Giants Trip Pads: Earth's Rotation Altered

Two games in the vacation paradise of San Diego: land of Felipi's Pizza Grotto, Croce's Bar and Grill, the Hooters with the best, uh, wings, and the San Francisco Giants personal House of Horrors.

With the spectre of an 0-8 start against the division leaders squaring them straight in the face, the Giants fianally managed to squeak out a win and escaped with a split of the abbreviated series -- avoid a torrent of comentary alternating between denial and fatlism as the teams await their next meeting in August. Thank God the Giants don't return to Petco until Sepetember 9. Maybe by then some good electro-shock therapy can erase the memory.

Leave it to the Giants to find an addendum to a long-accepted baseball truism: "Good  pitching will defeat good hitting...and good pitching will make mediocre hitting look like crap."

The punchles, feckless, ineffective collection of God-awful stiffs the Giants jokingly call an offense was on full display in Game One of the "not so much a showdown as it is an execution" series with the (choke, gag) division-leading Padres. The Giants dropped to 0-7 against the Friars, to 3-10 in the diivsion, and they kept a rather dubious string intact -- in four games at Petco Park the Giants hadn't so much as sniffed a lead.

I haven't seen anyone this "owned" since Kunta Kinte.

Think about it. Through seven games the Giants scored a grand total of nine runs against a team that was supposed to be the doormat of the division. Some dormat. They pitch well, they hit just enough, and they don't beat themselves like a certain team in Orange and Black. For three straght games I watched a play botched at third that Chase Headley makes in his sleep, and I haven't seen any of their pitchers love-tapping batters with the bases juiced.

Don'tcha just love the unbalanced schedule? We get to see this 10 more times. Yipee!

Yes, they unloaded on the Padres in Game Two, and it's about time. But we've seen this act before. The big blows came from Torres and Downs -- two guys who don't figure to play a big role in any Giants surge at the plate. Torres is a reserve outfielder who ran into one, and Downs is likely the odd man out with Freddy "Ouch, my Knee" Sanchez coming back.

It took 914 innings, but the Giants finally enjoyed a lead by stringing together some hits early, prompting a run on emergecy rooms all over the West Coast as Giants fans (or those willing to still admit to being same) reported seing halluciantions. Fortunately, Jonathan Sanchez did his best to restore the natural order of things by melting down in the fifth. After schooling the Padres twice yet getting no offensive support, he picked NOW to give up a five-hit inning and watch a two-run lead become a similar deficit.

It seems to be a trend -- Giants pitchers totally unwilling to accept the largess of their offensive bretheren. They must view runs like some kind of infection that needs to be fought off at any cost. Fortunately for the Giants, they have the cure.

Tell me, how many times is Eli Whiteside going to be sent to the plate in a crucual situation? Yes, he's hitting .300 -- in a very limited sample size. He's never hit at any level. His Little League coach tells stories of how young Eli yielded to a stray schnauzer when a pinch hitter was needed.  Saying he's a hitter is like saying you only date supermodels because the one date you had in ninth grade turned out to be a looker --after she dumped you.

The last time Whiteside and "clutch" were metioned in the same sentence was in relation to his ability to shift grears on his grandfather's '57 Ford Falcon. But with another catcher on the bench, Botch-y allowed Whiteside to kill two more rallies with weak two-out ABs.

My theory? Whiteside has photos. Of what, I have no idea --but I'm sure there are farm animals involved.

Eventually  Downs produced, cementing his bus ticket back to Fresno and allowing Wilson to do what Giants relievers do best -- heighten blood pressure. Walks, hits, the obligatory brain fart on a would-be double play ball hit to Uribe, and suddenly David Eckstein is at the plate.

Eckstein is the Giants' kryptonite. He's like a coachroach -- it's not what he eats or carries away, it's what he falls into and ruins. If something goes bad for the Giants, he's somewhere nearby. His double (aided by Rowand's route to the ball that went by way of Temecula) put the tying run in scoring position and had me resigned to the fact that the Giants would find yet another Wes Craven-like way to blow the game. Then Wilson managed a strikeout of Headley to end it, once again proving the best defensive effort by the Giants consists of not letting anyone attempt to field the ball.

So, it's a good news / bad news day. Good news: the Giants finally beat the Padres and now they get out of town. The bad news: Todd Wellemeyer pitches tongiht.

God help us.

Houston Definitely Has a Problem; Giants Benefit

I still haven't decided if the Giants are a team I love to hate or a team I hate to love. I am, for certain, grateful I'm not an Astros fan. Watching the weekend series the phrase that kept running through my head: "There, but for the grace of God (and Tim Lincecum), go I." The Astros are the Giants without pitching.

