Wow. What a stretch of awful baseball.
The Giants have scored 109 runs in 25 games in this month. They have pounded out 26 home runs, and 51 doubles. Of course, it’s been a little feast or famine, because 38 of those runs came in three games. Take those three games out, and it’s a very different story. Then we’re talking about 71 runs in 22 games, which is what a team scores when it is falling out of the race. That’s 3.27 runs per game, and when your pitchers are going through their worst stretch in two seasons, well, you know what’s gonna happen.
The pitching, the starters in particular, has been awful. Overall, they’ve allowed the fourth most run in the league, (127), so scoring 3.27 and allowing 5.08….
This is starting to look like a collapse, the kind that can cost people jobs. Sure, the players should be accountable. But the coaches and managers need to be held accountable, too.
The pitching coach has failed to correct major breakdowns in not one, not two, but three of the team’s young starters for going on five weeks now. The hitting coach has watched as the teams best young hitter endured a ten week homer-less drought, as he essentially swung at every pitch thrown to him for about 225 at-bats. And the manager, well, his failings are worthy of their own article. Allowing Aaron Rowand to stay at the top of the lineup for months wasn’t bad enough. No sooner did he finally get Rowand out of the lineup, he had to put Sanchez in the number two slot and watch as he killed two months worth of rallies. Not benching Sandoval for swinging at every pitch, or for being so fat and out of shape he can’t even bend down on a ground ball. He played the young catcher virtually every day during a staggeringly tough stretch of consecutive games (I think it was 28), until finally, he has broken down, as catchers do when you put them in the lineup for 30 straight days.
The GM? I’ll just point out one thing for now. The amount of money sitting on the bench or on the DL is staggering. Staggering.
Are you listening, Mr. Neukom? Do you really care?
Collapse? Or Playoffs? The matter is out of our hands now.
Good article! Thanks for sharing!
Short of a total collapse, where the Giants lose most of their remaining games, Neukom is going to bring the same cast of clowns back next season because the team is still drawing fans, and the team record is not pitiful enough to clean house. So we are stuck with Baer, Sabean, Bochy, Rowand, Zito etc at least for another year. Righetti probably will get blamed for the collapse of the pitching staff, just like Lansford got blamed for the woeful hitting last year, but I agree the trouble reaches higher in management level, and I just don’t see Neukom doing anything to rock the boat other than slapping the back of Righetti’s hand. First priority is making money, not winning a championship. Doesn’t Neukom realize that the payroll might be lower, and the team would realize more profit if Sabean would quit throwing bad contracts to players like Rowand, Renteria, Zito, Sanchez, DeRosa etc?
You’ve identified the one intangible lacking in every area of the baseball operations of San Francisco Baseball Associates. And it is the root cause of all the failure for the better part of a decade. An absence of strong positive growth encouraging leadership on the field and off:
Embarrassment? Humiliation? Hasn’t that been the watchword of the past week? A contending team with not just one, but two Cy Young Award winners at the top of the rotation and neither can get out of their first innings without being pummeled, beaten, and kicked; not once, but 5 consecutive times. That is a disgrace. Yes a pitcher has to make his pitches, but if their is no leadership in the field, in the dugout, in the tunnel to the clubhouse, in the clubhouse and in the front office, it is beyond silly and stupid to believe that a couple of 20 somethings (Lincecum, Cain, Sandoval, Posey, Sanchez, and Baumgarner) with no pennant-chase experience, let alone post-season experience to lead a bunch of off-the scrap-heap, dfa’s and waiver claims, overpaid guys on the disabled list and on the bench nursing their sub- 700 OPS to the fairy god mother promised land.
And so who does the lapdog toothless, ass-kissing media maggots go after? Sabean? Bochy? No? How about a little lower on the food chain; say Righetti, or Wotus or Meulons? No. How about the players with post-season experience? Oh. The Giants don’t have any except Burrell a midseason dfa pickup and the useless Renteria. No none of those guys. They go after Lincecum and Sandoval. Why? Because Sabean and Bochy and Baer decided to scapegoat the only two players, other than Buster Posey, that are worth paying more than a $1.78 to watch play. Bochy goes on a long-winded stupifying rambling dissertaion with the official front-office mouthpiece from the San Jose Merc about Lincecum and Sandoval’s physical conditioning implying in no uncertain terms that is the primary reason for the Giants horrible play. And so the jerkoffs in msm and KNBR, the Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally of San Francisco Baseball Associates, continued again today to relentlessly pummel Lincecum and Sandoval about their “conditioning”.
Remarkable in that those fuckers never criticized Armando, Alfonso, Moises, Renteria, Uribe, Molina, Finley, Klesko, and all the rest of the useless flotsam that Bochy and Sabean have brought in over the years to play cards with. Fucking asshole Giants don’t deserve to win shit. They deserve all the misery that is coming their way right now; double-dealing backstabbing cocksuckers calling out those two kids and focusing the cause of the Giants failure on them.
Bochy and Sabean and Baer deserve to reap the rewards of their cronyism, arrogant ignorance, that the continuing embarrassment on the field of the shitty product they spent $100,000,000.00 fucking million dollars on this year alone, has demonstrated over the past couple of weeks. A travesty and a brand of baseball that would embarrass even the semi-pro Pittsburgh Pirates
Nice going Bowtie. Fucking major league baseball isn’t fucking as easy as stealing software or bullying competitors or running roughshod over a duped computer buying public. Abuse of power can only take these fucks so far.
Losers. The whole lot of them.