…. and the bad.
The Giants just finished a 3-3 road trip, not too shabby considering the two teams they faced. But considering that they allowed only 9 runs in the six games against two of the most potent offense in baseball –at home, no less– and they lost two games in the standings, there’s not much to celebrate.
Once again, the pitching staff held a powerful offense to one run through nine innings, and once again, a mediocre pitcher turned into Sandy Koufax against the flailing SF offense. What a shame.
UPDATE: In light of Uribe’s breakout game yesterday, I thought I’d take a look at what he’s done since the All Star break, it was less than two weeks later that Brian Sabean wasted minor league pitcher Tim Alderson acquiring a broken-down ex-batting champ:
J. Uribe 126 at-bats, 32 hits, 6 doubles, 3 triple, 8 home runs 12 walks .254/.310/.540 .850 OPS
Sanchez 99 at-bats, 24 hits, 2 double, 1 home run 3 walks .242/.262/.293 .555 OPS
60 of those at bats were here. For those of you who would argue that Sanchez has been injured, well, duh. That’s one of the two reasons we shouldn’t have traded for him. The other is that Uribe was already contributing as much as we could possibly have expected to get from Sanchez. We should’ve been making a trade for a real hitter. And this was so obvious that even a carpenter, sitting in front of his computer for a couple of hours a week, saw it coming like Nostradaumus:
…. Sanchez, 31 years old, is a career .300 hitter, but he’s never walked more than 32 times in a season, his career high in home runs is 11, and his career OBP is just .336. He’s ranked fifth among NL second basemen in just about every category, which is to say, we traded our top draft pick from 2007 for a league average second baseman. For an easy comparison, let’s look at Juan Uribe.
J. Uribe 72 G 222 AB 17 2B 4 HR 21 RBI 10 BB 47 SO .284/.313/.432 .745 OPS
Sanchez 86 G 355 AB 28 2B 6 HR 34 RBI 20 BB 60 SO .296/.334/.442 .776 OPSI can’t for the life of me imagine how that kind of minimal upgrade would be worth one of the top forty prospects in all of baseball. Trading Alderson is fine, but WE NEEDED HOME RUNS AND WALKS!!!! Instead, we get two more 30-year old guys who are league average hitters. Can you see? This is systemic, because Brain Sabean does not know how to evaluate hitters, player value, or how to build a team.
The Giants have scored 9, 1, 3, 3, 1, 4, 0, 9, 5, 2, 0, 4, 5, 4, and 2 runs –52 total– in their last fifteen games, going 9-6 while scoring just over 3 runs per game. Of those 6 losses, two were 2-1, two were shutout losses, and one was 4-2. In fact, since the All Star break, the Giants have scored two runs or less 23 times in 60 games. Read that sentence twice.
The addition of a real hitter would have made an impact, more than likely a huge impact in that depressing fact. Adam Dunn, for instance, has 51 hits, 10 doubles, 12 home runs, 34 walks, and a 1.047 OPS since the break. Even Sandoval can’t match that production.
Instead, we got Freddie Sanchez, who has hit exactly one home run in the last three months, and as of right now, has hardly been able to walk, let alone hit; and Ryan Garko, who’s barely matched the level of production Travis Ishikawa was bringing to the table when he was acquired.
[...] Only Baseball Matters » Blog Archive » …. The goodWe should’ve been making a trade for … someone in the clubhouse/management be trying to figure out how to get the players to … Foul Territory – Sports Report – College Basketball – … [...]
so the freak has back spasms and cant play
the indestructable man has been destroyed by bochy pushing him too far
and while this org refuses to start guys like posey…sends guys like kfran to siberia, and continues to fuck around with guys like nate (on the bench again tonite), they have no fucking problem throwing in a kid who has never pitched above an aa level pitchers league
im rooting for madbaum to throw a no-no….dont get me wrong…..but tonite just continues to fit the mo of this entire org
and lets hope it is just back spasms and nothing worse
the med team of this org has a habit of misdiagnosing ailments
oh…and if timmy is gone for more than a game…say goodbye to the post season
I think its been clear for almost 2 seasons now. The Giants are going to wring every fucking thing out of him that they can because they know they have no chance to lock him up once he attains free agency.
His agent’s insistence on a series of one year contracts and risking arbitration instead of a Matt Cain, Noah Lowry, low risk, low reward contracts tells you that he and his agent (and no doubt his old man) may suspect that the Giants have no intention of paying for the type of run support he wants or needs. The run support necessary to put up the kind of numbers to score the compensation they think is commensurate with his ability is not something they think they can count on now, or even in the foreseeable future.
That is unless the front office comes under new management.
