Some Blog, Huh?

by Bat Fastard

(I haven’t read this, but Bat assures me that it's up to “Almost EEEEEE!” standards, which, frankly, gives me chills and a pain in the lower intestines.—GP)

So there I am, perfectly happy, eating horseradish cheese by the brick and watching episode after episode of some crime drama on DVD ’cause I got a big crush on the blonde detective, and my computer screams at me, “You’ve got mail!” Actually, no. The mail sound is a recording of me going “EEEEEE-maaaaaaaaaaaaail!” in a loud gravelly voice, but the sentiment’s the same. And do I have the willpower to stay plopped in my beanbag chair going “Yumyumyumyummity…” as my babe walks away from the camera? Of course not. I can’t ignore a ringing phone, either. So… well, thank God for pause buttons. And rewind buttons. But I digress.

Hoping that finally I’d receive that message from the actress who plays Detective Blondie saying that she’d be glad to run away from her hubby and join me in, I dunno, Dubai, surely you can understand—granted, the way the beginning of this sentence is worded, it sounds like you’re hoping I woulda gotten the good news—my crippling disappointment combined with the desperate malaise that greets all recipients of e-mail from Gregg. (Nothing personal, Gregg. Idiot.)

“Bat,” he rants, “I need you to take over the blog. I can’t take the pace.”

“No shit,” I offer, noting that it’s been nine months since the last entry. I mean, some blog, huh?

Turns out the guy is out of work, sort of. Not that this is new—his last day in the department he’d been trying to leave for twelve years was August 31, and he’s been—get this—temping in his old department since December. Part time. What the hell has he been doing all these months? Surely the vast hordes of “Almost EEEEEE!” fans would ask the same question, if they existed.

Now, I know all about being out of work—far better, in fact, than I know about actually being employed, but that’s another story, or several—so I can sympathize, but the guy’s written, what, 75 words since the 2002 World Series, something like that. So it’s hard to figure out where the need for Ol’ Uncle Bat comes in. Still, knowing that Gregg will never read this, I feel safe in saying that his problems are of no interest to me, particularly when they arrive in the form of an e-mail I’d rather get from a particularly appealing actress, someone who I don’t even care what she’s like in real life. Just stay in character and drop trou, lady. But I digress again. Theoretically I’m supposed to be writing about the Giants—took me 400 words to get that far—so I’ll stop bitching about Gregg and start bitching about them.

No doubt you billions of faithful “Almost EEEEEE!” readers have been concerned that the Giants apparently fell off a cliff last May and ceased to exist. Rest assured that your concern was legitimate. It’s not so much that by May it was obvious the Giants wouldn’t win a postseason berth; it’s more that the team was pretty crappy all season and shouldn’t win a postseason berth.

Further, they played like an unhappy team, a largely energy-free team. Much of that, I’m sure, can be attributed to the idiocy surrounding Barry Bonds As He Cheats His Way To Immortality, or however, the Bonds-bashers would put it. However, right or wrong, I tend to place a lot more blame on Felipe Alou. In fact, I grew thoroughly weary of the notion of the Giants employing anybody named Alou in their organization (and so very few named Fastard).

For instance, I got awful sick of Moises Alou finding ridiculous ways to injure himself for significant portions of any given season. I mean, unless I’m remembering wrong, didn’t he lose an entire year in Houston during a spring-training incident involving a stationary bike? And this year we can point to him tripping over the right-field foul line in Philadelphia and losing several weeks. The man is a terrific hitter, though. He really is. Still, let him treat New York fans to his Pierzynski-like reactions every time he pops up. Supposedly he’s a really nice guy, but Moises seems very ready to retire—or so I thought, until he signed with the Mets.

As for Felipe, how can he not be a burnout case? He looked like he was just plain sick of being there, and nothing in his demeanor suggested that he really knew what to do with this team (which, granted, would hardly make him unique). And he really doesn’t seem to know how to make out a lineup—but then, lots of managers don’t. Indeed, lots of his personnel decisions are pretty squirrelly, such as “Let’s go north with Tyler Walker and Jeff Fassero, then can them both after about two weeks,” or “Let’s bat Lance Niekro eighth today and third tomorrow,” as opposed to “not at all.” In fact, as Gregg noted in his “Manager in a Box” thing in an August 2005 blog entry that “Sometimes I think that when [Alou] makes a lineup, the first two spots and the last three (not counting the pitcher) seem like a priority, and whoever’s left over goes into the three-, four-, and five-holes.” And sometimes it doesn’t make sense at all, such as Steve Finley starting games in just about every spot in the lineup.

But there’s little point in ragging on the guy anymore, no matter how earnestly, because he’s no longer the Giants’ manager. Bruce Bochy is. (Weirdly, Felipe’s back in the fold, in some “advisory” capacity. Should we Be Very Afraid?) Rumored names had included Bud Black (now the Padres’ manager), Ron Wotus, Dave Righetti, Manny Acta (now the Nationals’ manager), and Joe Girardi (the NL Manager of the year—fired after one season with the Marlins). I was mildly bummed for Wotus, if only because he’s paid his dues, but to me the most intriguing names were Bochy and Black, so I guess I can’t complain. At least it wasn’t one of those guys who gets hired and fired every couple years, like Jimy Williams or Don Baylor or Bob Boone or Larry Bowa or Gene Lamont or Buck Showalter.

Now all we have to worry about is, well, the entire roster. The mainstay, it appears, would be 63-year-old Omar Vizquel. Ray Durham’s back. Pedro Feliz, I’m sad to say, is back. Bonds, at long last, is back. Ryan Klesko is a new face. Bengie Molina is a new face. Barry Zito(!) is a new face. Rich Aurilia is a new old face. Meanwhile, evidently they really like Kevin Frandsen, but I have the feeling we’re looking at an amalgam of Mike Benjamin, Cody Ransom, and Brian Dallimore—not that Frandsen is necessarily a bad player; just that he seems like maybe an up-and-down, fill-in guy, not someone to hang your hat on. And re-signing Feliz was a priority, if you can imagine. Feliz: the anti-Moneyball player. (Well, I don’t know that it’s all his fault. Felipe never let the guy sit last year, for crying out loud. And it showed. Remember that in 2005, Alou had said that Feliz was way better if he didn’t play every day.)

The outfield is in particular disarray. First, not that this is a bad thing, the Giants didn’t offer salary arbitration to Finley, who can now resume his career as a Giants-killer elsewhere (likely with the Rockies, with whom he just signed a minor league deal, meaning he’d be one of only two guys I can think of, along with Matt Herges, who will have played for all five NL West teams). Second, there’s Randy Winn, coming off a season that’s a lot more like Randy Winn than the last couple months of 2005 were. Age aside, I think he could bounce back—not to that level, of course, but to the level that led him to be an American League All-Star. Granted, he was playing for the Devil Rays at the time, and somebody had to represent them, but still. The Giants appear to want to continue looking at Todd Linden and Jason Ellison. The former doesn’t bother me anymore—give him another year—but doesn’t the Ellison experiment seem over? The good news, though, is that they lost the bidding wars for both Gary Matthews Jr. and Juan Pierre, neither of whom floats my particular boat. Still, they went and signed Dave Roberts (who would be the second Dave Roberts in San Francisco Giants history), and if I had to choose among him, Matthews, and Pierre, I’d go with Roberts, ’cause the other guys wound up getting huge contracts. My head is still spinning. Oh, and let’s not forget that the Giants made overtures—real or token, I dunno—toward acquiring Manny Ramirez from Boston. I don’t even want to contemplate what we’d have had to give up.

Molina is supposed to be this year’s answer to the Giants’ eternal question, “Who’s gonna catch?” As always, the answer is not “Joe Mauer” or “Ivan Rodriguez” or even “Yadier Molina.” Looks like Brother Bengie is (a) old (though younger than Feliz), (b) slow, (c) declining, and (d) in every way a San Francisco Giant, so why be surprised? Sadly, Mike Matheny’s career appears to be over—and due to post-concussion syndrome, yet. The good news is that the Giants aren’t relying on Eliezer Alfonzo to become Pudge. First, he’s not gonna. Second, while he did start off like a house afire, it sure didn’t last, and by the end of the year he was actively bad—and I haven’t even mentioned his seeming inability to successfully receive a pitched baseball.

And I also haven’t even covered pitching, especially the starting rotation, which is now bereft of Jason Schmidt—who’s now a Dodger. Chrissakes. What is with these guys? If he starts spouting off about how he’d always dreamed of wearing Dodger Blue, I’ll puke everything I’ve ever eaten, then mail it to Schmidt and tell him it’s candy. But screw him—he’s gone. In his stead is Barry Zito, once a very good pitcher, now a huge, preposterously expensive question mark—one question being, “Can he throw a fastball more than 85 miles an hour?” My fear is that the answer is no. Not only that, he’s tinkering with his delivery this spring. That sure fills me with $18 million a year’s worth of confidence!

Backing him up in the rotation are, in no particular order, Matt Morris, Noah Lowry, and Matt Cain. Now, I figure Morris is exactly the pitcher he appeared to be last year: far too much yecchh, not nearly enough yum. Lowry—I have no idea what his problem was, besides some weirdo injury. I have to figure that hitters are on to his changeup. Indeed, Cy Youngs aside, I’m not sure how different he is from Zito. Cain… well, today, supposedly, he just signed a multiyear contract extension. I’m hoping this is a smart move for the Giants, ’cause I’m desperate for them to finally come up with a pitcher who’ll turn out to be great as a Giant. (And he’s a pretty big guy, considering he’s got a short-guy face.) The fifth starter seems to want to be Brad Hennessey. Or maybe Jonathan Sanchez. Or maybe Russ Ortiz, canned last year by two teams after pitching horrendously for both, but who, hopefully not on that basis, has earned essentially a tryout with the Giants. Or, hey, maybe it’s Tim Lincecum, the number-one pick of whom the Giants apparently think even more highly than Cain.

The bullpen is chock full of Vinnie Chulk, but also guys like Jack Taschner and Scott Munter, both of whom were outstanding in 2005 and rancid in 2006. Alongside them are Billy Sadler and Patrick Misch (which sounds more like a sexual position than a ballplayer), very young dudes who got a look toward the end of last year. (In particular, Sadler, I daresay, still has whiplash and a perforated eardrum from watching, and hearing, batted baseballs fly long distances.) Kevin Correia and Brian Wilson more or less round out the Young Bullpen Righty contingent, with Wilson being looked at as a potential closer, which only scares me quite a bit. Oh, plus there’s Merkin Valdez, who really needs to come up with a nickname, like “M-Dog” or “Poot” or something. He’s the guy we got in the Ortiz trade after 2002, along with… Damian Moss! Hahahahaha! Remember that guy? A worse Giants pitcher is hard to remember! So it goes without saying that he’s a nonroster invitee this spring. Know who else is? Tyler Walker. I swear.

