How bad are the Giants? 6-17-2 so far this spring, with a league-worst ERA (7.11), league-high 30 errors, and a league-worst batting average (.253). And, before you start telling me it’s just spring training, keep this in mind:
Extreme poor performance in spring often is a sign of regular-season failure. Of the 33 teams to finish at .333 or below (over the last decade), only four posted records above .500 that summer.
Of course, a young team might just be going through growing pains, but we know that ain’t this team, which is evident in the slew of injuries decimating the infield.
Folks, we are looking at an historically bad team. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, that should come as no surprise. The team has failed to draft a talented position player in over a decade, has spent most of the last five seasons either filling the roster with a bunch of beer-league softball players and waiver-wire castoffs, or overpaying for experience; and has no plan for rectifying either situation in the near future.
And lest you imagine the team is stockpiling money to make a run a the next group of terrific free agents, let me remind you that this horror-show of a team is still gonna cost some $90 million dollars this season. $90 million dollars. Brian Sabean should be fired right now. In reality, he should’ve been fired three seasons ago. At this point, every day he’s still in charge is a day wasted. This team needs a whole new plan, one that includes jettisoning every player over 30-years old immediately. Durham, Aurilia, Vizquel and Dave Roberts are making a combined $21 million dollars. Add in the $4 million the team is paying Molina, and the team could have gone out and gotten A-Rod instead of Aaron Rowand.
25 Backtalkers
Couldn’t agree more.
If Beane was in charge, do you think he’d trade Cain and Lincecum for 6-8 premier prospects?
Not advocating – just a conversation starter.
Cain or Lincecum, maybe. Not both. But, yeah, I think a good GM could restock the minor league system with one of these guys as bait.
The scary part is this; if the Giants could get, say, four or five prospects for Cain; like two A-plus guys, two B’s and a C, those guys would be better than the guys we have in the show right now. So, is it worth it? Maybe it is.
Yeah maybe trading Lincecum would be smart. He’s the more likely to get injured of the two and Cain has already gone through his sophmore slump.
Honestly neither of these two are going to help this club. The team is that bad. By the time the Giants are respectable both will be quite a bit older and very expensive. Plus, the current roster is only likely to force either of these young pitchers to try to do something stupid like strike out every hitter and do some damage the their arms.
It could very well be that they have close to as much trade value now as they ever will. They’re young, cheap and so far un-scarred.
I hate to say it’s the smart move. Trade one this season and the other next.
To me the only funny part of this is hearing Bochy talk about how his team is losing because it isn’t doing “the little things,” like hitting behind the runner or hitting the cutoff man — the implication is that if they can just do these little things, then everything will be fine. This is sort of like saying that if Steve Buscemi would just trim his eyebrows and wear snappier clothes, he will look like Brad Pitt.
The Giants don’t hit for average, or for power, or draw walks, or play good defense, plus their relief pitching is spotty and their starters have an ERA above 7.00 this spring. They need a complete face lift.
Bochy needs to go to. Not hiring Manny Acta was a mistake. This team will challenge the Mets for historically bad…and only a mediocre NL will save us.
I like being correct an all, but this isn’t what I wanted when I (and many others) predicted our pending demise about three years ago.
yeah, but don’t forget the real problem these past few years has been Bonds. His salary, his clubhouse presence, his multiple-controversies. The clubhouse is so much more relaxed now, these guys are gamers and will pull together and win 90+ games with grit and determination. You don’t need talent in MLB, you need good clubhouse chemistry and respect for the game……..just ask Sabean or Bochy. Just look at what the Giants were able to do with his salary off the books….spend it on Rowand, a true gamer– albeit with half Bonds talent or production, but a good guy that will be great on KNBR with Ralph and Tom.
that is correct! (and I know you’re being facetious).
100 game turn-around! Rich Autilia hitting .550! Omar Visquel with 87 home runs! Constant complaints from the groundskeeping staff of loss of infield dirt from Giants plain just gorging themselves on it! 6 Nobel Peace Prizes! Dave Roberts robbing home runs from the top of the flagpole! Peace in our time! Massive explosions from the clubhouse from the, dare I say it, alchemy that exudes. Willing evacuation of everything from Chinatown south! Mays Field visible from space! Mel Ott grows cornfield in right center, emerges and confers eternal life on all San Franciscans! Retroactive awarding of World Champeenships all the way back to 1993!
