A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball

“We believe in our core. We want to protect our core. But we also have a large core.”—-Bobby Evans.

Well. that pretty much tells you what is going to happen today. We will be doing nothing. As I predicted. It really wasn’t very hard to predict.

I’ll always cherish the 3 beauties in 5 seasons, but it doesn’t give the people in charge a lifetime free pass. The game has changed rather quickly and it’s up to THEM to figure this out–not just keep doing the same shit that won’t work anymore.

This isn’t that hard to figure out. We will always be able to attract FA pitchers. We need to start overpaying for free agent right handed hitting power hitters. And have entire drafts focused on this type of acquisition.

No more nonsense coming out of Evans. If he’s in over his head, get him out of there. If they game has passed Sabean and Bochy by, get rid of them too.

And stop forcing players like Belt, Crawford and Panik into this line up. Their bats don’t play here. Not compared to what other bats are doing for other teams or what other legit right handed bats are doing in left field at AT&T.

This team needs to get completely blown up but only if it’s done by management with a completely different mindset than the one that gave us 3 championships.

A reminder of how right we all were nearly THREE months ago:

A new thread to interrupt the losses. I saw Pence hit a bomb. That had to have been on a fastball, right? Or was it off one of Hill’s loopy curves? Anyway, just poppin’ a thread up for the die hards. Carry on.

I can’t believe the season has sunk so low that Matt Moore getting into the 7th inning and *only* allowing 3 ER’s is seen as a step in the right direction. Still, he walked 4. There is ZERO excuse for this guy to have a 5.74 ERA while pitching HALF HIS FREAKING GAMES at AT&T Park.

Everyone complains about how the park factors hurt the hitters but it cuts both ways and I don’t understand how our pitching has been so consistently bad this season. What would these chumps be doing if they had to pitch in Colorado? Or Arizona? Or Atlanta?

Ok, I’m out of town for a week so new thread uploading may be interrupted. But I’ll do my best to get one up every day. 🙂

Kruk said we are 6-4 against the Art Dealer’s this year? Could that be? Win or lose tonight, these are the types of series that are the only interesting ones left on the schedule. So even if we get blown out 10-0 tonight, at least we get to see the colors of orange, black and blue jostling back and forth on the screen. In a lost season, I’ll take that.

I didn’t fact check MrSprtdude’s claim at the end of the last thread, but is it possible that every hitter we have except Nunie has a lower batting average than they had in 2016? If true, that’s incredible.

fact check: That claim isn’t true. Buster, for instance, is hitting 40 points higher than he did last year. I’m not checking anymore.

Top 3 things I was wrong about this year:

1. Matt Moore. I thought he would be a solid #2. He’s been awful, one of the worst pitchers in the league.
2. Mark Melancon. No, I don’t miss Santiago Casilla, who sucks. And I didn’t think Melancon would be good for 4 years, I had strongly hoped for 2. But he was awful from the git-go. And I don’t even really know how injured he is. He pitched like a guy who needed surgery but that apparently was never considered or needed. This fucking guy had 51 saves in 2015, 47 saves last year. How do you go from THAT to being completely worthless?????
3. Sam Dyson. He’s been very good. I thought he was a head case and maybe he is, he just needed a change of scenery.

In fact, “head case” could be a theme for all 3 of the things I was wrong about this year.

What were you most wrong about when considering 2017? Feel free to list non-baseball examples. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Well, the trade season is unfolding about as predictably as we had thought. Nunie was the guy who was most likely to go and…..he gone. We got back two pitchers who I started doing some research on this morning and then I just stopped. Not interesting. One of them went to U of Florida, one of them is a 17 year old, neither will help our team in the next couple of years.

Nunie was never going to bring much and that’s about the haul I was expecting. Now things get interesting. I have long felt that Evans et al. overvalue the core guys so even if they are considering trading them they’ll never be able to put something together. But in a lost season, that’s about all that’s left to hold my interest.

Panik, Crawford, Belt, Span and Pence. Do any of them go? My guess is no.

That’s an absurd thought, right? This will only be his 7th start of the season. But still, it’s almost August. And he pitches for the worst team in the league. Maybe tonight is the night? Gonna be an uphill battle to get him to 1 win at some point this season.

I thought it was mildly amusing that Bochy got kicked out and Cain was yelling at the umpire all because they didn’t get a pitch called a strike. Um, how about not giving up multiple 3 run bombs? How many 3 run bombs have the Giants hit this year? Two? Pirates did it twice last night: In our park where it’s supposedly impossible to hit home runs.

I’m tired of hearing about park factors. I went and looked up how to calculate the wrc+. Here it is:

Now, I’m not asking anyone to explain this to me because you’d be bullshitting me if you said you could do it. But I do know this: Lonnie Chisenhall has the highest wrc+ for the Indians at 149. That’s higher than Goldschmidt, Bellinger, Stanton, Murphy and Bryant. Anyone thinking about starting a team with Big Lon over any of those 5 studs?