The similarities are striking. The Astros, who a few short years ago made a World Series appearance, rode the Killer B's (Bagwell, Biggio and Berkman) the way the Giants rode the Barry Bonds gravy train. In both cases the team got old in a hurry and management was ill prepared for the demise. But where they part company is this: the Astros had very little in the farm system to replace their aging stars, so they started to rebuild. The Giants decided to replace declining vets with (wait for it), more declining vets. The Astros groomed Hunter Pence and Michael Bourn. The Giants signed Ryan Klesko and Edgar Renteria. Neither pulled off their rebuild/reload strategy very well. The Giants' decade-long obsession with pitching has lended them a substantial edge in that category, but neither team can hit worth a lick.

How sad is it when your analysis of your team includes a comparison to the Astros? I just lost my lunch.

But, you take your wins where you can get them. The Giants own the 'Stros like the Padres own the Giants, and since the Giants contiue to get pummelled within their own division (they're 3-9) they need to find some patsies in the other divisions to help fatten up the resume. Thank you, Houston, for your volunteer spirit.

I'm still trying to figure out how the Giants captured Game One behind Todd Wellemeyer, who was the author of the loudest five-hit win you'll ever see. Rocket after rocket found a glove, with the ball catching defenders more than the other way around. Wellemeyer left the park immediately, bought a lottery ticket, then hopped the red eye to Vegas. No one should be able to regularly fall into feces and come up smelling like Channel, but that's the kind of night TW enjoyed.  It helps when the team behind you takes advantage of Pony League pitching and finally scores some runs -- a development that no doubt placed Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez in the players' parking area dumping sand in Wellemeyer's gas tank.

The punchless offense retuned again in Game Two, and it almost did Lincecum in again. Brian Wilson's high-wire act literally used up every bit of the margin for error he'd been given, which wasn't much. The Giants seem to thrive on chaos, and if there isn't any they're sure to create it. Wilson these days seems to be more Mr. Hyde than Dr. Jekyl, reverting to his more pleasant counterpart only when Scotland Yard is pounding at the door.

Wilson's outing was made more difficult by a grounder to third that Rohlinger should have converted, but Wilson still has to shoulder the bulk of the blame. Both of his walks came after he had 0-2 leads on the batters. Matsui likewise was 0-2 before fouling off the entire day's allotment from Rawlings in working the count full. More than one of those fouls came on pitches that had "ball four" written all over them, so you'd have to say Matsui also contributed to his own demise.

Dude, when you throw 97 mph you don't screw around in that situation. Nibbling at the corners is for the Kirk Rueters of the world. If you throw triple digit gas, all you try to do is miss the center of the plate. Wilson, like the Giants, is often his own worst enemy. Don't think, just throw. Thinking only hurts the ball club. When you're 0-2 and can't put a guy away, that's mental. If you're there, you have some kind of talent (unless you're Brandon Medders). Trust it.

Did anyone notice Oswalt's new mystery pitch? Rowand and Moolina (not a typo) saw it first hand -- or at least they'll read about it in the Sporting Green. It's an amazing, heretofore unimaginable piece of mystical pitching chicanery. Aaron, Bengie, it's called a S-L-I-D-E-R. It runs down and away from you -- generally into the dirt. You couldn't hit the damn thing from a fox hole with a nine iron.  Flailing away like a drowning drunk probably isn't the best method of attack. Lay off.

Game Three? See above. The Giants' starting pitcher didn't have his best command but gutted it out, with the now 6-1 Barry Zito standing in for Lincecum. The offense hit just enough, wasted coutless scoring opportunities, then the defense subjected a fan base in servere need of a prozac fix to yet another nail-biter of a ninth inning.

Again the drama started with a grounder to third, as Sandoval took a bite out of the would-be third out like it was the strip cheese sandwich at Hooters (two of my favorites -- the sandwich and Hooters: or is that three things?). Which brings me to another point: when your defensive replacement at third (see Rohlinger in Game Two) needs a defensive replacement, what then? On most days, you can't count on Wilson throwing a 1-2-3 frame. That grounder would have done it. Instead you've got a runner on base, then Wilson gives up the obligatory base hit, and 57 pitches later the cardiac wards are filled to overflowing.

Rowand got a certain measure of redemption with a go-ahead homer -- something he needed after being thrown out at the plate 24 hours earlier when he rounded the bases looking like a turtle going up a 45-percent grade. Then the Astros gave away the eventual game winner on a wild pitch -- made necesary by some God-awful situational at-bats (shame on the Panda).

So now it's back to that Hell Hole known as San Diego, where the Giants last won when Shamu was a guppy. Cain goes against Richard Clayton, who will see the Giants for the third time this year (1-0, 13.1 IP, 2 ER vesus the G-men). It's Cain's thrird outing against the Friars, and he got blasted last time out thanks to his part in a team-wide, week-long boycott on throwing strikes.