But all that said, I actually see some potential for some pitching gooditude—not excellence, mind you. Aside from “Now he’s a Giant,” which you can use as a disclaimer for any player, in terms of potential success, I see no reason Zito can’t kick ass. I’m still big, ish, on Lowry, and very hopeful about Cain. Hennessey did great—right up till they started counting on him—and Sanchez has looked nasty. Seems to me like there are lots of reasonably good parts in the bullpen… which brings us to our closer: Armando Benitez. This dude is going to get booed every time out, at least until he saves five straight with minimal heart stoppage. EEEEEE! veteran Richard Booroojian has dubbed him “BFI II,” with “BFI” standing for “Big Fat Idiot.” (It should go without saying that the original BFI was Livan Hernandez, so I won’t mention it.) Me, I’m hoping Benitez will make us forget all about his new appellation. I fear, however, that he’ll do so after the Giants release him and he catches on with some team that’ll win the World Series.

Okay, now I haven’t touched on everybody in orange and black, and I’m not going to. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of tears in Scottsdale over that. But as we get ready for tomorrow, the first game of the exhibition season, when baseball isn’t yet about coronary concerns, here’s my question:

What is this team?

If He’s So Smart, Why’s He So Dumb?

Seldom does a sprinter dive toward the finish line. You know that. I know it. The Giants broadcasters know it. Why doesn’t the Giants shortstop?

I would estimate, very roughly, that Omar Vizquel loses about a hit a week due to a headfirst slide into first base, thus slowing him down. See, sliding causes friction; friction reduces speed. A fine example, besides Omar Vizquel, would be the brakes on your car or bike. If your brakes make you go faster, get help now; if they slow you down, they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. In other words, friction produces a braking action.

And that’s why ballplayers slide. It’s not to make them faster, it’s to keep their momentum from sending them past the base they want to stop at. Believe me, I know this one well.

When I was in high school, the planets apparently aligned perfectly one day, thus decreeing that I would actually get into a baseball game on my Frosh-Soph team. See, I rarely got to participate, even in practice. Sure, I carried the bats and shagged fly balls in BP—and often I didn’t even get BP—but mostly my job was to do things like be a baserunner for other people’s infield drills. (And don’t even get me started about my function as scorekeeper.) Despite my presence at all the practices and games (except for the one on Opening Day 1975, when I chose to stay home and score the Giants game instead), I was out of practice. Indeed, I played so little and was so discouraged by the situation—and by my coach, who apparently was trying to teach me a lesson of some sort—that when I did play, I sometimes panicked. God knows I did that in other sports, especially basketball—“chicken with its head cut off” was how my father once aptly described my approach to the game—but once I got out of Little League and started to perform poorly, and thus played less and less, I began to feel as though all eyes were on me, waiting for the next screwup. So when my high school coach actually put me into a game, I found myself wondering why—even after I reached the point where I was playing well again, thus enabling the return of a modicum of confidence.

And when Frosh-Soph practice started, I was playing about as well as I ever had, both on offense and defense. In fact, I was hitting like crazy. Also, I’d only started playing center field the previous spring, I loved it, and I felt like a center fielder—a pretty good one.

Naturally, that was the cue for the coach to keep me off the field almost entirely. But one day late in the season, I was instructed to go out to center field in about the fourth or fifth inning of a game. (I can’t remember, but I’ll assume we were losing big at the time.) By then the confidence I’d regained was gone, as was any hope that the coach hadn’t been lying when, just before the season started, he told me I’d be playing plenty.

My day began with a high fly ball. I took a step in, went “Uh-oh” as the ball flew merrily over my head, and wound up chasing it for what seemed like hours. I’m not even sure I held the batter to four bases.

Later—and here’s the part that relates to the stuff about Vizquel and friction—I stood on first base after walking. For no reason I can think of, I was given a steal sign. So I took off. I beat the throw by plenty, but the doubts kicked in, and I wasn’t even sure I could still slide right. I’m assuming, anyway, that this is why I didn’t slide. Or perhaps it had been too long since my last on-field screwup. In any case, I stole second standing up—until my momentum carried me off the bag, whereupon I was tagged a split second before I got back. The umpire called me out. I disputed his assertion that I’d come off the bag, of course, but to no avail. Of course. Perhaps because embarrassment was foremost on my mind, it didn’t even occur to me grief from the coach about not sliding. And when he did, and asked me why I failed to slide, I just said “I dunno.”

Ask me if I stayed in the game after that. Go ahead. Ask.

My point, though, is not to tell the sad story of my baseball career. My point is that I’m living proof that you slide to slow yourself down—and, certainly, to avoid being tagged, which rarely is an issue at first base, Omar. The only way sliding is gonna speed you up is perhaps if you’re playing baseball on ice. And the only reason to slide head first is to avoid a tag.

Jeff Kent used to dive into first when he was with the Giants. (Now that he’s a Dodger, who cares if he still does it?) That used to drive me bats, but I’d think, “Aw, Kent doesn’t seem like the sharpest bulb in the elevator, so maybe I should expect something like that from him.” But Omar Vizquel? Omar “4-6-5” Vizquel?

Maybe my estimate of a hit per week is too high, but in case it’s not, we’re talking about the difference between a season batting average of, say, .290 and .333 (or, if you prefer OBP, it’d be, say, .360 instead of .400).

What makes him do it? A league-mandated condition of his joining the Giants? No other reason makes sense.

Four Left, One Right, One I Didn’t See…

So it took Barry Bonds weeks to hit his first home run of the season, during which time he wasn’t getting a whole lot of other hits, either. Since then he’s hit four more, and it’s already May 8. Certain (that is to say “cretin”) fans and members of the sports media would have you believe that this is prime evidence that he’s through. I’d say it’s prime evidence that his bat had cooled off considerably since the exhibition season (like other Giants I won’t name), but hey, I’m just one fan, and not even a sports media guy, so what do I know?

There’s no doubt that he hasn’t looked all that good at the plate. His swing has looked better lately, but mostly he’s been all upper-body, which isn’t his style at all. And now he’s up to 713, and you know what that means? It means that the boos have to be louder and the signs more vicious, by law, because he’s a no-good lyin’ cheatin’ nose-pickin’ earwig-rapin’ peckerhead. In Philadelphia, some thought-bereft radio “personality” exhorted his listeners—the amazing thing is that people like this have listeners—more or less to buy tickets for the Giants-Phillies series this past weekend, then to ankle the games en masse when Bonds strode to the plate. Boy, that’s teachin’ The Big Fella, innit?

Brian Murphy of KNBR, a sportswriter-turned-radio-personality, said today that while he doesn’t support Bonds’ apparent cheating—that is, cheating by extension of the evidence that Bonds received steroids, as well as the hearsay (not “weak” evidence—just hearsay, as in “as credible as it may be, it’s still not direct,” which, incidentally, doesn’t make the evidence “bad” or anything) that he actually used performance-enhancing drugs, according to The Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams—he does find it awfully weak to hold up Bonds as an icon of dishonesty in an era where so many others have “cheated” by using performance-enhancing drugs. In other words, if you’re gonna rip Bonds, rip ’em all.

To the extent that multiple wrongs make a right, I agree, and I want to see anybody who’s ever experienced a sudden increase in power numbers be booed and have syringes thrown at them. In fact, I don’t actually want to see that. I want to see it all stop. You’ve made your feelings known about Barry Bonds, people. Move on.

Here’s the main issue, one that I have gone on about, at length, not only in EEEEEE! and its subsidiaries but also the Giants Usenet newsgroup, alt.sports.baseball.sf-giants: The hatred, the object-throwing, the booing, the screaming, the foul-crying, the banners, the proposed boycotts, the hand-wringing, the howls for exclusion, these things aren’t about cheating, honesty, integrity, fairness, level playing fields, hallowed records, Our Young People, or anything else except “I DON’T LIKE BARRY BONDS.” Simple dimple. Why the persistent bashers won’t cop to this is beyond me.

No it isn’t. They won’t come right out and admit that they dislike Bonds for no particular reason because they know it would make them sound stupid. But you know what? At least it’d be honest: “He just rubs me the wrong way”—I could respect that. Instead, it’s the lone kernel of truth and honesty for so many of these folks—and if you want evidence, just Google “Barry Bonds” in “Groups,” and set aside several hours to read it—in a morass of pontification about those things I said above that this whole thing isn’t about. Who knows if this is true—maybe it’s in Game of Shadows, which I haven’t read but wouldn’t mind doing so if someone wanted to send it to me for free, my disposable income being roughly on par with the percentage of the Martian atmosphere that’s breathable by humans—but prime evidence, as far as I’m concerned, is the anecdote wherein some IRS guy says, “I hear Bonds is an asshole. Let’s get him!” Again, I don’t know if it’s true, but frankly, I have no doubt it is.

What’s really annoying me these days about the Bad Bonds thing is the outcry over his assault on certain records, records that are considered hallowed. Really: hallowed records of baseball achievements. Hallowed. It moggles the bind, it does. And, hell, on some emotional level I hallow them as much as anyone else, I guess, but I also recognize that they are naught but records, and records, like rules and broncos, are made to be broken.

The records of which I speak are the home run records, both for a single season and for a career. Bonds already holds the single-season record, having eclipsed the record set three years before: Bonds hit 73 in 2001, Mark McGwire hit 70 in 1998. When McGwire—and Sammy Sosa—were chasing Roger Maris’ all-time record of 61 that year, that record wasn’t being very “hallowed,” now, was it? And when McGwire passed Maris, he got a huge ovation—well deserved in that 62 is a hell of a lot of dingers—and all kinds of publicity and fawning and everything else. When Bonds passed McGwire, it was acknowledged as something of an achievement, but it didn’t blow anybody away because the record had been set so recently. Also because the guy setting it was Bonds, who was already suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs.

But it probably wouldn’t have been all that much of an issue if Bonds hadn’t hit his last couple hundred home runs so quickly, because now he’s chasing the all-time career record. And that record, I would like to emphasize, is held by Hank Aaron.

“Duh!” you cry, possibly even in this context. “Everybody knows that Aaron holds the career record.” The hell they do. People still think Babe Ruth holds it. Oh, I realize that we all know rationally that Aaron broke the career record 32 years ago, and that he ended up hitting 41 more home runs than The Babe. But in our hearts, it’s Ruth who still holds both records; it’s Ruth who changed the game, made it pretty much what it is today by realizing that if you have a couple guys on base, you’ll score them a hell of a lot more quickly if you smash one out of the yard than if you bleedin’ bunt. What he did as a player is still amazing; Ruth is indeed one of the most important figures in baseball history, if not the most important, and all that other stuff is true—except the bit about him still holding those records.