Back injuries, particularly along the lower spine are complex, and hard to diagnose and fix. They can heal quickly or never 100 percent. Sometimes it takes weeks to get back to 100 percent, sometimes years, sometimes never at all. Again look at Eric Chavez, Joe Montana. Back injuries are just scary as hell.
Look at Mattingly
Yeah. No shit. Donnie Baseball. Almost forgot about him. Painful. One of the purest sweet hitters I ever saw. Just a beautiful swing. With pitchers everybody talks about the shoulder, the arm, the elbow. Those things can be surgically repaired know. A back injury to a drop and drive pitcher is capable of ending his career in a whole hell of a hurry. More so than a tall and fall guy like Prior.
When you enter this realm, you’re really delving into the unknown, Idiot’s and Bochy’s nonchalance notwithstanding
Baseballbriefs.com tracking back …. The good…
Baseballbriefs.com tracking back …. The good…
RE: Update
While we’re at it, lets try on some Matt Holliday for size.
In 178 Plate appearances spanning 41 games since coming to St. Louis from Oakland for a minor league prospect, his slash numbers are .433 OBP, .692 SLG, and 1.125 OPS.
On July 24, the first day of Matt Holliday, the Cardinals were 7 games over .500. They were 1.5 games in front of Houston and Chicago and 3.5 games in front of Milwaukee.
On July 24, that same day, the Giants were 8 games over .500, having just being caught by Colorado after leading them by double digit games earlier in the season. The Giants traded away a minor league prospect for Freddy Sanchez.
On Sept 8, 2009 the Cardinals are 25 games over .500, 11.5 games in front of the Cubs, 14 games in front of the Astros and 15 games in front of Prince Fielder and the Earthquakes.
The Giants as of this date are 14 games over .500 with the best pitching staff in the history of the franchise and are in 3rd place, 2 games behind the Rockies and 6 games behind the Dodgers.
This is the Giants story since Sabean got here. Missed opportunity after missed opportunity explained away with one excuse after another. And less than 2 weeks ago, the Rockies signed Giambi who promptly gave them 2 walk off hits. And no kudos for Brad Penny. That just gets them back to even after Randy Johnson and his 9 million dollar contract took the easily predicted 60 day DL vacation shortly after win 300.
This said it best:
The Posey “controversy” is nothing more than a distraction and will be good for selling some seats. It obfuscates the real picture which is Sabean’s arrogant stubborness and willful self-imposed ignorance.
Whining about Matt Holliday is pointless unless you know exactly what was going on between the A’s and Giants. For all fans know, Beane may have told Sabean “Look, if this discussion doesn’t begin with Bumgarner or Posey, this discussion ends right now”. And maybe that was only the start. Beane is a pretty good deal-maker – he probably knew what Holliday would have meant to the Giants, and could easily have demanded a king’s ransom for him.
It’s all pure pointless speculation without the facts.
Of course its speculation. That’s exactly the point actually. The Cardinals, Dodgers, Rockes, Astros, Phillies etc etc for 15 years have produced results. Sabean and the Giants have produced excuses.
He has called every non-event, which produces zero results, the same thing as you…speculation, from the lunatic fringe. The bottom line is still the same. Nothing for the Giants changes. They are 52 years of also-rans. Fifty two years of excuses.
The winners get something done and make the transactions they need to make and losers make excuses.
Sabean signs guys like Zito, Renteria, and other old garbage and makes excuses. The other guys sign guys like Sabathia, Texiera, Holliday, etc and make the playoffs and the World Series.
In the old days of the Reserve Clause, restricted player movement, and shitty ass Candlestick Park and a lousy tv contract, Stoneham and Lurie got away with that shit. Today, with unlimited budgets, the richest ownership in MLB, a new stadium, a lap dog media, and extraordinarily forgiving and enthusiastic fans, there is no excuse for the 15 years of failure of the current ownership group.
Mia, let me really piss you off and quote Ralph Barbieri: ” Two things can be equally true.” Meaningless but hard to argue, it in fact makes sense when trying to evaluate
why the Giants didn’t get Holliday and all the actual, demonstrable, failures that
Sabean has committed. For example, it can be simultaneously true that Holliday’s asking price was beyond the pale and that Sabean blew the chance to aquire Jermaine
Dye. So, as your latest foil fishchum (BTW, fishchum, do you have a self-esteem problem?) suggests, why speculate about a non-event, the details of which are unknowable, and conflate it with real, documentable disaster(s)? It just doesn’t do anything to further your argument. Allah knows, The Idiot has thrown enough bad shit
in your wheelhouse.
Well, I thought it was obvious I was not referring to Sabean’s failure to secure Holliday specifically. It was just one more example of a successful organization (the Cardinals) continuing to do the things that makes them successful while an unsuccessful organization (the Giants) continue to do the things that make them unsuccessful.