The Giants find themselves in exactly the same position they were in one week ago, half a game behind the Padres heading into a three-game showdown -- but now with The Hated Dodgers sudenly breathing down their necks. Last week they were gunned down without getting off so much as a shot. Hopefully a better result awaits.

You can't win a division flag in May, but the Giants have proven before that you can certainly lose one. To have a chance, they have to do better within the division, and that needs to start tonight.

An Ode to Dennis Green

Stop me if you've heard this before......

There's a Giants way to play baseball. Strong pitching, strong defense, timely hitting. It's not so much hitting with power as it is hitting when it counts. We don't have big bats but we have professional hitters, and that's what it takes to contend.

That's what we're being told by Giants management.

That type of team was on full display during the San Diego series. Unfortunately, it sat in the opposing dugout. The Padres pitched better, they played better defense, and they produced the timely hits. In return, the Giants botched play after play, the pitchers walked the equivalent of a small Central American nation (and their pets), and the bats were as limp as a 90-year-old man who has long exausted his allotment of Cialis.

I bring this up because way back when, in the rant that launched this site, I made mention of how the 2009 Colorado Rockies had become the team the Giants had professed to be. In 2010, we see it transpire once again -- this time on the border.

This is the modus operandi of the Giants organization -- talking the talk while someone else walks the walk. And man is it getting old.

Twelve walks in the opener and no offense to speak of doomed Barry Zito (who issued seven of the walks himself) to his first loss of the year. And that was the bright spot of the series. Cain came back the next night with the same inability to throw strikes, and the offense managed to leave more people stranded than that volcano in Iceland grounded in British airports. As for defense, by the time Sandoval managed to lose a friggin' ground ball in the lights, my head was ready to explode.

Think Michael Ironside in "Scanners".

Then came game three. This is one of those seminal moments when you just know the world is changing (or going to Hell) around you. One hit. One lousy hit, and it's an infield single by a guy who has no business in the big leagues. Of course, that can be said for about half this roster. What gives, did the Halloween section at Party City have Giants uniforms on clearance?

I really don't know whether to laugh or cry in regard to Jonathan Sanchez.  In two games against the Padres this year he pitched 15 innings: four hits, four walks, two runs, 15 strikeouts. He lost both games by a combioned score of 2-0. The only reason I don't totally feel sorry for him is that he's also had games where he stunk the joint up and had to be bailed out. That's kharma for you.

Wanna feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for Giants fans who once again have to watch a team that management screwed up. Dr. Frankenstein did a better job of assembly. Did anyone really think they were a contender? Was Molina gonna hit .330 all year. Was Renteria? Were Huff and DeRosa suddenly supposed to become the next Barry or Thrill?

This team had no offense last year. It has none this year. A few hot streaks will show up from time to time, but they are what they are. If it walks, walks and sounds like a duck, it's a duck (and what I think of them rhymes with duck).

Geez, the best pitches a I saw during that series came from the Padres, followed closely by the one I made firing a coaster at the TV. The Giants' efforts finished a weak third.

May has become the killer month for the Giants. It's when teams find out who they are. I have vivid recollections of a mid-May streak just a few short years ago in which a Giants team throught to be a contender dropped 15 of 18 and never came back -- and that team had some hitters.

This group is built to be frustrating. They hope the pitchers hold the opposition to under four runs, pray the defense doesn't implode, and figure that if  they luck into a sac fly or booted ground ball at the right time they just might win a game. When the stars align, they earn a 3-2 victory. When they don't, well, we just saw it versus San Diego. You get something so unsettling that Eli Roth couldn't watch it.

All you need to know about the Giants' offensive "improvement" is that Bengie Molina, a man who generates his own gravity, is back in the cleanup spot after not one but two seasons where he was an abject failure in that same role. Friday night, Bruce Botch-y found his team (and his own enormous brain pan) so challenged that, once again, Eli Whiteside was allowed to head to the plate representing the final out, and act of futility tantamont to trusting Roman Polanski to babysit your teenage daughter.

The Giants don't get it. It's a bad team: badly contructed and badly managed. They can't win like this.
The Astros (who are really the Giants without Tim Lincecum) come in tonight with Todd Wellemeyer on the hill. Can an ERA reach infinity? Samuel Clemens had Wellemeyer in mind when he said: "He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages."

I spend each spring anxiously waiting for baseball season to start. Six weeks in and it's a big far serving of "Bleh!" Not sure if I'll even watch tonight: it's $200 a year for the MLB package and I get more entertainment value out of Spongebob. Maybe the garage needs cleaning. I've been putting off that root canal for awhile, perhaps this is a good time. It couldn't be any more painful that watching this dreck.