But he’s the reason they’re still “hallowed.” No other reason. Sheez, Aaron got death threats when he was chasing Ruth. Granted, most if not all of them were about an African-American ballplayer breaking records held by a white one, but what if it hadn’t been Aaron? What if it had been a white player? I mean, if Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and, especially, Ted Williams hadn’t lost so much career time to injuries or military service, almost certainly one of them would have broken Ruth’s records—at least the career record. And would any of them have received death threats? Eh, probably not—even Williams—because “at least the new record holder would be white.” But with guys like Ford Frick around at the time, the new white record holders still wouldn’t have received the acknowledgment they’d deserve, and the ghost of Ruth still would have hung high over the rest of them. But you can still bet your bottom dollar that a great many folks wouldn’t have wanted to see those records broken, period, because they were held by the most lovable, charismatic, talented, simply the greatest figure in baseball history, the one for whom people laugh off the many overindulgences for which he was famous, and even the ones for which he wasn’t so famous.

Major League Baseball has stated that if and when Bonds passes Ruth—and he’s two home runs away from doing so—there will be no particular celebration. I have no problem with that—Ruth is not the record holder (except for “most home runs by a lefthanded batter,” which is still pretty awesome)—why fete someone for moving into second place? (Ask the Giants of the ’60s about that.) Many, in and out of the sports media, believe that this has to do with Bonds being African American; others are certain that it’s because of the steroid use that apparently is so painstakingly documented in Game of Shadows. Frankly, I think it’s about him being Bonds. Nothing else. I believe Major League Baseball would have made a point of honoring McGwire, or even Sosa (who would’ve gotten horrible threats for being not only dark-skinned but not even American; who needs records if you have to put up with nonsense like that? Oh, incidentally, Bonds did receive death threats in 2001).

I have tremendous respect for Ruth’s accomplishments. When we think of him, I imagine most people think “Fatty Boombalatti” (thanks in part to John Goodman), a Right Jolly Old Elf keeping promises to hospitalized kids. But however huge and out of shape the man may have gotten, he may well have had the most actual baseball talent in the history of everything ever. To put it simply, he dominated baseball for a good long time.

So his records weren’t just numbers, they were “hallowed” entities, almost. But what I wonder is, why wasn’t Maris’ 61 hallowed? Because he wasn’t Mantle, or because he wasn’t The Bambino? Is Aaron’s 755 really hallowed? It’s acknowledged as the product of talent and longevity, especially noteworthy because he’s never really been thought of as a slugger per se—that is, there was quite a bit more to his game than home runs. (Ditto Ruth, but hey.) To me it feels like Aaron’s record is way less about Aaron than about Having Passed The Babe—meaning that The Babe is still revered, but (possibly because he seemingly went about his business and “quietly” put up a brilliant career) Aaron is, by comparison, incidental.

Bonds is leading the latest assault, and at this moment he’s 42 behind Aaron. It seems almost a given that he won’t reach Aaron now that he’s lost virtually an entire season to his knee injuries and that he’s nearly 42 years old. Oh, plus he’s through—remember that part? And with him about to pass Ruth, well, there’s plenty of resentment about that. I think Bonds won’t quit until he physically cannot play baseball anymore, and he’s not at that point yet. He’s in pain all the time, because of which he can barely overtake stationary objects when he runs, but things heal. I don’t expect him to reach 100 percent—hasn’t it already been years since he was at 100 percent?—but I do figure on him to end this season with Aaron in sight, so much so that to retire at that point would seem crazy. Not that Bonds never seems crazy.

I want Bonds to break Aaron’s record, mostly because he’s a Giant, and it’s already pretty cool to have a Giant be the all-time single-season leader, which you’d think wouldn’t last long. I appreciate the work he obviously puts in to just being a baseball player, and I remember the great all-around player he was, as opposed to the astounding all-around hitter he is now. And as I’ve said in EEEEEE!, I don’t care about the performance-enhancing drugs. Assuming he used, we’ll never know what direction his career would’ve taken if he hadn’t. For all we know, he could have 800 by now. The point is, sure, maybe these performance enhancers enhance performance significantly—but you still have to go out there and do it. I could start pounding these drugs into my body, and there’s no way I would hit 756, 73, or even one home run in the major leagues. First, I’d have to actually be in the major leagues, which is a separate but nonetheless significant issue. Second, well, to be perfectly honest, there’s nothing in my life that I do nearly as well as Barry Bonds hits, and I don’t know anybody who can reasonably say that they are as good at what they do as Bonds is at what he does. Just taking the drugs cannot and will not turn someone into Barry Bonds. And I appreciate what he’s done on the field, and I feel very fortunate for having been able to follow him closely for so many years.

I neither like nor dislike Barry Bonds. I don’t know him and have never met him, and that will remain true unless we both become involved in, say, a traffic accident, which I easily could do without. I just find it appalling and so deeply, profoundly stupid that this man has been made the subject of scorn and vilification of the type you’d normally reserve for, say, Osama bin Laden. The difference is that with bin Laden, at least people have a good reason to hate him.

Of Beans and Drills and Four-Six-Fives, of Cabbages and Kings

Well, that certainly was a series, wasn’t it? Neither team scored, yet somehow the Giants won two of three. But that’s not the remarkable part. The remarkable part came in Sunday’s game: the routine 4-6-3 double play that wasn’t. Instead of throwing on to first, Omar Vizquel threw to Pedro Feliz at third, catching the runner rounding the bag.

Have you seen a more creative shortstop on a daily basis? I haven’t. Maybe Ozzie Smith was—I don’t know; I didn’t watch him every day (and I didn’t like him much anyway, for my own irrational reasons, which I at least acknowledge as irrational, Bonds-bashers! But I digress)—but we Giants fans now get to watch Vizquel throw from a full-on sitting position, or hacky-sack the ball toward first, or do the Three Stooges thing where you wobble your hand in front of the baserunner’s eyes and go “Woob woob woob woob woob!”

I cannot remember ever having seen a 4-6-5 double play, and yet, stunningly, Feliz seemed to have been expecting the throw, which tells me this is a play the Giants have worked on at some point. (Well, what really amazed me was that Feliz didn’t freak or brain-lock.) So does Vizquel practice throws to first while sitting in the dirt? The closest I could imagine would be throwing stuff at the TV from one’s living-room floor, but maybe Vizquel really does practice all those absurd (yet ultimately effective) moves.

The other remarkable bit in Sunday’s game started with Brad Hennessey (called up to make the start in the injured Noah Lowry’s stead, with Jeremy Accardo drawing the short straw bearing the legend “Fresno”) drilling Jeff Kent in the helmet with what Mike Krukow says was a sinker. First, it’s never pretty when a ballplayer gets hit in the head. No doubt many of you remember Goose Gossage banking a 97-mph fastball off Ron Cey’s helmet in the 1981 World Series: Cey went down like he’d been shot, and I seem to remember him not moving for a long time. I also remember a Salinas Packers (or maybe Angels) game in the mid-1970’s in which infielder Darrell Darrow took a fastball to his helmet and, like, never moved again. The impact was awfully loud and seemed to involve a weird sort of cracking noise. I’m guessing Darrow was never the same again; last thing I remember about his baseball career, he was trying to make it as a pitcher. And I’m not sure I blame him.

Dodger or not, I sure hope Kent doesn’t suffer a fate similar to that of Tony Conigliaro, Paul Blair, Dickie Thon, or the other players you could name whose careers were “negatively affected” by beanings. Something tells me Kent will make a full recovery, though, despite his worryingly long doze near the plate yesterday. He’s the kind of guy about whom you’d say, “Aw, he’ll be fine—it only hit him in the head.” In fact, he’d probably say it. But did Hennessey mean to hit him? I can’t see how. This was a 2-0 game, and it looked like the pitch just got away. If it weren’t Giants vs. Dodgers, I suspect everybody’d guess the same thing.

So if it weren’t Giants vs. Dodgers, would Dodger reliever Tim Hamulak have plunked Barry Bonds on the elbow armor? Debatable, depending on whether it was deliberate to begin with. Hamulak was ejected immediately, but I was surprised. Circumstances sure made it seem deliberate, but, again, it was a stupid time to drill somebody. However, it looked like a “You hit Our Guy, we hit Your Guy” situation. Hamulak didn’t seem too bummed about being ejected, suggesting deliberation on his part, but Bonds—according to Krukow—didn’t feel that Hamulak meant it. And Hamulak, you have to hope, is not stupid enough to say otherwise. Either way, anybody who wonders about Bonds’ elbow-protective equipment need wonder no more: We saw why it’s there.

Not So Much “Wet and Wild” as “Brown and Bubbly,” and Not the Good Kind

The Giants had a terrific series against the Braves, taking three out of four in San Francisco, including a come-from-behind win courtesy of Lance Niekro’s game-tying home run and Randy Winn’s bloop single in the bottom of the ninth. It therefore should go without saying that the game I attended was the one they lost.

That would be Friday, April 7. Not only did the Giants lose, they lost ugly. Matt Cain started out looking fairly sharp and nasty, but he was through by the fourth—unfortunate, given that he stayed in quite a bit longer. The bullpen then went out there and gagged, by the end of which a 6-4 Giants lead was turned into a 14-6 Giants loss. Tyler Walker lived up to his surname, walking thousands and thousands of batters before Jack Taschner came in and did the same (though, to be fair, Taschner also hit a guy on the foot). Jeremy Accardo then poured a little more gas on the fire before putting it out by peeing on it. Or something. I mean, these guys looked genuinely awful. Awful. Awful.

The only thing worse was the weather. I had called KNBR that afternoon to see if the game would be played. They said it would, primarily because the Giants wanted to get as many butts in the seats as possible, preferably butts purchasing hotdogs and beer.

My son, who had been looking forward to the trip to the Giants’ home, whatever it’s called these days, was beside himself at the thought that the game might be canceled. See, he likes the idea of going to baseball games, eating ballpark food, getting souvenirs, and exploring all the cool stuff at the yard. He likes it a hell of a lot more than he likes actually watching baseball, however.

The train dropped us off much earlier than I had anticipated, given the weather and all, so we strolled around for a while, ultimately ending up by the archways in order to avoid the rain. There we saw many shiny puddles in the outfield, plus a mostly flooded warning track, which led me to inform my son that he could kiss goodbye the notion of seeing Barry Bonds that night. Indeed, the only glimpse we got of the man was when he grabbed a bat just before Moises Alou’s pinch-hit, two-run homer that gave the Giants the lead. Clearly he would’ve hit if the game had stayed close, but thanks to the pen, Bonds sat all night. Bleah.

