankful and grateful that he was along for the ride … but if you’re paying attention you grasp that Tim Lincecum probably “smokes” a bit too much and that Pablo Sandoval is an underachiever, and that Pat Burrell is a rather twisted character.

That is what makes this book palatable to a reader like me, which is required, because at the end of the day this book really is for Giants fans.

I like the Giants a lot more from the other side of the world; up close, I am reminded, in Andy’s book, that the whole Giants/San Francisco/Bay Area/Northern California aggregate pretty much has a massive inferiority complex toward anything SoCal. Which always, always comes as a surprise to people in SoCal, who assume that because they think San Francisco is cool that Northern California people must be cool with them … and they are wrong. Giants fans don’t intend for their successes to be shared in any way whatsoever with anyone who lives south of Fresno.

Thus, I actually wrote on this blog back in October that I hoped the Giants won the World Series. Maybe a sort of California solidarity going on. A West Coast thing. Even a National League thing. If I had been in SoCal, I may have reacted very differently. With horror, perhaps.

So, be warned that an undertow of Andy’s book reflects what I perceive to be the mindset of that whole region: “I guess we showed those jerks in Southern California.”

Thus, it becomes a sometimes difficult book to read as a fan of the Dodgers or Angels. Andy hates the Rally Monkey, which is one of the most brilliant ideas in baseball marketing history and was so much fun during the 2002 World Series (which, oh yes, the Giants lost after being six outs from winning it in Game 6).

But, the flip side is this: Andy isn’t writing for Dodgers fans. He is writing for Giants fans who want to believe that their team was special, that it was unique, that it was fun and that it reflected well on San Francisco and the whole region. It is very much a viewpoint of that market, which is very insular and more than a little crazy but also very self-aware.

So, this is a book that is well-constructed, thoroughly reported, highly informative, a thrill ride of discovery, achievement, vindication, celebration.

If you are a Giants fan, or ever were, or ever might be … you must own this book. It should be on the coffee table with “The Best of Herb Caen” and back issues of “Mother Jones.” You will want a ready reference to remind yourself of the wonders of the Giants’ run through the World Series. You will be able to read it over and over. Go buy it. Now.

It will give Giants fans chills. It will give Dodgers fans dry heaves.

And follow Andy on Twitter at: @extrabaggs … he is doing book-signings now and then, and maybe you can meet the author. He’s a good guy, aside from the “going native” up in Baghdad by the Bay.