As I mentioned, Barry Zito’s complete collapse in the last game before the All Star break, the day after Jonathan Sanchez threw a no-hitter, was a cold slap in the face to a team on a roll. Now, having lost three of four since the brak, (four of five, overall), the Giants are looking up at the Rockies, who are playing some serious baseball right about now.
The last four games have really made it clear that the team has no hitter that makes the opposing pitcher nervous at all; no one who creates the pressure or puts them in a situation where it really matters if the pitcher walks the hitter, or if he just wants to pump another fastball over the plate. Even the Kung Fu Panda, because of his willingness to swing at so many bad pitches, can be dealt with, as long the bases are empty.
Its games like these that make it clear that for the Giants to contend through the dog days of August, another bat is a must. Jay Jaffe, over at Baseball Prospectus, thinks the Giants are in for a tough run:
…. Among contenders, the Giants have the hardest row to hoe—much harder than the Rockies, their closest rivals for the NL Wild Card. The 19-point gap (in opponents winning percentage) between the two teams is the equivalent of 1.3 games in the standings over the remaining schedule.
Problem is, there doesn’t seem to be much out there, you know, like, say, a 29-year old who’s hit 40 home runs each of the last five years, who costs about as much per season as, say Renteria. 
UPDATE: Make that six of seven. The team’s freefall is so overwhelming, even the Freak isn’t immune. The decision to avoid Garret Anderson –first base was open, gotta love that endless Krukow optimism– and pitch to one of the hottest hitters alive in that fateful third inning was patently ridiculous. Sure, Anderson’s a good hitter, but he’s no Pujols. They could have shaken hands the minute that pitch left the yard, because that game was over.
Oh, and as for Adam Dunn being “slightly better-than-average,” his .400 OBP would be the best on the Giants by about fifty points (other than the Panda), and with 24 home runs and 73 walks, I mean, are you serious?
He’s got the tenth best OBP in the NL, the fifth most home runs, the 7th best OPS, the 6th most RBI, 9th best SLG…. what more could you ask of a hitter than to be in the top ten in every single important offensive category? He’s an absolute beast, and his $8 million dollar salary this season is exactly what we’re paying Renteria. For all the hand-wringing about how weak Dunn’s defense is, Renteria’s been pretty crappy with the glove to go with his complete lack of offense, speed, and pretty much anything other than “veteran leadership,” whatever the fuck that is.
Meanwhile, the Red Sox got Adam LaRoche from the Pirates, a real hitter in some serious decline, for a bag of used baseballs. I’m sure we couldn’t have come up with a package of nobodies to get a guy with more home runs than all but one of the players on our team, right?
16 Backtalkers
Baseballbriefs.com tracking back …. Buzz Killington…
Baseballbriefs.com tracking back …. Buzz Killington…
I was not convinced after the last homestand, and this road trip shows again that Sabean has built half a team without any idea of how to build an major league offense. I won’t be a believer in this team until either until 1/2 the line-up or the GM are replaced.
I wonder how many teams are kicking themselves for passing on Dunn, who is putting up a slightly better-than-average line so far (.268/.401/.542/.943) for an absolutely abysmal team. He’s on pace for another 40 homer, 100 walk season at the bargain price of $8 million. I’m just writing that out because it’s just mind-boggling.
Another affordable option might be Josh Willingham, who is also on the Nats. He put up some good power numbers for the Marlins the past few years and he is hitting .283/.406/.942 in a part time role this year. The Nats will probably listen to offers for almost anyone right now. He wouldn’t be the total solution, but probably an upgrade over what the Giants have in the outfield and the price might not be too steep.
Dunn is also on pace for the “Worst defensive player in baseball” award this year. His bat is great, but he really has given up as many runs with his glove as he’s earned with his bat. All said, he’s on pace to be a slightly below average player.
That said, he’s been better than Renteria (who’s been replacement level, which is about 2 wins worse over the course of a season than an average player), and a move to 1B HAS to improve his D (if for no other reason than his 1B peers are generally bad defensive players themselves). We would certainly be doing better with Dunn right now, which shows just how bad our position players are.
That’s a ridiculous assertion. His defense couldn’t be worth more than 1 or 2 wins below replacement. His offense more than makes up for that, by a mile.
His runs created total, 71.1, is currently sixth in the league, and his runs created per 27 outs is 9th. He’s made 10 errors, playing, by the way, 3 positions. Pujols has made 7, Prince Fielder has made 4. Alsonso Soriano has made 8, Justin Upton, widely considered one of the best young players in baseball, has made 7. Granted, Dunn’s first base performance has been terrible, but in what world would he be considered too poor a player for the Giants?
