No Brian Wilson, no Panda, no Lincecum, (or, should I say, no Freak)…. When are we going to add Freddie Sanchez’s name to the list of players who go from the Giants to the broadcast booth?

This team is boring, boring, boring. Actually, when they are bat, they are boring. In the field, they are brutal. They look like the ’62 Mets.

How about a home run every once in a while? How about catching the fucking ball, I mean what the hell were Burriss and Crawford doing last night?

Since I wrote about the good hitting back on April 26th, Posey has absolutely cratered. 9 for 50 in May with all nine hits being singles. Um, maybe he’s not healthy?

Belt is at .239 with no homers. Schierholz never plays, why? Matt Cain has a better batting average than Burris, Crawford, Huff and Theriot.

25 home runs? The whole team has 25 home runs? Do I need to point out that Josh Hamilton has 18 all by himself?

This team has been ravaged by injuries, but still, we are among the very few teams in baseball who simply do not develop position players at all. Other teams have injuries and they bring up guys who can at least pick it and throw it. We apparently cannot. Why bother fielding minor league teams when you can’t pull somebody up who has even the fundamentals down? No strike zone judgement, no speed, and no glove? What the hell is going on in our system?

Let me ask a clearer question: When does this failure get fixed? When do we bring in somebody who knows how to put together a minor league system. Because whoever is running the system for the Giants absolutely and unequivocally does not?

No veteran minor leaguers who can hit .250 and catch it at any positions?! A handful of young players who show any promise at all, (aside from the apparently talented Mr. Brown, which begs the question, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!

Honestly, this is a travesty.

UPDATE: Jim, you have a point, to a degree. “Developed” Posey? Sandoval? When 21 and 22-year olds make the majors and excel, there’s not very much development going on. It’s more a point of being lucky or, at best, prescient in the draft. At worst, it’s finding a needle in a haystack. If the Giants had a record of developing young hitters, I’d be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no such track record. Two real hitters in 20 years is disgraceful, a failure of such immense proportion as to be almost unimaginably bad.

Without looking, I’d bet the Royals have had better results than that. The Mariners. For that matter, even you want to give them that they have focused on developing pitchers to use as trade bait to get hitters, the results doing that, basically since the Kent and Burks deals, have been flat-out abysmal. Their free agent signings have been equally preposterous. So, on every front available to a team to put out a major league offense, the Giants have failed completely.

UPDATE: He just hit his 11th and 12th home runs last night. Sheesh.

UPDATE, Part II: He’s now leading the NL in home runs and RBI. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: More hard luck as the Giants lose Pablo Sandoval for the second year in a row to a broken hamate bone in his hand. Geez. This team seems doomed to squander another year of top-flight pitching as their offense completely tanks, and key players sit and watch. Where’s Stan Conte when you need him?

…. Joaquin Arias led off the ninth against Cincinnati closer Sean Marshall (0-2) with a walk, and Ryan Theriot followed with a single. After pinch-hitter Brett Pill struck out, Pagan lofted a 1-2 pitch 386 feet into the left field seats to snap the Giants’ losing streak in Cincinnati at seven games.

Posey is fourth in the NL with a .368 batting average, Sandoval is 11th, Cabrera is 20th, and Schierholz is 23rd. The Giants are 8th in runs scored, 7th in home runs, 3rd in batting average, 7th in OBP, 5th in SLG, and 6th in OPS. Life-changing? Obviously not, but still, these numbers, albeit a small sample, are very encouraging. If the pitching can stabilize at our expected high level, we should be able to win a lot of games.

Sabean deserves some kudos for what looks like a much improved offense.

Zito heads out to Colorado to try and stop the skid. Good luck with that.

UPDATE: Guess I should be dismissive of Zito’s chances to win more often.

4-hit shutout? Unbelievable. Good for him. Good for the Giants.

UPDATE, Part II: Is something going on with Lincecum? Rob Neyer details the pitcher’s surprising decline since his Cy Young days:

…. Lincecum finished (spring training) with the Giants’ third-best strikeout-to-walk ratio, behind Bumgarner and Cain, and the Giants’ third-best home-run ratio, behind Bumgarner and Cain. Based purely on last season, we might have guessed that Lincecum actually entered this season as the Giants’ third-best starting pitcher. Based purely on this March, we might have guessed that Lincecum actually entered this season as the Giants’ third-best starting pitcher.

Also in the piece is some data stating that Lincecum’s velocity is down all the way to 90. His strikeout/walk data seems to clearly show him losing velocity and command since ’08. That worries me. I’m not panicking, but I’m worried.

I’ll have more later….

I have been saying for years now that Brian Sabean and whoever his team of analysts are, use statistically-based analysis that is rife with flaws. In fact, based on the players he goes out and gets, he has no statistically-based analysis at all. Sabean values major-league service time, which coincides with age and a lack of speed, defense and actual production. He ignores virtually all of the current statistical analysis tools, and for the most part, pays little attention to anything other than batting average. If a player has had the fortune to be on a championship team, regardless of contribution, Sabean will treat this player like a championship contributor, and by “treat him like a championship contributor,” I mean that he will pay him a lot more money than he is worth.

