STL 3 SF 1
My dream of a .500 finish for the Giants is slipping away. There are 25 games left, if they can win a dozen I suppose I'll take that as progress. Speaking of progress, Mauricio Dubon had two hits including his first career double and his first career homer. That's pretty cool. I'm thinking a lot about 2020 these days!
--M.C.
p.s. The Giants were 11-15 in April with a minus-20 run difference (91 RS, 111 RA) and 10-16 in May with a really ugly minus-63 (112, 175). In August they were 11-15 with only a minus-10 (125, 135). They had three one-run losses and three two-run losses.
14 comments:
giants had the magic, and traded it away. I am glad that one of our pick-ups is Dubon, but I was looking at him more for 2020. I hope we can find a way to re-sign Pillar, and in the off season to have some hitting guru teach him some plate discipline. The weakness of this team right now is our starting pitching. No longer do we have the best bullpen in the league. Many of our young starters just do not seem to be quite ready. Often it is minor control issues, and the ability to put batters away once they get two strikes. I am not sure what to think about Posey for the future. Will his hip be much better for 2020, and we will get some semblance of the old Posey back, or are we going to see a steady offensive decline? He is still an excellent defender, but probably needs to bat 7th or 8th in the lineup. Sometimes Rodriguez shows flashes of brilliance on the mound, and other times he looks like a deer in the headlites. Should be an interesting off season. Hoping that this September will be better than last year, but it almost looks as if some of the players are kind of tanking it. Perhaps due to significant injury.
They traded Melancon and Dyson who both pitched better in SF than for their new teams. At least so far. That bullpen 'magic' was going to regress regardless. There is no 'magic' in baseball. Even Watson and Smith had bad outings!
I agree about the starters. That's the clear Achilles Heel of the team. They need the young starters to step up and be more consistent.
Here's my philosophy of baseball:
1. Get TALENT
2. Have minor-league instructors develop that talent.
3. Have major-league coaches deploy that talent properly.
4. Hope for the best (mostly avoiding injuries).
The Giants, right now, are still working on steps 1 and 2.
Bochy and his staff have always been good at step 3.
That was a great run (2010-2014). Good luck married talent and they had three children.
Achilles had one heel unprotected because his mother gripped him by it when dipping him, as a baby, into a fluid of invulnerability. If the Giants are Achilles, their mother must have used two hands: a 2019 heel has been the whole mess of position players that poor Zaidi inherited, save for one late acquisition, Evan Longoria. Panik is now gone, but both the stalwart Brandons have miserable fWAR 0.2 contributions so far. Posey’s value, with a wRC+ of 83, is almost entirely defensive. The team, apart from pitching, has been overwhelmingly carried by Zaidi players, whom he has had to acquire without giving up any player of importance or promise from the thin resources he was bequeathed. The heel of starting pitching may be remediable, if Cueto is OK along with Samardzija, Bumgarner, and Webb. But as those close game losses remind us, the hitting with “the core” at the core of the lineup, remains horrendous.
I must always remember to be careful with my literary allusions. I'm going to get called on them!
It's true. The team is cobbled together, assembled on-the-fly. The Old Guard are, well, old. You would not think Belt (31), BCraw (32), and Posey (32) are old, but they are.
They still have baseball life, but they will be mostly role players and platoon partners and late-inning replacements and dare-I-say it DHs if they want to last in the bigs. It's a cruel world out there. Giants need some 22-year olds in a big way!
Good stuff from MLBTR about the Rays and how they built their team.
Here's a quote:
"In a game where much is often made of the culture-building aspects of draft-and-develop philosophies, the Rays have been able to squeeze wins out of a roster constructed more like a Lego set, where pieces are matched, assembled, and deconstructed again with purely modular logic."
80 wins in 2017, 90 wins in 2018, and 81 wins so far in 2019 with a genuine shot at the playoffs.
The Yankees got shut out yesterday. They had gone 220 games without being shut out. Can you believe that? In over 100 of those games they have scored 6 or more runs.
That's one way to win ballgames--clobber the shit out of the ball!
Giants pick up a lefty-hitting utility infielder from the A's: Corban Joseph.
You do not know if that regression would have occurred with the giants. The thing is, that Bochy figured out how to win with these guys. He had 6 or 7 strong in the bullpen so he can mix and match them in ways that worked most of the time. Once in a while one of them had a bad day, but certainly our pen has been worse since the trades. We do see that we have some guys ready for the future, and some are not there yet. The point is with a 7 deep pen of mostly reliable pitchers, the giants found themselves in games despite the poor hitting. Although, the giants hitting on the road is in the top few in the league, and their hitting at home is by far the worst. No one else is even in their same low stratosphere The giants pitching at home has been okay, but their pitching on the road has been about the worst in the league, much of that coming as of late. The way to make up for our really weak starting rotation was to have one of the top bullpens in baseball. That perhaps was our only strength and one Bochy figured out how to maximize. Take that away and we have weak starting pitching, and average bullpen, a team that only hits on the road. And a team which will need to win a few games so Bochy can get his 2000 wins.
Certainly we can never know. I guess I looked at the 'pen as helping sustain the improbable run the Giants were on. I also don't think teams are that sensitive to change, and if they are, they are weak to being with. It was only two pitchers. And the whole thing was predicated on gradually working in the younger untested arms, and they have unfortunately not done as well as hoped, not to mention injuries like Moronta and Gott. I also think the team HAD to deal at the deadline. They could not afford to pass up chances to improve the roster. They were a marginal playoff team, at best, and in fact I thought the entire playoff talk was so improbable that it wasn't worth mentioning. Just playing better baseball was the thing for me.
When the Giants actually in the playoffs race, the teams in the NL not including Atlanta and LA that were also chasing a spot we're basically .500 teams. I think that's kind of not how it's supposed to work. Since then, Washington particularly and other teams have played better than .500 and the Cardinals have gained a lead in the Central. But a .500 team has slipped out of contention since then. Not entirely, of course, no one has it sewed up, but the better teams are differentiating themselves.
You would hope that talent will rise. That is, a good team that's hovering around .500 will find its legs and start to play at its true level. The Nats come to mind. They were clearly a good team but they had a horrible start. Now they are playing more like everyone expected.
Jaylin Davis got promoted to the big club.
And was on base twice in four PAs.
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