Not in the real world. He’d make a few less plays than either Ishikawa or Lewis or whoever we’re trotting out there in left right now. Meanwhile, he’s hitting a home run every four games, which is only what our ENTIRE FUCKING TEAM IS DOING RIGHT NOW!!!!!!
But no, let’s talk about how lousy a defender he is…..
But defense wins championships! On a serious note, I’m curious where your numbers are coming from. I’m using fangraphs numbers. I’ll acknowledge that their metric for defense, UZR, needs more than half a year to effectively judge a defensive performance. It has him on pace for a little over -3 wins defensively, though based on his historical data, it’s probably overstating his bad defense by .5 wins or so (he’s been really, really bad every year for the last 4 years, this year he’s just even worse). Offensively, fangraphs linear weights (wOBA), which is a very, very good offensive stat, has him at just over 2 wins above replacement so far.
Giving him credit for being a better defender than the stats have said so far this year, he’s on pace to be about a 3 win above replacement player (1 win above average). That’s worth ~$14-15M on the open market historically, and assuming his D at 1B is a little better, maybe he’s a ~3.5 win player for the Giants (he couldn’t play OF for us in our park, so 1B it is). Definitely an improvement over Ishikawa.
My point isn’t Dunn would have been a bad move, but his contributions wouldn’t have been as great as his offensive performance makes it seem. He really is as bad as any other player in MLB defensively. It is relevant – you know the importance of run differential – a run saved is as good as a run earned.
Just one more time, I want to point out that Dunn is better than Ishikawa or Renteria, despite his defense. I’m not trying to say otherwise…
Not wanting Dunn, if you’re the Giants is kind of like going to the dance with a 396 pound woman with a beer belly; limburger cheese breath, toe jam, the complexion of Michael Jackosn and bigger cankles than an Indian Elephant and deciding not to go home with Jessica Simpson because you hate the Dallas Cowboys.
hmmmm..now that I think about it, thats not a woman. Its Brian Sabean
Check this out:
Amongst NL outfielders, Dunn OPS is .952. Good for 7th highest, overall and 3rd amongst Outfielders. The highest Giant is Rowand. 770. Good for 47th overall and amongst qualifying batters in the National League, and 18th amongst outfielders. The drop off after that is not mathematically definable.
Just wow. 8 million for Dunn. 18 for Renteria. I knew it was bad, but this is almost funny.
You mean 2/$20mil for Dunn, 2/$18.5mil (plus a $2mil signing bonus?!!!) for Renteria….
But your point still stands.
Outfield errors are a little different anyway. Like they say, show me an outfielder with no errors and I’ll show you an outfielder who can’t throw.
“We changed to a ground attack in the eighth,” Bochy said.
Fearless Leader Denver Pyle Impressionist Bruce Bochy after Sabean’s tits-on-a nun, useless offense scored 4 unearned runs in the eighth inning. I guess thats what sock puppets say after being used as Yuneal Escobar’s personal pinata for the last 4 days.
GROUND ATTACK: (def) Pathetic misuse of a baseball bat as a pool cue, and propagandized as if a blue-collar sports endeavor. Known in the vernacular as bullshit.
Bochy is a useless asswipe. But he’s not the main problem. He’s just saying what any company stooge would say. Stooges. Thats what Giants field management has been since 2002. Seven years of Mush Brain followed by Uncle Jessie of the cranium on peds.
Which leads me to an asidem. Scott S’ thesis is right. There is a plethora of horrid baseball being played out there by a lot of teams. That’s what happens when you take the greenies out of the game as well as the peds. David Wright squirting a double play ball around like it was a used condom in the All Star Game. Albert Pujols not picking the resulting throw out of the dirt, which would have been a good play for a high schooler and a routine play for a Double A player. So thats what happened today to the Braves. Zito got away with a felony by walking the bases loaded in the 4th and getting some generous calls from home plate umpire Jeff Kellog. Whatever. He’s still horseshit and sleeps with teddy bears. And the Giants continue to slot him in the No. 2 hole. Is this French politics or baseball? Jeezo.
Its been unfair and unrealistic to expect Cain, Lincecum, Romo, Wilson and Sandoval to continue to carry this garbage can full of Sabean free-agents on their back into the playoffs. Lincecum’s pitches have been way up in the strike zone his last three outings and he’s making location mistakes. Getting rid of the beanie and Michael Jackson doo would be a good start. Cain is solid so far. Romo hyper-extended his knee two games ago before Bochy finally realized that pitching with strained ligaments does not make for great location, movement, nor velocity. Wilson is a fucking zoo. He is Jeff Brantley with a mohawk-rat-tail-mullet. At least he is well rested for the past 2 weeks.