As for youth, if a player is young and unproven, Sabean will only play him regularly if forced to by injury. That is his strategy for handling young players in a nutshell.

The roster that the SF Giants have started the season with each of the last ten seasons is described exactly by this analysis. Loaded with players past their prime (who are paid far more than their production warrants), seasons filled with disabled list management, and an appalling lack of offense and knowledge of how to generate it.

Every time I read an article about how we can’t afford to pay for a great player like Pujols, or Fielder, or Vladimir Guerrero, or Alex Rodriguez, great, championship-caliber players in their prime, I remember the vast amounts of money thrown away on players whose production was replaceable by major-league minimum dollars, and I am dismayed. Were it not for that mismanagement, the team could easily afford to pay for the one big bat they need to change everything. Now we are three seasons into having the fortune of championship-caliber pitching. We snuck into the playoffs in ’10, and won it all on the basis of that amazing pitching. Two seasons in a row thrown away with the worst offense in all of baseball, and we are looking at adding maybe 20 runs of offense with Melky Cabrera and Angel Pagan. This, while two of the greatest first basemen of all time were there for the taking. First base, by the way, being a position in which the Giants have fielded league-worst offensive production for more than 20 years running.

Instead, once again, some other team gets better, while I read articles about how Brandon Belt needs more minor league at-bats, or how Gary Brown needs his .350/.450/.500 numbers in the minors need to be produced again before he is ready to replace all the guys who made 400 outs for us last year, while earning $4 or $6 or $10 million dollars.

I’m not telling anyone how to spend their money. But when they spend it like fools, I’m gonna write about it.

For that matter, as much as I think the world of Matt Cain, I wouldn’t want to go beyond five years for him, or any pitcher. Pitchers have such a higher risk of injury that it just doesn’t make sense to tie yourself up for so long, we’ve seen so many of those six and seven year mega-deals just destroy franchises.

One lost year later, we now hear that somehow, Bruce Bochy is gonna protect Posey from the rigors of catching by preventing him from blocking the plate.

…. It is not a hint, or a suggestion, or a plea, but a direct order: Manager Bruce Bochy has told catcher Buster Posey not to block the plate this season.

“I’ll take this out of Buster’s hands,” Bochy said after Giants pitchers and catchers, including Posey, finished their first formal workout of spring training Sunday. “As a manager, that’s my job. I certainly don’t want people to think he’s backing off on his own. It’s something we’ll work on with him this spring.”

For an organization that operates in such a diverse and complex city, these Giants sure don’t seem to have much of a clue. Even Buster thinks this is pretty much bullshit:

…. He and Bochy already discussed Bochy’s insistence that Posey stay out of harm’s way so he can stay on the field, though Posey, still suggesting that Cousins went after him, said, “I want to make it clear I wasn’t blocking the plate in the first place.”

Of course Cousins went out of his way to blow him up. That’s the way things are in baseball right now, even though there’s really no reason that baseball should allow that to continue; they do. (and don’t expect Seligula to solve this problem, he’s too busy counting his money) Until there is a rule change, runners will blow up catchers. But that’s only one way catchers get hurt. We’ve been over this. He is too good a hitter to be a catcher. Look at Joe Mauer, whose career has been completely derailed by concussions and other assorted injuries. The Twins are moving him out from behind the plate, praying that they are not too late. This is not something that might happen to Posey, it is going to happen. It’s already happening. Even if he never has a catastrophic injury again, he is at enormous risk behind the plate, every pitch.

For crying out loud, they’re already talking about him using a different helmet because of how banged up his head was getting. This is a joke of a response. He is the most valuable hitter this team has developed in probably 25 years. One of these days, he’s gonna make $10 or $15 million dollars a year. And you cannot be a catcher and not get ground down into dust.

He’s coming back from a career threatening injury, he was already having issues with his catcher’s mask; and he’s the best hitter we’ve brought up in decades! Where is the decisiveness, the leadership in this organization? He needs to be moved out from behind the plate, all other considerations be damned. Stop telling me about how great a game he calls, about how he saves the team hundreds of runs every year. None of that is true. The Yankees won four World Series with Jorge Posada behind the plate, a widely recognized poor defensive catcher, who had all kinds of problems calling games during his first four or five years. They still won those championships. He started late as a catcher, had several seasons where he caught fewer than 80 games per year, (by the way, that’s one of the reasons he was able to be effective late in his career).

Guys like Posada are outliers. Most catchers are like the Molina brothers, big, thick, tough guys, just good enough at the plate to learn how to be a catcher. Hell, Posada is like a Molina who can hit. Posey is not like a Molina.

He’s entering his third full season, and here’s where we are. He’s had problems with getting his bell rung, and he lost a season due to a horrific collision. One more significant injury, and you’re talking about him being permanently damaged goods, if he’s not there already. This is a waste of time, and a waste of resources. The Giants need to do better.