I, for one, will dare to say it, here and now – 178 wins in 2008. Thank god that punk Bonds is gone – he never could outhit my greatgrandmother.
Fucking Awesome Post!
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Looking at the Giants this year makes me realize that it can be hard being a sports columnist. If I had to write about the team this year, the only five relevant points that occur to me are:
1. The Giants stink.
2. Cain and Lincecum are awesome.
3. The Giants will stink until at least 2010.
4. Most of the Giants’ front-office personnel should probably be fired.
5. The Giants REALLY stink.
That’s all I could say, even if I wrote eleventy-thousand words. Everything else would just be fleshing out exactly how much the Giants stink, what brought them to this degree of stinkitude, how to partition the blame between ownership, the GM, the manager, the major and minor league coaches, etc.
What else is there to do: speculate about whether Dave Roberts will be a useless .250 hitter or a useless .270 hitter? Whether Aurilia will hit four or seven home runs? Whether Ray Durham will be a bad defensive player or a historically bad defensive player? How soon the Dan-Ortmeier-as-a-starting-first-baseman experiment will end? Whether the Giants will finish 20 or 30 games out of first place? Aside from Cain and Lincecum, there is truly nothing interesting to lsay about this team.
No Problems
The Front Office Moe, Larry, and Brian
Farm System Mgt: Dick, Jack, and Curley Joe
Field Mgmt. Bruce, Carney, and Shemp
Outfield Tattoo, Methuselah, Wiley Coyote
Infield, Mr. Rourke, and 3 of Jerry’s Kids.
Get rid of all of them and replace with players from Fresno, Farm System Mgmnt from Minnesota and Florida. Fuck the Front Office, Sell the team to Eddie DeBartolo
On a more serious note, drafting quality players won’t do any good until you clean out the Player Development stiffs. Everybody likes to talk about what a great job the Giants have done developing pitchers. Who? No really. Who has come out of the Giants system that has done shit. Not potential. The last two awesome pitchers that I remember were Jason Schmidt and Rob Nenn. Who came from somplace else. Yeah there are some nice arms in Sanchez Correia Wilson Cain and Lincecum. Nice Arms. Whatever. They are still in the “unrealized potential” category. The Giants haven’t developed a great pitcher since Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry. Unless you want to call Rod Beck, Jeff Brantley, and John Burkett “great”.
I’m with the guys who say trade one of Cain or Lincecum. They are not going to be anything with the Giants for the foreseeable future. Some nice individual performances, but I don’t see anything that establishes Cain and Lincecum as anything other than potential. And unrealized potential at that and likely to remain as long as they’re with this collection of carpetbagging droolers.
I didn’t count Nathan because he was pushed out the door for some jackass who shall remain unnamed, before he was actually given any respect by an organization, who actully knows what to do with young talent.
Great work with Accardo and even Aardsma too. Well, we’ll have high draft positions over the next couple of years, draft positions to be used on high school pitchers.
It’s stupid to blame Sabean. He’s a bureaucrat first and a baseball guy sixth. He takes the flak and does what his bosses say and gets paid way more than you for it. He came from the Steinbrenner Yankees, where orders were taken and executed, to the Macgowan-Baer Giants, where things are way more wheeny-like and bland but the hired help still do what they’re told to by the suits. Many still give credit to the suited duo and their pet dinosaur for building AT&T Park, which they managed to do mainly by signing Bonds and Dusty Baker in 1993 and then doing what they know best (as demonstrated by their recent Mission Bay coup): stage a multi-year political campaign, composed mainly of bribes and arm twisting, that resulted in what would normally be impossible in San Francisco: a waterfront baseball park. And despite their other super-enormous failings, for which they will burn in hell and when that’s done be forced to eat the 2008 Giants raw, they deserve credit for the park. Although back to hell they go immediately, because obviously they sold their souls to the devil to get it built — and, boy, is the devil pissed at the whithered, spent condoms he got in the deal. But during their brief triumph of competence they even allowed Sabean to buy hitters to stack around Bonds. He tried to screw it up by being himself, he got really lucky with Kent and Burks.
