– Winston Churchill
On May 12, at
And then this happened:
After today’s 7-2 home loss to the New York Mets, which completed a sweep by the Mets, the Giants now stand at 40-50, meaning they are 17-35 since the 12th of May. Some of that has been due to some bad timing with the schedule – the Giants have had a series of long road trips after the schedule was frontloaded with homestands – but they’ve also managed to lose three of four at home to the Miami Marlins and get swept by the aforementioned Mets, a team consisting of about four guys you would actually want and 21 guys I’ve never heard of. I think the season reached an absurd new low on Monday night when the Giants lost to the Mets 4-3 in 16 innings, leaving 18 men on base (11 in extra innings) and batting 1-for-15 with runners in scoring position.
[Side note: thanks to good pal Diane over at Value Over Replacement Grit for answering my query on the absurd number of extra inning games the Mets have been playing this year. The VORG is an official Friend of The Lose, or FTL, because we wouldn’t want any FTW going on around here, and you should read Diane's blog all the time.]
On May 14, the Giants ventured to Toronto for two games at The SkyDome (and I don’t give a shit what it’s called now, it’s still the SkyDome) against the last-place Jays, and the Giants got shellacked 10-6 and 11-3 and it’s been a free fall ever since. So my first instinct here is to blame Canada for the Giants miseries. Surely this is Canada’s fault. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO OUR TEAM?!?!?!? Except I really like Canada, have many friends there, speak excellent Canadian, and appreciate the fact that our northern neighbours are both extremely mellow and secretly badass. And that was 50 games ago, so surely the Giants should’ve gotten their shit together by now.
No, it’s not Canada’s fault. As the Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE just said from across the room, upon hearing what I was writing about, “it is with heavy heart that we regret to inform you that our team sucks.”
It’s really tough to watch this happening. The Giants won the World Series in 2010 and 2012, and the 2011 team, while being offensively inept and dreadfully boring, still managed to win 86 games and be in the race most of the year. And after a great start to this season, they’ve completely gone off a cliff. This can happen sometimes to veteran teams, of course, who can seemingly get collectively old and slow all at once. The 2001 Mariners won the most games in American League history, the 2002 and 2003 teams were among the best teams in baseball history not to make the playoffs … aaand then, in 2004, they were in last. They were old, slow, couldn’t hit nor field, and a good number of their longtime vets had outlived their usefulness.
Thing is though, the Giants aren’t really that old. Many of their best players are in their mid- to late 20s. Having made a whole bunch of terrible free agent decisions in the aftermath of the Barry Bonds era, the Giants have instead been living off a steady diet of serviceable veterans on short-term contracts while developing their own young players. The bulk of this team’s core is home grown talent they’ve now been hurrying to sign to long-term deals so as not to have to deal with free agency issues at all in the future. They made it a point to keep the majority of the 2012 team intact, and with good reason – they just won the World Series, for cripesake! But suddenly, the core seems to have just completely rotted out. Something is rotten in the proverbial Denmark. (Even more rotten than in the real Denmark, which doesn’t seem possible).
OK, so what the hell is going on here?
The Giants have had an absurd number of injuries, for starters, many of them in bunches and a number of them weird. Pitcher Ryan Vogelsong was pitching a shutout when he broke his hand batting; CF and leadoff man Angel Pagan may have done the remarkable in a rare Giants win, but he also apparently injured his leg severely on what was the most exciting play of the season, and he is now basically shelved for the year. NLDS MVP Marco Scutaro was hitting .330 again – remarkable for his age – then he broke a finger so badly that it’s now bent at an angle. He’s trying to play through it, amazingly. Broken fingers, strained feet, appendicitis, cyst removals from swollen knees – you name it, this team has been a M*A*S*H unit. But bad teams always have lots of injuries. Every team has some injury issues during a season, but bad teams suffer because there isn’t enough depth of talent to play through it and be successful.
The offense has gone into a complete tailspin here of late, lacking any sort of continuity and having guys come back from injury too quickly who clearly aren’t effective. But early in the season, the offense was carrying this team – which should be a red flag, because Phone Co. Park is the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball and any good offensive stats will tend to regress. The Giants will only win if they pitch well.
And therein lies the biggest problem: the Giants CAN’T PITCH. They haven’t worth a damn all season, but were bailed out early on by a string of improbable late game heroics, as the Giants pulled off one surprising comeback after another in the late innings. The team that threw four shutouts in their last 7 postseason games of 2012 – all wins – now has one effective starter (Madison Bumgarner) and a really good LHP setup guy and closer who never get in the games because they’re losing all the time. Matt Cain, the ace, followed up giving up 7 runs in 3 innings on Friday by lasting .2 of an inning today. Tim Lincecum, who found his form in the playoffs in the bullpen, and playoff hero Barry Zito are both rarely able to get out of the 5th inning these days, which means the bullpen is constantly taxed, guys are all out of sync, and everything’s a mess. Now the defense, which was so slick in the World Series, has started to come apart. The offense is wheezing. Even manager Bruce Bochy seems to be losing his Midas touch. They're inventing new ways to screw things up.
And there aren’t any good solutions. Their minor league system is iffy, so it’s hard to make deals. Conversely, they don’t really have a lot of guys a playoff contender would want (save for RF/fan favourite/weirdo Hunter Pence, who actually referenced that Churchill quote for the media last weekend), so trying to restock through deadline day deals isn’t really going to work. They’ll have some money to spend in the offseason, as the collective $40 million their paying to Zito and Lincecum comes off the books, but the Giants aren’t big players in free agency anymore. Their m.o. in the championship years has been to add on to good rosters throughout the season
The Giants have been a source of joy for us in recent years. On Oct. 1, 2010, I lost my job, but three days later I was caring far less about that and far more about the fact that the Giants had beaten the Padres on the last day of the season to clinch the division. Watching them proceed from there to win a World Series brought a joy and happiness that was a most welcome distraction in an otherwise terrible time. “Who cares if I don’t have a job? It’s 80° out and there’s a World Series victory parade!” Watching them go through this abysmal death march of a 2-month stretch has been extremely discouraging. The city that lives and dies with this team and sells out every game has been mired in an interminable hangover without the benefits one gets from of a few stiff drinks.
But I know that you cannot win every year. Admittedly, we’re a little spoiled here at the moment – two championships in three years is pretty remarkable, especially since they’d not won one since 1954. We Giants fans were becoming perilously close to being those annoying, irritating types who gloat constantly because their team wins all the time.
That would’ve been kinda awesome if that happened, wouldn’t it?