And by successful I mean setting goals, strategizing to achieve those goals, acquiring personnel necessary to execute that strategy–with foresight for contingencies, executing that strategy and you know…actually winning a couple of fucking Pennants and World Series instead of a bunch of sullen, mulit-syllabic, clich-ridden excuse-making press conferences.
Dan, while I stick to my original post I think +mia makes an excellent point on the flipside of my post – that for the last 15 years, it’s been a lot of excuses as to why the Giants haven’t brought a WS trophy to 3rd & King. It always seems as if Sabean is able to pull off 1 good deal (in this case, Penny) that keeps him away from the edge of the gangplank that so many people would like to see him walk off of.
No, BTW – no self esteem issues here. Just an admittedly strange sense of humor.
BULLSHIT!!!!!! Once again, you idiots are reduced to explaining that, of course, the demands for such and such player were beyond mortal understanding. Right.
Matt Holliday couldn’t have been closer to being untradeable, running out a pedestrian .286/.378/.454 .832 line, with 11 home runs and 54 RBI in 90 some-odd games. Since the trade, he’s taken everyone –EVERYONE– by surprise, having hit 11 home runs with 39 RBI — in half as many games– while running out an almost Bondsian line of .378/.433/.692 with a stellar 1.125 OPS.
I wasn’t advocating a trade for Holliday, practically no one was. He was looked at as a Coors field albatross waiting to happen. He may still be. Anyone remember what he did in a late season trade?
Anyway, Holliday was acquired for cash, third baseman Brett Wallace, pitcher Clay Mortensen and outfielder Shane Peterson.
Anybody know who the fuck those guys are?
BP said this when the trade happened:
Wallace is projected to turn into a 15 home run guy, or, say, any player from the Giants.
So don’t tell me the Giants couldn’t have afforded to trade for Holliday. Sabean didn’t see the upside– for that matter, the venerable Joe Sheehan didn’t either:
Sheehan didn’t think Holliday was as valuable as Alderson, and then Sabean went out and traded Alderson for Freddie Sanchez? Awful. But regards Holliday, Sabean did not see Holliday’s potential value, and he didn’t make the deal, fine. But to sit here and suggest that it was because Beane somehow had the upper hand is bullshit. At the time of the deal, Holliday was viewed by virtually everyone as a complete AL bust, a Coors Field fraud, and could have been taken off Oakland’s hands for table scraps.
There is no shortage of useful and useless idiots willing to make excuses for Giants failure. It is fallout from the post-modern idiotism that seems to permeate early 21st century western thinking, where failure is deemed to be whatever the perpetrator of the failure wants it to be in order to escape accountability for his/her fuckups, and the ability to convince enough like-minded paste-eaters to go along with him/her.
In other words you have no shortage of stupid fuckers willing to make excuses for the failures of other stupid fuckers because in their stupid world there is no failure, only differences in results where the only thing that matters is that all the participants get a motherfucking plastic jesus trophy (like a high draft choice or a Cy Young Award nomination) at the end of the day after the tire-kicking is over so nobody has to feel bad. As if life was all about ones hurt feelings. Who gives a shit.
Amazes me the amount of insipid thought processes people will subject themselves to, to avoid the ideas and opinions that will render their little comfortable world of baseball as they want it to be, a media-generated myth.
Just for clarification. This is not directed at anybody here. But rather the less erudite opiners who frequent the usual places in the company of the usual suspects
Well, OK, I take back the idiot comment. But, guys, come on. You’ve got to stop defending failure, and start talking about what’s really happening with this team.
Is front office stability a good thing? Of course it is. But everything can be taken to its absurd conclusion, and we’ve arrived at this team’s event horizon.
Do the Giants deserve credit for the development of Wilson, Sanchez, Cain and Lincecum, the acquisition of Jeremy Affeldt, the league-best pitching staff? Absolutely. While it’s easy to say Bochy or Righetti don’t bring anything special to the table, they deserve credit for what the team is accomplishing. I acknowledge that they’ve done many good things this season.
At the same time, Bochy’s handling of Fred Lewis, Nate Schierholz and the rest of the team’s young players cannot be explained. Leaving Buster Posey –the future of the team– on the bench for the last week, while the team is scoring 3 runs a game, is simply laughable. Benji Molina as a cleanup hitter, all season long, is patently absurd.
And Brian Sabean’s failure is no longer defensible. You cannot continue to explain away his failure to acquire good, young hitters of quality. And because of his failure, we will end up with the best pitching staff in baseball watching the postseason on Fox, instead of playing.