Ray Ratto, former avowed Bonds hater, and morbidly obese San Francisco Chronicle hack opined on Sunday July 12th:
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“It’s pretty clear by now that we’ve seen enough, and whatever reasons Billy Neukom has for letting events unfold until season’s end or respecting the process already in place, they really aren’t valid any more. Brian Sabean and Bruce Bochy have new contracts coming, and that’s now. Not in October, either. Now.
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Now normally I’m all over folks for not providing context or background or perspective. But this speaks for itself. Just as a turd on the carpet.
This is exactly the kind of crap that has the sycophants or more disdainfully, “phans”, swooning all over the Giants for having the great courage to have a six week run of above average ball. Funny how the team still does not hit. It does not score. It does not have smart at bats. It runs the bases poorly. All in all, it is a team save for Pablo Sandoval’s first half, that would be worse than the 1969 Seattle Pilots managed by good ol boy, Joe “shitfuck” “fuckshit” Shultz of the .411 career winning percentage, who scored a grand total of 639 fucking runs. And this was the year AFTER they raised the pitching mound.
Guys like Ratto and the window-licking, paste-eaters who think Sabean needs an extension now have either long term memory loss, dementia, stupiditis, the after-life expectations of Sirhan-Sirhan or some combination thereof.
In case anyone forgot. These are just a few of the “IMPACT” position players/starters that Sabean saddled Mush Brain and Uncle Jessie with through free-agency or panic trade, after Baker was sacked.
Marquis Grissom, Edgardo Alfonso, Neifi Perez, Michael Tucker, Devi Cruz, Dustin Mohr, Mike Matheny, Omar Vizquel (second contract) Randy Winn (second contract), Alex Sanchez, Steve Finley, Mark Sweeney, Jose Vizcaino, Shea Hillenbrand, Ryan Klesko, Dave Roberts, Rich Aurilia, Bengie Molina, Ray Durham, (second contract) Jose Castillo, Aaron Rowand, Edgar Renteria, Jose Uribe and if you don’t get the picture by now, I’m sorry, I don’t do internet braille.
The Giants had their chance during the offseason. Any big transactions now by a guy like Sabean would be akin to granting amnesty to Osama bin Ladin and expecting him to be the grand marshall at the Easter Fucking Parade.
And the tough part of the August schedule hasn’t even started yet.
Two Starters and a Pablo Sandoval cannot make up for the shortcomings of the continuing beer-league tryouts of your San Francisco Giants. They are still unwatchable on offense. Putrid in their 5 year continuation of this disaster created and cultivated by Brian Sabean.
/end of rant
+mia,
Agreed. I’ve gone back to not watching. Haven’t seen one inning since last Friday’s debacle against the Buc’s. You can carry the torch for me. I’m done for the year.
I’ll still check in time to time for your insights.
Vaya Con Dios
Here is another perspective on Sabean and the Giants front office “success” in managing this team. They point to the run of playoff successes since 1993.
How many of the 32 teams in baseball would not have had at least a couple WS championship rings with Barry Bonds on a team for 15 years? It gets really difficult to think of any outside perhaps Kansas City. The fact the Giants even only got close once speaks volumes to the crap management in the front office.
Even the Padres/Brewers/Devil Rays/Tigers would have probably won a couple. Shit, there are a lot of minor league teams who would have made the playoffs with Bonds on their team 2001-2004. Its frustrating that ownership looks back at the Bonds era as a “success” for Sabean et al during the Bonds era, rather than a complete waste of perhaps the biggest difference-making athlete in baseball history.
Sabeans playoff “success” can be boiled down to two simple factors.
1) Barry Bonds, who signed before Sabean beacme GM and would have been in San Francisco for all those years anyway what with being the face of the franchise and loved by the owners.
2)He seriously lucked out on Jeff Kent.
You’re talking about his legacy. Sabean’s legacy is the failure to capture even a single title with fifteen years of the best player alive. More to the point, from 2000-2005, Bonds put on a six year run of performance that hadn’t been seen since the time of Babe Ruth, and Sabean failed miserably in his efforts to maximize that performance.
Did the Giants get extremely unlucky in losing that Game Six to the Angels? Absolutely. Did Sabean allow personality conflicts and internal dissension to completely derail that teams chances to get back to the WS the next season? Absolutely.
Sabean is a failure. Bochy brings nothing to the table that any baseball lifer couldn’t. Righetti? Name one thing Rags does as a pitching coach. The only thing I notice that all the Giants pitchers do is throw waste pitches after they get ahead in the count. The mantra of Righetti must be “don’t get beat with two strikes.”