The Giants continue their slide toward baseball Gomorrah, aka .500, with another loss on the road (0-6 on the trip, 0-5 for the month). I remember thinking before last year's NLCS that the Nationals matched up well against the orange-and-black, that they certainly did not lack for personnel. They had the guys to win the series. Like the Pirates earlier this season the Nats had an axe to grind against the defending champs and served notice on national TV that they were loaded and ready for the showdown. The local fans got their money's worth. Us, not so much. The Giants looked lifeless, and weird stuff happened like Joe Panik made an error. And Ryan Vogelsong and Bruce Bochy got ejected. Ballplayers have short memories--they forget about their last performance and look forward. We fans need to learn that trick.
San Francisco falls to four back of Los Angeles. Chris Heston gets the call against the Mets tomorrow night at AT&T.
GO GIANTS!
--M.C.
7 comments:
At least the Gnats only hit one homer.
Isn't it always around the ASB that the season starts to shake out? A team will get hot and move into contention....or fall apart and get left by the curb. It is pretty obvious which one is going on with our beloved boys. It feels like the whole thing is teetering on the edge. Playing bad and losing a few in a row is expected, we know that. It is all about how you respond and bounce back. Yesterday's response was terrifying. We are really starting to look like losers. That double ejection was embarrassing. I know Vogie is a jerk but forcing the ump to toss you like that, walking off the mound and all, was a dumb move. That ump is a well known hack and has been for years. Getting all mad then is silly. It is like getting in a big public fight with an incompetent coworker, a well intended doofus, and doing it at the worst time. Oh well, it sure wasn't why we lost.
Why do we keep losing? Too many reasons right now. How about I pick two: #1 When we play the big boys it is obvious we don't have the starting pitcher fire power. Hopefully, Cain and Peavy help with that. Too bad their emotional debuts were washed away during this streak. Maybe another youngster can help, like Stratton.
#2. Our injuries are clearly taking their toll in many different ways. Maxwell is a fine fielder, which makes him tolerable out there, but his presence in the lineup is a big negative. It seems like he is incapable of a productive out lately. But he is not the only symptom of this problem. We no longer have a top flight lead off hitter. We have a struggling 1B who is trying to play LF occasionally. Our #3 hitter is almost completely untested. Our pinch hitting options are, shall we say, not impressive. These all get "fixed" when Aoki and Pence return, right?
It's the injuries. Key people are out and the club has to make do. Maxwell is a fifth OF and has to start, for example, as you pointed out. Considering the roster mess they are OK. Win a few games at home before the Break, stay close to LA, they will be fine.
They do need to bounce back. But looking at the balls and strikes throughout the road trip
was brutal. Both the Angel Hernandez Crew and the Phil Cuzzi crew were terribly bad, and not equally bad for both teams but especially bad for the giants. The number of strikes thrown by giants pitchers called balls in key spots, and the reverse the number of balls tossed by the opposition against the giants called strikes, during the six games has to approach at least the half century mark. I do not think I have ever seen so many bad calls go against one team when it comes to balls and strikes throughout a 6 game road trip. Of course they should still have one a few of those games. Nevertheless, in key situations, the home plate umps were terrible. It was so bad that one can posit a theory that some higher ups told some of these guys to make sure that the world champs to not repeat. Of course, one could say that is a conspiracy theory. But my friend was pointing out the poor calls a few years ago by certain NBA refs, and low and behold he was right, as those refs ended up caught in a scandal related to their bad calls. Enough of my ranting about the umps. Its up to Bochy to get the giants to win, no matter who is behind the plate.
I really struggle a bit here. We've all recognized that a championship-caliber team needs to rise up against their toughest challenges. Examples: Melky's suspension, 6 elimination playoff games, a Wild Card elimination game, bad calls, tough scheduling, injuries, etc. I don't care to excuse anything based on injury or bad umpiring. Sure, they happen. Okay. The best teams play through all of it. Quite simply, we aren't doing that right now. (Oh, it would've helped if we had better depth, to be sure).
I didn't hear anybody "blame" or "credit" our great 21-9 month of May on tough scheduling- Giants had 30 games in 31 days. Haven't we seen Cuzzi, A Hernandez, and Joe West in our previous (and successful) World Series? See? The Giants rose above all of that. Now? They travel across the country and drop 6 straight, it's the faulty schedule & travel? It's a bad umpire? It's injuries? Meh. Yada, yada, woof, woof. Sorry. I'm not buying it.
I mean, we've seen so many base running errors, for example. Mental lapses on defense. Whether it's calling for an outfield fly, Belt getting to the bag, Timmy holding runners or backing up home, guys getting picked off, throwing errors, overthrowing the cutoff... Nonchalance. Lackadaisical play. Pitchers not finishing 0-2 count opportunities to put the opposition away. Inherited runners are now scoring. Our batters having non-productive outs.
Remember the key factor in our great 42-21 start last year being RBI's in 2-out situations? Yeah. Usually in crunch time, we've been accustomed to seeing the Giants force errors by *other* teams. Whether it is pulling a pitcher early or Runs Thrown In. But right now, we're often the ones not playing the game the right way, not playing up to our potential.
I hope it turns around quickly. We all know the Giants are capable of much more. Cheers.
I am wholly with carmot here. But I would add that the bench of McGehee and Arias has meant little rest for the three infielders who have been contributing extraordinarily to the Giants' success this year, when they have had it. Replacing McGehee with Adrianza may ease this problem halfway. DFAing Arias in favor of even Kevin Frandsen might ease it further. Something, at any rate, needs to be done to keep the lineup going till Aoki and Pence return.
I myself would like to see the team adopt some version of the scheme that Owlcroft has been proposing on MCC, in which the position-player lineup gets treated like a rough analogue of what's standard for the rotation, a regular schedule to assure that players get adequate rest. For example, Duffy, Crawford, and Panik would play five games out of every seven, with only one of them out of the lineup for any given game, and the utility men, Adrianza and X, would fill in on the days when the regular starters rested. That would mean more rest for the regular and more frequent ABs for the utility men, so as to keep them sharp. Bochy has repeatedly talked about the need to give his guys more rest--well, here is a way to do it, and to beef up the bench in addition, since we can attract better bench players if they know that they will get regular playing time.
You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry? Lollygaggers!
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