We attended the game courtesy of a cousin I had not seen since my age was somewhere in single digits. I shall not name him, lest you track him down and make fun of him for being related to me, but he and his wife are not only a delightful couple, they’re also huge Giants fans with season tickets, of which they sometimes have spares, hence our trip to The City.

Of course, the ballpark adventure was nothing compared to the adventure my son and I undertook upon exiting the home-bound train after foolishly listening to the conductor tell us to “detrain” because of a car on the tracks. Little did we know that this was the last train of the night—well, early morning. So there we were in San Mateo at 2 a.m., walking down El Camino, hoping for a lift before we actually walked all the way home and died from the effort. But that’s another story, as is the one about the drunk on the train who apparently wanted to fight me for a seat.

It’s Already Ugly

The 2006 Giants looked a lot like the 2005 Giants on Opening Day. Naturally they chose to get hurt by my least favorite Padre, Khalil Green, and my new, second-least favorite Padre, Mike Piazza—so categorized because they habitually kill the Giants. Piazza would be a great hitter no matter what, but I’m convinced Green would be Cody Ransom if the San Francisco Giants did not exist.

Last night’s contest went much better, though, because it was rained out. In San Diego. Yes. I gather it was the first rainout there in eight years. And the Giants looked great!

Meanwhile, virtually everybody but me believes that absolutely no meaning can be attached to spring training games. Even baseball insiders say that, including A’s GM Billy Beane on a recent interview on KNBR. And while the results of the games themselves are meaningless in a practical sense, I think it’s awfully shortsighted to dismiss them out of hand. For instance, in 1997, I think it was, the Giants beat the A’s in a Bay Bridge Series contest on ninth- or extra-inning home runs by Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent. I commented on the Giants newsgroup that I thought this was a good sign. A couple of posters attempted to shout me down, on the order of “What a bozo, getting all excited about a meaningless exhibition game!” But that’s not what it was about.

See, here we were, just a day or two shy of Opening Day, with all team rosters all but set. In other words, the Giants and A’s of that night were the Giants and A’s we were going to be seeing for the foreseeable future. And I thought the Giants showed some unexpected character that night. (Well, I didn’t expect it, anyway.)

Since then, I’ve paid, well, not strict attention, but a bit more than passing attention to the exhibition results. Now, I think it is fair to say that on the whole, a team’s won-lost record in the exhibition season is worthless, but if you have, say, two teams go 16-16, with Team A winning 12 of their first 16 games and Team B winning 12 of their last 16, doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t that tell you, for instance, that Team A was winning at a time when the regulars were getting an at-bat or two per game, long looks were being given to guys with uniform numbers in the high 70’s, and shorter looks were being given to guys brought up from the minor league camp due to the need for warm bodies? Doesn’t it also tell you that once Team B was pretty close to being set (and thus so were the team’s opponents), certain comfort zones were reached, and that Team B—again, going 12-4 “down the stretch”—might be showing us that they’re pretty good, and that by the same token, Team A (4-12 during that period) might well have some problems? It does to me—maybe not with a hundred percent certainty, but still, meaning can be derived.

In 1997 (or whenever the aforementioned game took place), the Giants looked a lot like Team B. In 2006 they look a lot like Team A. And once the bell rang, they played a lot like Team A, in their one and only game to date. And hey, every loss in April is a game you gotta win in September, right? (Thanks to Robert S., who pointed out that I’d initially said “2007,” thus, he said, going out on a limb.)

But that’s not really what bothers me. For one thing, Armando Benitez started the season on the shelf, and apparently it’s a different physical problem from his horrendous leg thing that kept him out most of last year. For another, geez, this team’s awfully soft at first and third base, don’t you think? Lots of you will say no, and I sure hope you prove me right. I don’t anticipate that happening, though.

Lance Niekro seems likable enough, but just not good enough. He’s not very selective up there (though I know he went to great trouble to work on that in spring training), and last year he was abysmal against righthanded pitching—i.e., in most of his at-bats. Against lefties he was pretty much what we always wanted J.T. Snow to be, but that’s not good enough unless (a) you figure on Niekers to be a platoon player, (b) his platoon partner has opposite platoon splits, and (c) you wind up with the reincarnation of 1978’s “McIvie” platoon of Willie McCovey and Mike Ivie. As it is, your backup first basemen are Mark Sweeney, Pedro Feliz, Todd Greene, and Jose Vizcaino.

Of these, Sweeney no doubt is the one who’ll get most of the swings when Niekro sits, and well he should. He’s one of those guys people call “professional hitters,” and I’d be surprised if he hurt the club. (Surprised, that is, within the boundaries of surprise, when you’re a Giants fan, at something going horribly wrong.) When it’s not Niekro or Sweeney, I think it should be Greene. (Apparently Feliz is getting a full-time shot at third this year; more on that later.) The one that bugs me is Vizcaino. I’d really have to pore over the offseason transactions column, but I have no doubt that better, cheaper players were available after the Giants signed this guy. And when the signing was reported, apparently joy reigned at the notion that he could back up at first base.

Well, first, the only reason to pick up Vizcaino at this stage is to back up Omar Vizquel, which is probably bad enough. Also, though, he’d be the backup third baseman—a step down from Feliz, which in itself isn’t easy to believe. But to consider him as a backup first baseman is jut plain painful. I used to think of Vizcaino as a “slash” hitter—lots of doubles, hard line drives, etc. Sounded great to me when the Giants acquired him. (Well, great in the context of how angry I was that the Giants traded Matt Williams in order to get him for 1997.) I actually thought The Vizzer was the key acquisition in that deal. (Quiz answer: No, it was Jeff Kent.) But as a Giant, he was pretty much a slap hitter—a love-tap hitter—and he’s scarcely changed since. I’m not sure, therefore, why we’d need him and Vizquel, but that’s a shortstop thing. Why we’d want him to back up at third, I don’t know, unless the Giants are really hot to bat their third baseman eighth. But as a first baseman, Vizcaino is the antithesis of the prototype. That’s not always a bad thing, but in this case, how can it not be? It’s not like we’re watching McCovey In His Prime most days. My real concern—and maybe this is an overreaction, maybe it’s an amazingly astute observation: you make the call, as long as you agree with me—is that the fact that Vizcaino is around to play third and first suggests that his range at the middle-infield positions has dropped significantly as he has aged. If so, what possible use is there for a player like this? Meanwhile, it’s not very long ago that the Padres picked up Geoff Blum from the White Sox. Could he really have been that much worse a deal than Vizcaino?

And with Benitez (such as he is) out, who’s the closer? Could it be anyone other than Tim Worrell, inexplicably re-signed for this season? Now, Worrell wasn’t bad in that role in 2003, but the gaudiness of the save statistic boosted his stock (as it did, no doubt, for Tyler Walker last year). He got himself a nice deal in Philly after that, then was terrible last year (for reasons that I gather were personal, ergo none of my damn business) until moving on to the Diamondbacks. Either way, I don’t trust the guy a hell of a lot. Do you? And with Scott Eyre no longer available as the setup man, no doubt Worrell was going to get a lot of time in that role. Now who’s it gonna be? Anybody encouraging? To me the best sign last year was Jack Taschner, but he seemed to get lit up this spring whenever I listened to a game, and he got knocked around on Opening Day. Should he be the guy? It’s one question too many.

Of course, the A-Number-One question mark is El Fellow Biggo, Barry Bonds. As you know by now, the first book has come out detailing what an awful human being he maybe is, and folks are going, “Boy oh boy, he’s gonna get booed everywhere he plays!” Well, gee, folks, that would certainly be new, wouldn’t it? Barry getting booed? Shee, I’m surprised it took until the other day for someone to actually throw a syringe onto the field. (The only good that can come out of that is that when Dodger fans witlessly call Giants fans “battery chuckers” because of an idiotic incident in 1982, we can lay “syringe chuckers” on Padres fans. Whee.)

But don’t interpret the previous 1,500 words as panic. There is no reason to panic. Tragically, though, there are plenty of reasons to strap oneself in for a long, long season. I sure hope I’m wrong.

EEEEEE! Eats Everything!

They said it couldn’t be done! Lots of them said it shouldn’t be done! Many more predicted that it wouldn't be done! And they all had a point! But they were all wrong! As sure as I’m using a bunch of exclamation points!

Go to EEEEEEgp.com, if you dare, for the Season Postmortem—back after an eon-long hiatus:

• EEEEEE! Rolls the Dice
  
  Mostly for you long-standing gamers, but potentially fun for others.



• The Futility Series
  
  I couldn’t have done either of these first two pieces without the
  other. And maybe that's one of those “shouldn’t have” things, too.



• Barry Bonds is a Man—Yes, a Biiiiiig Man
  
  Perhaps not as big as this article, a huge wodge of stuff about the
  man and his (or not) ’roids.


* Catcher ERA: Does it Tell You Anything?

Sort of a distillation—but not a short enough one, of course --
of the discussion on the Giants newsgroup last year about CERA.

Hope you have fun with it.

Thanks.

Gregg

Wait till Next Eon

With “Gigantes” emblazoned boldly across his chest, Barry Bonds strode manfully onto the field Monday night to thunderous applause. (I bet some sportswriter somewhere wrote something almost exactly like that. Don’t want to check, though, since you asked.) And his first at-bat is an 11-pitch nailbiter that ends with Bonds launching one into the bleachers in left-center field. For a double. Which, as Mike Krukow said, was not how the script was written. Bonds, first and foremost, is a showman, and the home run had to be a foregone conclusion. Not to the second-base umpire, though, who ruled that (a) a fan had interfered with (b) a ball that would have hit the wall and bounced back into play, rather than (c) continuing over the wall for a (d) home run.

Not that it matters now, since the Giants won that game, but I’ve seen the replay I don’t know how many times, and while the consensus on the Giants newsgroup seems to be that the umpire made the correct call, I just don’t see it. It looked to me as though the ball hit the top of the wall and continued over.

Monday’s second-base ump was today’s home-plate ump, Paul Knauert. (Phil Knauert? Broderick Knauert? Hooptiously Drangle Me With Crinkly Bindlewurdles Knauert? I forget. And right now I don’t care.) And onto today’s game he imposed his eccentric point of view, specifically regarding the strike zone. Starter Matt Cain learned early on that he could pretty much forget about getting strike calls on pitches that were more than an inch off home plate’s dead center, and yet somehow he managed to last six, giving up only two runs.