Thats the frustration of watching a guy like Larry Baer manipulate his target audience with willing accomplices throughout the media, especially his lapdog employees at Comcast and the Giants broadcast booth. They never seem to run out of excuses for failure. Never. And they’re all plausible. And they are omni-present, never taking even 5 minutes off. Baer and his minions are as vigilant in the monitoring of their audience as any White House Pollster.
What a fucking relief to listen to Hank Greenwald Jr call the game Sunday from Milwaukee on the radio. He actually called the game in a forthright manner rather than offer up a never ending stream of patronizing homilies over the wholesomeness and downright goodness of all things Giants. Right on through Howry making a mess before turning the game over to Merkin Valdez for Fielder’s walk off. He just called the game and let the game carry the drama without the nonstop cheerleading and consequent excuses and so forth.
It was during the radio broadcast of Sunday’s game that I came to realize just how jingoistic the Giants broadcast guys on Comcast and KNBR and the rest have become over the last couple of years. Its as if the team performance is not good enough to speak for itself anymore, but rather now requires constant explanation, rationalizations and promoting as if they let their guard down for one minute, the audience will turn away in disugust. Krukow sounds no different than Don Sutton in his salad days with Skip Carey in Atlanta on TBS or Hawk Harrelson on WGN. At least nobody took Harey Carey seriously rightfully dismissing his slurriness for what it was, pure shilling for the home team.
Krukow, and Fleming and Snow, Roberts and some of the other studio hacks not even worth mentioning have become a disgusting non-stop 9 inning infomercial. The only thing missing from Giants media events are Billy Mays and Ron Fucking Popeil, and a studio audience promised exciting parting gifts after the event is in the can.
The fucking Giants have become as faceless and feckless as ESPN and one long fucking car commercial. They have lost their fucking way and are as devoid of anything more traditional than Al Davis’ polyester hair and leisure suits.
And thats why I have a really short temper when I see some of the stuff echoing all the propaganda that comes out of Third and King.
These guys are in a snit over Buster Posey’s absence of playing time. Ryan Garko, who like Posey, won the Johnny Bench Collegiate Catcher of the year award is not getting much playing time either for that matter. And some of the folks over there are actually outraged and surprised that Bochy is not a Giants fanboy with a mancrush on every 1st round draft choice that comes up through the system and lands in his clubhouse in September. Apparently they forgot who Bochy was and is.
Even mainstream media it seems is showing cracks about giving Bochy a free pass on everything from his dullard personality to his young-player phobia, to his retarded insistence on setting up Bobby Howry to blow leads in late and extra inning games. Tim Kawakami, of the San Jose Merc, and one of the few commercial media and blog guys who doesn’t keep his mouth firmly planted on Baer’s and his boys’ asses, had this to pass along after his encounters with Cranium Melonous yesterday:
No mystery to me. Or anybody else thats been paying attention to Bochy for more than his tenure here in San Francisco. Kevin Towers got fed up with Bochy during the middle of the 2006 season and his insistence of starting Vinny Castilla at third base. Castilla, who was OPSing at .579 and was clearly done, was finally kicked out by Towers at Alderson’s insistence. (Much like Rich Aurilia getting put on the DL with phantom injuries all of this season)
The Pads won the division before getting eliminated in the first round in four games by the Cards. For what’s it worth the Padres scored a grand total of 7 runs in those 4 games. Though Bochy still had one year to go on his contract, he was “encouraged” to seek other “opportunities.
The Giants had four finalists to replace Felipe Alou, who in no surprise to anybody other than to the Giants and their sycophants, turned out to be a miserable failure and destroyer of pitching arms. The four finalists were Manny Acta, Bud Black, and Ron Wotus. Right about now, I’m thinking that a lot of Giants followers would have preferred the other 3 to the one they actually got. Guess Wotus, Black, and Acta, were not demonstrative enough in their ability to kiss Larry Baer’s ass and adopt “The Giants Way”.
At least the Padres had the good sense to show Bochy the door, even though the Pads won the NL West. So there is still some hope that Mr. Peanut will see fit to rid himself of the stench of whiskey-stained aloha shirts, gnarly goatees and one really bad Denver Pyle sound-alike.
If only the Giants could take their attitude/approach at home and apply to road games. The difference in yesterday’s game to every one of the previous road trip is huge.
The Giants are one of the best teams in baseball at home and one of the worst on the road. Far too many players are showing significant road/home splits for this to just be a mere coincidence or case of small sample size. I know familiarity/comfort will play a role to an extent but really shouldn’t someone in the clubhouse/management be trying to figure out how to get the players to perform on the road.
its really sad
this is the best rotation and pen that i have ever seen on a giants team…but the worst offense
however, 16 of the next 22 games are at home…and look what the team did at home today
so there is still a chance
but they wont have home field if they make the playoffs…so it will be one and done