Thanks mia, and also good post yerself – what you said is, to me, the saddest thing. At whatever interval, teams are supposed to produce major league regulars. Some might become stars, some might be just holding down their position, but nevertheless, there’s 750 ML ballplayers that came from somewhere. Let’s even narrow it to 300 legit players, ten per team. Where are all the Giant farmhands? It’s easy to say “Joe Nathan, Joe Nathan” but shouldn’t there, uh, be quite a few more? How many products of the SF farm system are regulars anywhere? Even Accardo and Aardsma as mentioned above, are unproven quantities.
I read this interesting thing last night lengthily dissecting the Texas Rangers, and the author posited that the ownership’s priorities are 1)the land increasing in value and 2)the franchise increasing in value (as they all do, astronomically). The ballclub is just an excuse to be able to accomplish 1 & 2.
Food for thought.
Oh, I think that Accardo’s a regular bullpen pitcher at the big league level and I think that he’s around 25. Aardsma may turn out to be nothing, but he’s sticking around and the Giants only gave him 10 2/3 innings to prove himself.
The Giants farmhands? They don’t exist. Sabean does get credit for drafting some decent pitchers, to be fair. But overall? Awful.
But you can see my point… all things being equal, if you could undo all the deals, the Giants should be able to field a .500 team. I don’t know if they could fill out a 25 man roster, though. Maybe.
Right, but they also failed on a number of other fronts, fronts that have been addressed here for the last four years or so. As John noted, can you imagine a team with Bonds backed up by a real star or up-and-comer?
Watching the A’s play today, I’m colored impressed by their ability and courage to address and accept change. Ryan Sweeney? Jack Hannahan? Keith Foulke? Plus their youth movement with the likes of Buck, Barton, and Suzuki aren’t exactly…well…our players. They may not have great numbers over 162, but they’ll certainly play better than the Giants crop of players.
“…but they’ll certainly play better than the Giants crop of players.”
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As will Troop Beverly Hills.
I agree that trading Cain or Lincecum is the only chance this franchise has to be any good before 2013… I say wait until the trade deadline and hopefully a contender in desperate need of pitching will give us $1.50 on the dollar for a young stud like Lincecum, which is actually very possible. Sadly, knowing Sabean, he’d probably trade Linecum for some middle tier veterans in attempt to “win” now. You’d have to be a complete retard to not trade Jason Schmidt and then let him just leave via free agency (we had not one but TWO great opportunities to do this) so of course counting on Sabean to do the right thing now is just foolish hope.
Your 2008 Giants — All Outs, All Season.
Well, that’s a really ballsy thing to do, trading both Cain and Linecum, I mean if the A’s can basically rebuild their farm with Swisher/Haren you guys should get a haul for Cain/Linecum. The real issue is, if you trust Sabean to evaluate prospects in another teams farm. If he can, you should be able to get 8-10 really good/topflight prospects or maybe even more. You could rebuild/reload (whatever) and be competitive in 2-3 years.
And I’m not trying to be disrespectfull, but the Giants are going to be really hamstrung by Zito’s contract. I guess they were working on the Bonds model, pay him lots of money, get lots for production back for your dollar. I really thought Z would figure it out and but unless ST was just a fluke, and unless he somehow get’s those 5mph back on his FB, it’s going to be an even longer season every 5th day.
Should be interesting to see what happens over there on the other side of the Bay.
Why not trade Cain and Lincecum? I mean, really, can things get any worse? By the time those guys are surrounded by a good enough line-up to win ball games they’ll be free agents anyway… why waste their value on the current crop of hacks?
What makes following the Giants so hard now is that all of this was so utterly predictable… and avoidable. And yeah, I’m SICK of the blame it Bonds game — last time I checked he didn’t sign all of those god damn contracts, just his own.