Bonds pinch-hit later, taking strike three on a pitch that began shin-high, finished ankle-high, and never managed even a whifflet of the actual plate. But the Giants worked and worked. They worked my nerves. The couple of clutch hits they managed were pretty badly offset by some wretched clutch at-bats, to say nothing of some wretched clutch relief, courtesy of Armando Benitez and LaTroy Hawkins.

The Giants ended up taking two of three from the Padres, but today’s loss puts them six games back, instead of four, with 17 to play. Of course, their actual won-lost record still reeks, and the question remains: "Is this really the team we wanna see in the playoffs?" But when it comes right down to it, of course we want that. We want to see our team go all the way, even if it lost 110 games and were forced, due to injuries, to field an all-Fresno lineup in Game 7.

Won’t happen, though. This loss is pretty much the worst one all season, even counting those games Benitez gave the Dodgers. The icing on the cake today was that due to some standard overmanaging (for the sake of a pinch-runner) that cost the Giants Edgardo Alfonzo, who’d been hitting (singles), and Lance Niekro, who at least has power, the three-four-five hitters the Giants sent up in the tenth were Jason Ellison, Ray Durham, and Angel Chavez. Granted, Durham’s been psychotically great lately, still. Watching Chavez’ game-ending popup was… well, actually I didn’t watch it. I turned my head for a second, and it was over.

Who could Alou have sent up there instead? I imagine he’d say "Nobody, because we’re out of third basemen," what with Feliz having moved to first base after Niekro was pinch-run for. (Bonds had pinch-hit for Alfonzo—weird, but not necessarily a bad idea.) But when you’re a run down in the bottom of the tenth with two out, no matter how bereft of third basemen you might be, don’t you at least consider sending up someone else, especially given the importance of this game to both teams? So let’s see… I guess Alou could’ve sent up Haad—but then you may as well send up a pitcher. Knoedler? I dunno, is he better than Chavez? Besides, I have a vague memory that he’d pinch-hit at some point earlier—a memory that could be wrong. In that way it’s similar to my memory that Dan Ortmeier had been on deck as a pinch-hitter in the sixth, then came back in favor of somebody else—Knoedler?—and never got into the game. Snow? He’s hurt. Young Moises Alou? He’s hurt.

So if I’m right about Ortmeier, why not send him up there in that situation? If nothing else, you get the platoon advantage. Either way, it’s Trevor Hoffman out there, so one raw rookie’s got about as much chance as another.

But now that we mention them, what about Snow and Alou? They’ve both come up lame lately—thus robbing Felipe, for the 145th game straight, of his preferred lineup—but—again, given the importance of this game—would it have killed either one of them to give it a try? Had they, say, smoked one off the wall, would they be unable to reach first base before a throw from deep left-center? My point is that leaving Chavez in there was tantamount to saying, "Okay, guys, time to pack it in." I find this tremendously annoying, in case anyone asks.

Not only that, but does Moises Alou have a severe case of Alou Face or what?

Isn’t “Musing” Supposed To Imply a Muse at Work?

You know this is the year we’re gonna win it all, right? I say this knowing that I’m a Giants fan, ergo not optimistic by nature, but there’s some method to my madditude.

The Giants are barely in third place, having defeated the Diamondbacks last night. Yay! And they’re not far out of second place—indeed, if they somehow sweep Arizona and the Dodgers on this trip, things’ll get mighty interesting. So we should be pretty excited. I mean, the team certainly is better than it was a month ago, wouldn’t you say?

So you watch. They’ll rip through September, overtake the still-not-particularly-good Padres, and win the division—making them the first-ever division winner with a losing record. (Texas in 1994 doesn’t count. They might have turned it around, were it not for an inconvenient strike.) And, continuing to play hotter than Halle Berry in a parka in Death Valley, drinking scalding coffee and singing “We’re Havin’ a Heat Wave,” the Giants will plow through an astounded St. Louis and an unprepared Atlanta. And, of course, we’ll be delighted, our minds boggled beyond belief.

And into the World Series we shall go! It doesn’t matter who wins the AL pennant. The Giants will bury them in five games, tops! And we shall be World Champions! Yay!

At which time we Giants fans, instead of being derided for following a team that hasn’t won a World Series in 50 years, will be derided for following the only World Champion with a losing record, ever. This would almost typify being a San Francisco Giants fan. (Except for the “World Championship” part, but you know what I mean.)

Well, this certainly would be okay with me, actually—the logic here having to do with ruling in Hell.

So let’s leave this happy topic. Anyone else notice the Toyota commercials on both TV and radio lately? Tell me if there’s something just a tadlet funky about the strident, dramatic background tune:

“What shall we do with the drunken driver
“What shall we do with the drunken driver
“What shall we do with the drunken driver
“Ear-lye in the morning?”

I know it can't be just me.

Will He Be a Righthanded Atlee, a Righthanded Atlee, or Something In Between?

A post on the Giants newsgroup today said “Unlike some people here, I love the Giants, win or lose.” This drew the appropriate response, “Name one Giants fan here who doesn’t love the Giants, win or lose.” The first poster said that he doubted he could name any such Giants fan, but that the tone in the newsgroup sort of bothers him. Or words to that effect. That’s pretty standard stuff in the newsgroup, but I’d like to explore the larger concept, namely Giants fandom—which, as you know, is as large a concept as any you’re likely to find.

In the EEEEEE! 2002 Postmortem I wrote a piece about what sports and teams mean to us, titled “Why Does it Matter So Much?” This was pretty exhaustive—that is to say “long”—but didn’t adequately cover the “thick and thin” angle. And to be honest, plenty of newsgroup post, and a few e-mails, have seriously worked my nerves by taking that approach. The implication is that because I—or many of us in the newsgroup—aren’t “real” Giants fans because we dare to point out the occasional nudity of the emperor.

Well, horrors! You know? My response to today’s post was, “I love my kid, too, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t annoy me sometimes.” Am I supposed to maintain psychotically inaccurate illusions about my team? Am I supposed to believe that—win or lose—they’re just wonderful and sublime? Well, yes, I guess. The Giants will always be my team, no matter who they trot out there, and while it’s true that once you don the colors, you’re One of The Beloved, why shouldn’t I complain if you stink?

All it really comes down to is that there are different types of fans, and who’s to say that one type is somehow superior to another? And when we talk about different types of fans, we enter the realm of personality types. Some folks are optimistic by nature, and I have to say that I envy them to some extent. I can’t imagine, for instance, waking up and thinking, “This is going to be a great day!” But I wouldn’t mind feeling like that—would you?

Rather than pessimistic, I tend to think that the diametric opposite to “optimistic” is “realistic.” Now, that’s not meant to imply that I possess the gift of seeing things exactly the way they are; it’s more like this: Maybe you were excited about the debut last night of Matt Cain, whom we may as well call “Super Bowl” because of the unbelievable hype we’ve been exposed to since the Giants drafted him, and maybe this excitement manifests itself in “Well, maybe he didn’t throw a perfect game, or even win, but we’ll be riding his arm to a World Championship!” I too was excited—probably as excited as I’d been before any game this season—but my expectations were not high, nor could they be. Hey, I wanted that perfect game, too, but I realized after a while that what I really wanted was (a) a Giants victory, and (b) something approaching a “quality start” from Cain, something that would provide some solid footing, some confidence, whatever else he needs to, I dunno, be a good pitcher for the Giants. I think of that not only as a reasonable hope, but a realistic one.

Think about the last few guys we’ve seen hyped. I’m sure I’m missing some key figures here, but the guys who come to mind, in reverse chronological order, are Jesse Foppert, Jerome Williams, Mike Remlinger, and Mark Grant. Foppert and Williams, definitely, were supposed to be The Real Deal. Indeed, they both threw some good games for the Giants, especially Williams. And they both threw some bad ones, as anyone else would. These two should have been rotation stalwarts for years to come, but even after all the hype, Brian Sabean traded them. Remlinger came up and threw a shutout, then another good game, then two not-so-great ones, then returned to Triple-A… and went to Seattle in the Kevin Mitchell deal. Grant managed to fashion a reasonable major league career, but he never really panned out with the Giants—and was traded in the previous Kevin Mitchell deal.

Okay, on the one hand, this tells me that you have to give up quality to get quality, as general managers are so fond of saying. That’s okay. I mean, as consumers, we all know that, for the most part, we get what we pay for. It’s just kind of depressing to see these kids come up, sporting a “Can’t Miss” label, and then leave. Thankfully, neither Grant nor Remlinger haunted the Giants all that much (though Remlinger’s career may have come to an end only within the last couple of days), and we don’t know about Williams and Foppert yet. But whether Cain is traded or not, I kind of expect the same thing.

I don’t want the same thing. I want him to be great. I want him to make Giants fans forget about Marichal and Perry—well, older Giants fans, anyway, because the younger ones often don’t know who those guys are. I want Cain—some Giant, anyway—to win a Cy Young. I’m tired of the fact that the Giants just don’t grow great pitchers anymore. (Nor do they grow great position players anymore, but for the moment, that’s beside the point.)

I did like what I saw in Cain last night. You have to temper his wildness by bearing in mind that he had to be pumped up like a monster-truck tire. I look forward to his next couple of starts, just to see if he comes up with something that works besides a 95-mile-an-hour fastball, and maybe puts some movement on that, too. It’s a shame he lost—he wasn’t great, but he didn’t deserve to lose, especially considering that the Rockies’ second run in this 2–1 game scored on a double-play ground ball.

But you know what I want for this guy? I want him to be fun to watch. The last Giants pitcher I can remember really enjoying was—wait for it—Atlee Hammaker. Yes! In the first half of 1983, he was masterful, and, as awful as the Giants were, I looked forward to his starts. I do enjoy watching Schmidt and Lowry, but I hope Cain—or some Giants pitcher, soon—can provide that much fun again.

Tixtrade

This arrived today from one of the folks who runs Tixtrade, which launched yesterday:

”You can buy or sell Giants tickets from other Giants fans for free at www.tixtrade.com. Join in on the fun and start building feedback within the community. It's a great resource for Giants fans and will surely become a reliable place to find great tickets.“

This site enables Giants fans to buy and sell tickets to each other for free. (Well, you still have to pay for the tickets, but there aren’t any weirdo hidden transaction fees.) If I actually had money, I'd be looking to actually buy tickets, but I have given the site a good look, and I consider it a happy alternative to the usual suspects.

Felipe Alou in a Box

In his Baseball Abstract at some point during the 1980’s, Bill James introduced his “Manager in a Box” managerial assessment forms. I’ve filled one out for the current Giants manager. Sure, there are lots and lots of words there, but I do invite your comments, corrections, and criticisms.

Year of Birth: 1935
Years Managed: 1992–2001, 2003–Present
Record as a Manager: 2,179 games: 1,128-1,051, .518
(With the Giants: 448 games, 246-202, .549 through 8/23/05)

Managers for Whom He Played: Bill Rigney, Tom Sheehan, Alvin Dark, Bobby Bragan, Billy Hitchcock, Ken Silvestri, Lum Harris, John McNamara, Dick Williams, Ralph Houk, Gene Mauch, Del Crandall.

Others by Whom He Was Influenced: How should I know? He was in the Expos organization for eons, during which times those with the longest managerial stints were Mauch, Williams, and Buck Rodgers. (Williams also was Alou’s manager with the A’s.)

Characteristics as a Player: Righthanded-hitting outfielder with some pop, hardly ever walked, didn’t strike out much. His lifetime range factor and fielding percentage (for whatever those are worth) are above league averages, and he’s been described—during Giants broadcasts—as having been a very good defensive outfielder. He also played nearly 500 games at first base, and the numbers suggest that he was about average. Except for his first two years and his last, he played at least 100 games a season, and of those 100-plus years, you could call him a regular for eight of them. He stole over a hundred bases, but was successful only 61 percent of the time. His OBPs were almost always about 40 points above his batting average, suggesting, in his case, roughly 30 walks a season. Note his lifetime OBP, .328, and his highest batting average, .327 in 1966, when he lost the batting crown to his brother Matty. That year his OBP was .361—roughly Omar Vizquel territory.

WHAT HE BRINGS TO A BALL CLUB

Is he an intense manager or more of an easy-to-get-along-with type?

He seems like way less of a player’s manager than Dusty Baker. I don’t know whether he’s what you’d call a good communicator, but I get the sense that he doesn’t have that much time to waste on mere ballplayers. I could be wrong, but that’s the sense I get. Over the last two-plus seasons, there have been at least a couple of incidents where players have received bad news from a coach or the press, rather than Alou. It is said that with Montreal he had a doghouse, where naughty players go, but that hasn’t seemed real clear since he came to the Giants.

Is he more of an emotional leader of a decision maker?

Depends on what you mean. He’s an “emotional leader” in the sense of playing hunches; in this way, Dusty Baker is a piker by comparison, and I used to go on at length about how he played hunches. His demeanor usually suggests that his emotional range is firmly between 4.9 and 5.1; indeed, he rarely gets animated during arguments, and seems to give up way too soon. When he gets ejected, it’s a real surprise. Is he a decision maker? Well, he seems to pigeonhole all his pitchers very tightly, and he has no hesitation about yanking them. So in that way, yes.

Is he more of an optimist or more of a problem solver?

Well, both. Attempting to get anything out of Alex Sanchez was awfully optimistic, I’d say, but that’s just a small example. Once Armando Benitez went down, he tried a few guys in the closer role before going with Tyler Walker—and sticking with him. I really don’t see how he could have considered this a solution so much as a stopgap, especially given his choices in that role last year. Since he plays hunches to death, “optimist” seems to be the right category, doesn’t it?

His in-game decisions, however, suggest that he at least considers himself a problem solver: burn a pinch-runner or phantom pinch-hitter; play percentages till you want to strike him (“Allemande left and allemande right, stand up, sit down, fight fight fight!”). The only problem is that he often leaves himself without a safety valve of any kind—viz J.T. Snow being in desperate need of a pinch-runner in the final game of the 2003 Division Series, but with no one available to do the chore since he’d already burned some guys earlier, unnecessarily.

HOW HE USES HIS PERSONNEL

Does he favor a set lineup or a rotation system?

This guy definitely uses his whole roster. Everybody plays—it’s almost like Little League sometimes (which is something I don’t mean in a disparaging way). He understands the value of rest, especially in that his team is awfully old. He moves hitters around in the lineup, though I’m not sure there’s much rhyme or reason to it. For instance, Marquis Grissom batted leadoff, third, and eighth as a Giant (and elsewhere, but I think these examples clarify my point). When Randy Winn came aboard, Alou batted him second, behind Vizquel. Then suddenly he flip-flopped them, perhaps because Vizquel wasn’t hitting much. It probably doesn’t matter either way in this case, but it seemed as though the move was made just to make a move. Sometimes I think that when he makes a lineup, the first two spots and the last three (not counting the pitcher) seem like a priority, and whoever’s left over goes into the three-, four-, and five-holes. I suppose that sounds mean, but it might explain putting Grissom, J.T. Snow, Edgardo Alfonzo, Deivi Cruz, Lance Niekro, and Pedro Feliz in the three-hole at various times. (If Bonds were around, that would be a set lineup position: fourth; I think he should hit third.)
This year, anyway, people move in and out of the starting rotation, and the sequence has changed.

Does he like to platoon?

Even though with his pitchers he loves to play the lefty-righty-lefty-righty thing, he doesn’t really do that with his hitters. Michael Tucker doesn’t usually start against lefties, but he often does when he’s hot. And this year Niekro’s gotten a lot of starts against righties, although he and Snow seem to be a clear platoon pair, if not necessarily a good one.

Perhaps because he usually has at least 12 pitchers, he doesn’t often pinch-hit to get the platoon advantage. The other side of that coin is that many of the guys he does use as pinch-hitters are people you’d often want to pinch-hit for.

Deivi Cruz and, especially, Neifi Perez would fit those categories. (None of this, though, is nearly as heinous as the time Dusty Baker sent up Cody Ransom in place of Andres Galarraga. Once Ransom was in the game, clearly it was a bunt situation—nobody didn’t know that—and Ransom couldn’t get the job done. The point is, even with Galarraga being over 40 at the time (and he still is, by the way), happy and hitting after a bad time with the Rangers, it’s (a) pretty weird to pinch-hit for someone with his power unless it’s a lefty batter who’s just like him, and (b) really stupid to pinch-hit Ransom for anybody, let alone someone with Galarraga’s power. Sometimes it’s best to risk the double play.)

Does he try to solve his problems with proven players of with youngsters who still may have had something to learn?

With the Giants he’s done both. That might have to do more with Brian Sabean than Alou, though. This year has been a real Sabean aberration in that tons of rookies and youngsters have gotten decent chances, and, indeed, four well-liked veterans—Grissom, Kirk Rueter, Matt Herges, and Jim Brower—got the boot. What suggested to me that Alou is fond of youth was when Perez got released last year and Alou named Ransom as “the shortstop of the future.”

How many players does he make regulars who had not been regulars before, and who were they?

I’m not interested in researching Alou’s Montreal years, but with the Giants he’s made regulars out of Jason Ellison, Pedro Feliz, and Deivi Cruz in particular. (Of those, only Feliz currently plays almost every day—indeed, Ellison’s back in Fresno.) Ellison looked to be mostly a defensive replacement, but Grissom wasn’t hitting and kept getting hurt besides. Feliz has played three infield positions and two outfield positions under Alou, so desperate are the Giants to get his bat in the lineup (for reasons I don’t entirely fathom). And Cruz really was just a stopgap.

Giving the closer job to Tim Worrell, Herges, and Walker probably qualifies a mention here, too. And Noah Lowry looked as though he’d just be a Young Bullpen Lefty, but suddenly here he was, starting games and winning them. So he certainly counts.

Does he prefer to go with good offensive players or did he like the glove men?

Well, I wouldn’t say he’s had a lot of either. Bonds you play no matter what, barring, say, a devastating injury, and he’s pretty much become a liability out there. Grissom became one, too, but he played almost every day when healthy. Ray Durham, ditto. Cruz gets a lot of time at second base, but he’s not a second baseman. (Nor is he much of a shortstop, since you asked.) Ellison has a good defensive rep, but I have the feeling that’s mostly because he’s fast. So to actually answer the question above, you pretty much have to conclude that he likes hitters. On the other hand, J.T. Snow has been his first baseman, for the most part, even though he hasn’t hit much in two of Alou’s three years. And Snow is an occasional defensive replacement.

Having Mike Matheny behind the plate suggests that he at least appreciates the value of a good defensive catcher. (Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that Matheny is a good defensive catcher; some folks think otherwise. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen any particularly effective measures that would tell us how good a given catcher is on defense.) He certainly doesn’t hit much. Aside from perennial backup Yorvit Torrealba, now gone, Alou’s catchers the last two years were Benito Santiago and A.J. Pierzynski, neither of whom was in there for his glove. On the other hand, neither was anything close to a spectacular hitter—I guess they were just perceived that way.

Does he like an offense based on power, speed, or high averages?

Not high OBPs, that’s for sure. He doesn’t seem to value walks at all, as his own playing career might suggest. That’s why we’d see, for instance, Ellison in the leadoff spot. Alou seems to like high averages, given Ellison’s and Niekro’s early success and Sanchez’ immediate insertion into the lineup in the top spot. I get the sense that Alou likes speed, but the Giants rarely have any of that, and this year is no exception. Durham, for instance has sick legs now—only two—so he doesn’t steal. Ellison tried to, quite a bit, but then started getting thrown out constantly, as if he’d been aching for it. Vizquel is the closest thing this team has to a stolen-base threat, and he’s been getting thrown out a lot lately. It remains to be seen if Winn’s speed will have an impact. In any case a real “disruptor” just isn’t a priority for the Giants, and a lot of baseball analysts will tell you that stolen bases aren’t that important anyway. Speed in the outfield is, though, and with the gimpy Grissom and Moises Alou out there, not to mention Feliz, the Giants’ outfield has been cringe-making, for the most part. With Winn out there, at least, the complexion has changed somewhat.

Does he use the entire roster or did he keep people sitting on the bench?

I swear, he’d put all 25 men in the game if he could. If a guy sits for any length of time, you have to assume he’s hurt.

Does he build his bench around young players who could step into the breach if need be, or around veteran role-players who had their own functions within a game?

Alou clearly likes versatility, so that may be a higher priority than either of those criteria. However, you’d have to say he leans toward veteran role-players, such as Perez, Cruz, and even Feliz. He’s more reluctant to throw a young player such as Todd Linden into the deep end.

GAME MANAGING AND USE OF STRATEGIES

Does he go for the big-inning offense, or does he like to use the one-run strategies?

Alou sometimes, but not terribly often, bunts when he shouldn’t. (No Ransom-for-Galarraga setups here.) He’ll almost always bunt his pitcher with one out, which I’m okay with—I mean, you may as well get a guy into scoring position if you’re going to get out anyway—but on the other hand, double plays have just murdered this team this year (and, thanks in large part to Pierzynski, last year). Dusty used to bunt a lot because, I thought, he didn’t trust the ability of any of his baserunners to reach second on their own power. So there has to be a happy medium between nearly gratuitous bunting and constant double plays.

Unlike Dusty, Alou will squeeze now and again, and he likes the hit-and-run, which he’ll sometimes use in an effort to help a slumping hitter. Another thing is, the Giants don’t have a big-inning-style offense, so one-run strategies are the order of the day. Sadly, the team’s lack of speed makes that a tough row to hoe. Also, these guys do seem to make a lot of unproductive outs: lots of popups, short fly balls, and grounders to third with runners on second.

Does he pinch-hit much, and if so, when?

He doesn’t pinch-hit much for nonpitchers, at least not this year. For instance, I would have expected to see Matheny pulled for a pinch-hitter now and again, but that doesn’t happen. He’ll pinch-hit for his pitchers about as often as he should, but the “trouble” inning seems to be the bottom of the sixth or top of the seventh, depending on whether the Giants are home or not. If it’s Jason Schmidt or Lowry, let him hit if he’s not worn out. If it’s Rueter, Brad Hennessey, or Kevin Correia, you’re not going to get much more out of him, so pull him. With Brett Tomko, you never know. All too often we’ve seen Alou let a pitcher hit and then get bombed once he’s back on the mound.

Is there anything unusual about his lineup selection?

Double-play king Snow batting second leaps readily to mind. Longtime leadoff man Durham batting fifth behind Moises Alou certainly is weird. Batting Cruz anywhere above sixth is odd. Batting Niekro third makes hardly any sense at all. Feliz seems to migrate slowly between the third and seventh spots, with many stops along the way. And sometimes Alou will go with an all-righty lineup against a lefty, but not always. Also, it’s not at all unusual for Alou, when he sits a regular, to put the replacement into that player’s spot. I think we see this more with, say, the second and third spots than fourth and fifth.

Does he use the sac bunt often?

Every time a pitcher is up with less than two outs and a runner on first and/or second, and often first and third, he’ll bunt. With the position players, I don’t see it that often. Vizquel and Ellison like to bunt for hits, though, and often their failed attempts will be credited as sacrifices. Alou also will ask the wrong kind of guy to bunt—say, a Snow or an Alfonzo or a Tucker.

Does he like to use the running game?

Oh, I’m sure he’d love to if he had one. He’s tried it out with Ellison and Vizquel, mostly, to very little avail. He’ll hit-and-run more than Dusty seemed to, and certainly he’ll squeeze more often.

In what circumstances would he issue an intentional walk?

I think mostly to get the pitcher to the plate. Sometimes he uses it to load the bases and set up a devastating hit by a weaker batter. In fact, he doesn’t use the intentional walk all that much.

Does he hit and run very often?

He seems to try it about every third game. Is that often? I don’t know. He does like to stay out of the double play, and I think he’s more likely to hit-and-run than to steal or bunt.

How does he change the game?

Does he? If anything, he impacts the demographics of his roster. Currently active are 14 white players, seven Latinos, and four African Americans. (Compare this with the Latino-bereft Roger Craig years, for instance.) Of the 12 pitchers, 10 are white, but of the seven infielders (counting Feliz), only the first basemen are, with one African American and four Latinos. Alou’s outfielders tend to be African American or Latino, though this is less obvious with Grissom, Ellison, and Sanchez recently taking a hike.

There’s nothing, though, that would lead me to believe that he “changes the game.” That’s not a criticism, though.

HANDLING THE PITCHING STAFF

Does he like power pitchers, or did he prefer to go with the people who put the ball in play?

Schmidt, Tomko, and Correia throw hard; Hennessey and Lowry, not so much. Alou inherited Rueter, but obviously he liked him enough to keep him in Montreal from 1993 into ’96. Eyre throws hard, but Christiansen and Fassero don’t. Walker throws pretty hard, as do LaTroy Hawkins and Jeremy Accardo; Scott Munter doesn’t, and Benitez doesn’t throw as hard as he used to.

None of this answers the question, really, but over the years, especially during the Dusty years, the Giants didn’t strike out a lot of guys per nine innings. This year they have two closers who are power pitchers, more or less. Eyre gets strikeouts. But except maybe for Schmidt, I don’t think this team has anybody hitters are afraid to face.

I don’t know that either Alou or Sabean has a marked preference.

Does he stay with his starters, or go to the bullpen quickly?

Both. Frequently he either doesn’t stay with them long enough or he leaves them in too long. Often, when I’m watching a game, I seem to figure out when a starter is tiring before he does. I don’t know why—maybe I’m seeing something that registers subconsciously. I do know that when I think a guy is losing it, I get antsy because Alou and Dave Righetti don’t seem to be acting on it fast enough.

I don’t get a strong sense that Alou pays attention to pitch counts. If he did, he’d have known—well, this would mostly be the last two years, because this year was off-the-charts bad—to pull Rueter after about 90 pitches, without fail.

Does he use a four-man rotation?

Who does anymore?

Does he use the entire staff, or does he try to get five or six people to do most of the work?

Oh, he uses everybody. He runs his bullpen into the ground, partly because he seldom has more than one starter who can go even a full six consistently. Schmidt does, but he still throws lots of pitches.

Not that I think Walker is any kind of star, but I do think that Alou wore him out, even though the Giants haven’t had that many save situations this year. Walker, for instance, has had at least a few games in which he entered during the eighth inning, and he seems to have guys warm up often, which takes a toll. Lately, in fact, Christiansen complained in the papers about how Alou uses his bullpen. I’m not sure that’s entirely his fault, though. True, he seems reluctant to keep Correia or Hennessey out there past the sixth, but otherwise there are huge periods where you just can’t expect a starter to last much past the fifth. In other words, the starting rotation needs some kind of upgrade. At the moment, I would say that means replacing Tomko.

How long would he stay with a starting pitcher who was struggling?

Well, at what point do we determine “struggling”? In the second, when he gives up three runs on two doubles, a single, and a walk? Or in the seventh, when he walks the first two hitters? I’ll tell you this, though: He’ll stay with that closer till the sound of the Trump of Doom. He showed that with Benitez early in the year against the Dodgers, when hit after hit after hit gave them a victory that never should have happened, and he showed it with Walker on Friday, when the Cardinals turned an 0-4 deficit into a 5-4 win.

When it’s a starter giving up a quick three or four, Alou often will let him try and right the ship, at least if the pitcher is a veteran. Last year, if I remember right, he pulled Lowry a couple times with the lead during the fifth inning.

Is there anything unique about his handling of his pitchers?

I hope so. He does not tend to win those games where seven pitchers appear in the ninth inning. His constant, almost desperate attempt to gain the platoon advantage on defense drives me crazy, along with everyone else. Eyre, for instance, gets righthanded hitters out just fine... but he’ll pull him in favor of, I dunno, Brandon Puffer because there’s a righthanded hitter on deck. Some day in the distant future (I hope, for all concerned), when Alou manages in heaven, when Rafael Belliard shows up as a pinch-hitter, I fully expect Alou to pull Sandy Koufax and bring in Stephen Mintz to face him, only to see Barry Bonds come up instead. You’d think a manager would ask himself, “Which matchup would I prefer?” Sometimes Alou doesn’t seem to.

What is his strongest point as a manager?

Maybe that he has good instincts about resting position players. He’s said to be a good motivator and a good guy to play for, but that’s hard to reconcile with the idea that he often doesn’t communicate directly with his players. To me he does seem very smart and thoughtful, though. I do feel that he manages the team, not just the ballgames.

If there were no professional baseball, what would he have done with his life?

Retire early and fish nonstop.

“The Giants’ Pitchers Use Lifebuoy…”

Even with a scorecard, it’s hard to tell one player from another, but it’s become especially true of the pitchers. I said I was going to write about them soon, and I guess this isn’t all that soon, but, to be fair, I was putting it off because the entire pitching situation has been almost entirely depressing and insane. To date, we’ve seen 22 pitchers take the mound this year, of whom eight have done some DL time (and remember, we still have over a week left in August): Jeremy Accardo, Armando Benitez, Jim Brower, Jason Christiansen, Brian Cooper, Kevin Correia, Scott Eyre, Jeff Fassero, Jesse Foppert, LaTroy Hawkins, Brad Hennessey, Matt Herges, Al Levine, Noah Lowry, Scott Munter, Brandon Puffer, Kirk Rueter, Jason Schmidt, Jack Taschner, Brett Tomko, Tyler Walker, and Jerome Williams.

Of these, who hasn’t stunk? I mean on the whole; almost all of these guys have had reasonably good stretches at some point. Schmidt’s pitching well now, generally, and so is Lowry. Eyre had been doing just dandy until he got bombed in the recent Sunday game against Houston. Correia and Hennessey have had some noteworthy starts (i.e., noteworthy for being good). Munter had been doing great until, in rapid succession, he started giving up fly balls and then landed on the DL. Taschner looked good. Williams’ first start was wonderful. You could reason that Tomko and Walker haven’t been actively bad. Even Cooper hasn’t looked bad, and he’s the one you’d expect to reek. The rest of them you need to slather with Old Spice and pray.

Schmidt is probably the most worrisome. Just during the season he’s lost some speed, and the talk has been that he’ll “never be the same.” Still, his change-up has been good enough to keep hitters off balance. However, as they’ve been saying in the Giants newsgroup, you never know whether you’re going to get the Good Schmidt or the Bad Schmidt. Used to be that you’d always get the Good Schmidt, though sometimes he’d have a rough day.

Lowry came into the season without a major league loss to his name. Then he started losing like he’d been doing it all his life. His control really suffered, and the hitters weren’t buying that fabulous change-up the way they had been. Now he seems to be back on track, despite the occasional weird bout of wildness. My only question about Lowry is, what’s that thing under his eye? I thought it came from some kind of would last year, but you’d think it would’ve gone away by now.

Tomko seems to be pitching better in the latter half of the season, as he did last year, but he’s hardly a world beater. However, and maybe this is just me not remembering well enough, he seems to be throwing harder this year—certainly harder than Schmidt these days, which is sad.

Correia and Hennessey—they’re the rest of the rotation. Isn’t that weird? Remember way, way back when Rueter and Williams owned those spots, with Foppert waiting in the wings? No more. They’re dust. Anyway, Hennessey seems to be more of a “pitcher” than Correia, but that doesn’t mean he’s a better pitcher. His best has been better than Correia’s best, but his worst has been at least as bad as Correia’s. We hear Mike Krukow tell us that these guys will anchor the rotation for decades to come, but I’m not sure how forward I look to that. Indeed, if the Giants had stayed relatively healthy (and had Bonds), and if they’d actually played reasonably well, I’m sure they would have given up one or both of these guys for one or more medium-impact players.

Rueter... well, I’d like to say he was steady, and, unfortunately, I can. He was almost uniformly horrific. As has been said perhaps trillions of times over the last three or four years, he’s got no margin for error. First, he only throws about 80, and second, he cannot succeed unless his umpire gives him roughly the same treatment as Eric Gregg gave Livan Hernandez during the 1997 postseason (as opposed to what Livan did during the 2002 World Series, for which he will never be forgiven). Really, Rueter needs strikes called on pitches about eight inches outside and two below the knee. Otherwise, he’s batting practice. Granted, that’s all academic now, as the Giants designated him for assignment last week. Disturbingly, at least for him, he cleared waivers and received his release. Brian Sabean has said that he almost had a trade in the works, but I’m assuming the other GM’s laudanum wore off just in time for him to back off. Rueter’s only 34, and he doesn’t look old, but he has the air of a 20-year veteran who’s run out of tricks.

The trade of Williams to the Cubs still ticks me off. It still doesn’t make sense. I have to believe that the Giants ended up writing him off as a headcase or an attitude problem, because their decisions about him this season have bordered on the irretrievably insane. His first start of the year was terrific. Then he didn’t pitch for about 10 days, during which he got shoved into the bullpen, which apparently weirded him out. Then he got bombed in his next start. Next thing you know, he’s in Fresno, trying to Find Himself, for reasons I have yet to fathom. And there
he stayed, until the Giants packaged him with David Aardsma—a recent first-round draft pick whom the Giants thought would be the Next Big Thing—and sent him to the Cubs for LaTroy Hawkins, who, after a couple of decent-to-good years with the Twins, wore out his Chicago welcome in a hurry. I honestly think that even one of these guys was too much for Hawkins (even if Hawkins had done well), and I have the feeling that most other major league GMs could have gotten Hawkins for one of those guys, or somebody else entirely who wasn’t as good. On the other hand, I have the feeling that Aardsma’s main contribution to the game, when all is said and done, will be his spot ahead of Hank Aaron in Major League Baseball’s all-time alphabetical roster. Williams, I think, will be a stud.

Foppert, too. Randy Winn’s been badmouthed in the newsgroup somewhat, the general sense being that he’s not an “impact” player—i.e., he ain’t nothin’ special. I don’t know yet. He’s been an All-Star (because someone has to be chosen each year from Tampa Bay), and he seems to be kind of an exciting player. However, because he’s not a pitcher, I’ll focus instead on Foppert here. Seemed to me that the Giants trumpeted his praises about as much as those of Matt Cain, if not more. Clearly Foppert was going to be our next Marichal, with his devastating speed and control. His major league performances generally didn’t bear that out, but sometimes a horrifying injury will do that to a guy. I know you have to give up quality to get quality. Sometimes you even have to give up quality to get LaTroy Hawkins. But while Foppert didn’t impress me overall, I just think it was nuts to trade him. Give the guy a full season at the big-league level first, you know? Apparently it’s still generally believed that Foppert will raise a lot of eyebrows, and it grieves me that the Giants seem to be tired of pitchers like that.

You may not remember this, but a lot of folks, not just in the media (local, of course) but even a great many fans, considered it a foregone conclusion that the Giants had the division wrapped up—even without Bonds. I never understood that, mainly because they’re the Giants, for whom no form of success is a foregone conclusion, but no matter. Anyway, one of the reasons for the unaccustomed optimism was Armando Benitez, last year’s Florida closer, who was, as they say, lights out. Granted, he comes with a rotten postseason reputation, as J.T. Snow could tell you, but that kind of thing doesn’t worry me, given that you have to get to the postseason before you can worry about succeeding in it. Not that I’ve ever been crazy about Benitez, but his signing sure should’ve been a load off our minds. He took an alternative approach, though, which was to get hit very hard before that train ran over his hamstring. (Amazingly, he’s back now, after surgery wherein two tendons had to be reattached to the bone.) It strikes me that the injury had to be present, possibly weeks beforehand, but he probably figured he could play through the pain and keep getting diathermy, or whatever players get for hamstring injuries these days. But even more than his devastatingly bad performance to that point, his four-month absence hurt the Giants even worse, to the point where I’d probably rather have Felix Rodriguez back than the guys who’ve been saving games (or not) in the meantime.

Brower couldn’t do the job. Herges had already shown he couldn’t do the job last year, so at least he wasn’t much of a factor.) The Giants even brought up Accardo—and Felipe Alou threw him into a key save situation in one of his very first games (possibly his debut), and of course, Accardo failed, which made Alou look like an idiot. Eventually he settled—and in my opinion, this is settling—on Tyler Walker, whom my sister calls “Piggy” because he looks like he should be a pig farmer somewhere. I still don’t understand this decision. (In fact, I found it surprising to begin with that Walker making the club out of spring training apparently was a foregone conclusion.) I’ve said before that the Giants should have learned by now, if only from the horrendous Herges experiement, that the save statistic is gaudy and nearly meaningless, and that they need to stop letting it seduce them. But no. Assuming Walker comes back this season—he just went on the DL yesterday after being largely responsible for the Giants blowing a 4-0 lead in the ninth on Friday and losing then and there—he’ll get his twenty-some saves… and I daresay the Giants will have the nerve to be impressed. Look how well he filled in for our expensive, injured closer! Please. If you’re going to be a team’s closer, just about the only way not to get twenty-some saves is to get bombed every time out. Walker did have an amazing moment earlier, when he entered a game with the bases loaded in the ninth inning and struck out the next three Detroit hitters, the first time (at least since they began recording saves in 1969) that had ever happened. But aside from that, there hasn’t been a lot of “there” there. He sure doesn’t seem to fool a lot of guys; nor—except for three Tigers—does he overpower them. At best, his control is nothing special. And yet, when the Giants acquired LaTroy Hawkins, they made him the eighth-inning guy, not the closer.

In itself, that’s probably a good thing, as Hawkins stank as the Cubs’ closer. Supposedly he just doesn’t have the mental makeup. And after a very snappy 1-2-3 in his Giants debut, he gave up a grand slam to lose a game, and he never got any better. Then he went on the DL. Since his return, he’s been better, though not actively good. I’ll always remember this guy, though, for being just excoriated by Cubs fans upon his return to Wrigley. Even Giants fans don’t get that nasty. I kind of hoped Hawkins would take out a full-page ad in the Chicago Sun-Times consisting mostly of a huge photo of his right hand extending its middle finger. If he doesn’t feel that way even now, he’s a bigger man than I. Either way, I’m pretty sure he’s a taller one.

The guy I think has been a surprise—Krukow even has touted him as perhaps the Giants’ MVP—is Eyre. He’s been awfully stingy. This has to be his best year ever, and he’s 33. It’s well known that he suffers from ADHD, so I’m wondering if his treatment has played a large part in his success this year. I’d like to know what he thinks on the matter, because if indeed his meds, or therapy, or whatever, have helped him this significantly, he certainly has to be somewhat of an inspiration to others with ADHD. And I’m telling you, ADHD ain’t no joke.

Another surprise has been Munter, who, for all I know, may not pitch again this season. He’s a big ol’ guy, and they call him “Herman,” which is kind of funny (once or twice), but he doesn’t overpower the hitters. When healthy, at least, he just makes them hit into double plays. I imagine he has the inside track on being next year’s seventh-inning guy, on the theory that Hawkins (or Eyre) and Benitez are the top of the bill. The Giants have also gotten some pleasant appearances out of Accardo, who looks like a Frosh-Soph player and who’d been closing in Double-A before his first call-up. He throws hard and his ball moves. I’d be surprised if he made the club out of spring training next year, but I figure on seeing plenty of him, unless we trade him and, say, Munter for the next Michael Tucker.

Aside from Eyre, the principal Giants lefties have been Christiansen and Fassero, neither of whom should scare anyone except Giants fans. Though he looks at least 10 years older, Fassero’s “only” 42, and while I wouldn’t characterize him as “through,” I also wouldn’t characterize him as “effective.” (Plus he has a surprisingly high voice. I kind of expected more gravelly tones.) Like Chad Zerbe before him, Fassero has done whatever the Giants have asked—that is, he’s pitched in whatever role they’ve needed; he hasn’t succeeded whenever they’ve asked, though, and I can’t imagine he’ll be around next year. Why should he when—I suspect—Jack Taschner almost certainly can do at least as well? (Taschner’s not with the club right now. Got sent down—I mean, they had four lefthanded relievers for a while.) Meanwhile, Christiansen doesn’t strike people out, walks too many, and gives up too many ringing base hits. That’s really a shame, given how good he was when the giants acquired him in 2001. His injury and subsequent Tommy John surgery have changed his career path dramatically.

Because Walker went on the DL, Cooper came up, after being outrighted just a few days ago. I remember him having an impressive spring last year, then later coming up, getting bombed, being released, and pitching in Korea. What he’s doing back here, I’ll never know. However, he started against Roger Clemens and pitched well in the only game I’ve been able to attend this year, and he got his first major league hit, which is one more than I’ll ever get. (Actually, it wasn’t him pitching well so much as the Astros hitting poorly.) They’ve since used him a couple of relief outings, to little avail. I think he’s up here because somebody has to be.

Other guys like that have been Levine and Puffer. Levine, in particular, had a very good spring, and yet again the Giants were seduced: I don’t know if they’ll ever learn to view a good spring by a mediocre player with suspicion. He came up, got hit, got hurt, came back, got bombed, got outrighted… but at least he isn’t Puffer, whom I’d remembered—falsely, I’m sure—as an effective, hard-throwing middle-reliever with Houston. Instead, he took the mound with that weird sidearm/submarine delivery and served up batting practice a couple of times. Let us just say that a September call-up for either of these guys should, by all rights, surprise me.

Herges started out not horrible, then stopped getting people out altogether, then got traded to the Diamondbacks, who canned him within days. This wasn’t a huge surprise, given how awful he was last year. What was marginally surprising was how wretched Brower was. Talk about batting practice. The Giants simply waived him one day—I gather they didn’t want to designate him for assignment so he wouldn’t have to wait 10 days to get a job. And indeed he didn’t. He went to the Braves, did well in Leo Mazzone territory (with a 3.57 ERA), and then they designated him for assignment just now. I had guessed that he was about to be traded, probably to the Giants, but Bobby Cox has said he's trying to get him through waivers to Triple-A.

Well, I think I covered all of the Giants’ pitchers this year, which is more than I can say about the hitters. (I left out Brian Dallimore, Adam Shabala, Justin Knoedler, and Tony Torcato—there’s just not much to say there.) I keep telling myself I can’t believe how bad this team is, but now that I’ve taken a closer look at their personnel, it should be pretty evident, shouldn’t it?