So we can find and manipulate any saberstat we want to try to justify why our players don’t hit at AT&T and opposing players DO hit at AT&T. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it.

Get better hitters, preferably right handed ones. That is the only thing that’s going to fix this team and it’s going to take years to accomplish that even if they started today…..

Kershaw hitting the DL is bad for baseball. We need the stars to play or the game is just worse. I want the Dodgers to lose because they choke in the post season, not because their best player gets hurt. It probably won’t effect them because they’re so far ahead and they still have plenty of time to trade for some SP help. Still, disappointing to hear he’s dealing with the back again….

Pitt in town. For fun, I tried to come up with a trade that would help both teams. I really gave a Belt for McCutchen trade a run but they have a young first baseman (Bell) and Belt is just owed too much money over the next 4 seasons (68 millon!) to ever realistically think the Pirates would do this. Maybe if we offered Crawford, too? That might do the trick but with McCutchen only signed through next season, why would the Giants do that?

So that’s the task today. See if you can come up with a fictional trade that these two teams could pull off this week. I struck out.

Slow day at The Flap…..After catching myself see myself in that video I posted earlier, I decided to find the SI pic of me at the Dave Dravecky comeback game. See if you can spot me. #where’sFlavor? hint: this one is harder than the video but pretty much center cut.

These 3 Giant icons. You know how many pics we could find of 3 fucking icons like this? Dozens. We are lucky to be fans of this historic team.

So what did everyone think of the Sandoval comments? That was a pretty long interview. When they asked him what he missed the most about SF he immediately smiled and said “fan support.” I believe that if he’s going to re-start his career it will start with that long, lost fan support he has missed for the last 3 years. He’s just one of those guys who needs it.

This is a great pic from last year’s NY Flapalooza. Two have on dark shades but it’s technically outdoors so I can live with it. 🙂 🙂 🙂

San Diego now 6 full games ahead of us–starting to feel like this just might not be our year to catch them. It was nice to see one of our random bench dudes step up and crack one out but come on, the Padres banged out 20 hits yesterday. They absolutely deserved to win.

Matty Moore (is Less) today. Brandon Grace just fired a 62 and conditions are perfect at Royal Birkdale. Golf will be far more compelling today than what’s going to happen later in the afternoon in San Francisco.

I get it, AT&T Park is not a home run hitters park. But we are particularly weak in our own park. We’ve hit 25 measly bombs in a place we are supposed to know better than anyone else. The next lowest home HR total is 40 for the Pirates.

And 25 bombs wouldn’t be the end of the world if our opposition was also having trouble with power. But other teams are not having the same problems we are with knocking the ball out of the park. Our opponents  have 39 dongs, 14 more than us. It’s entirely possible that we get doubled up, in our own place, by the end of the season.

That is embarrassing and unacceptable.

….pending a physical. Oh. Uh. That could be a HUGE problem. Can you imagine Pablo taking a physical? “Run on the treadmill? Are you loco?????”

So until he makes it through the physical this is a long way from actually happening. And I’m all for it. Ryder Jones sucks, he’s just a classic lame honky. The Donger also sucks. Gillaspie: sucks. Everyone we have sucks.

And Pablo sucks too. But he would light up the rest of this season. He’s only 30. I am absolutely a believer in guys not being able to succeed in Boston or New York for whatever reason.

Do I think he’ll recapture the Panda magic? No. Maybe he fires up some old the old eating holes in town. I give him about a 12% chance of turning back into a solid major league hitter.

And I’ll take 12% over the “less than 12” guys like Ryder Jones will offer…..

As the trade pieces start to fall around mlb, we sit and watch no one want any of our players. Maybe dumb Nunie. He might go. I keep praying Brandon Belt and his maddening inability to hit a fastball will go but I’ve accepted no one wants him either. We are stuck with basically everyone who is here, blisters and all, this is your team.

Anyway, I can’t be emotionally dragged down by any of this nonsense right now. Del Mar opens today and while I won’t be there, sadly, this is one of the great days of the year. This is the most beautiful sight in the world to me. To each his own I guess:

The great Wilco Joe sent me these 2 pics. Kid looks like a gamer. Murph looks the same as he did in ’54. How is that possible?

I’d love to know what finally prompted Baer to fess up about the sellout streak. I can picture him looking out at the vast emptiness of undisturbed seats, seeing only James and his contingent lounging across an entire section. He sighed deeply and quietly said to himself “it is time.” And up to the KNBR box he went.

Here is a picture James took about an hour before Baer made his disclosure:

Span, Nunie, Pence and The Donger combined to go 0 for 15 last night. They tried their honkiest to out-honky Matt Moore but they were to be denied. Has that lollypop he threw to first base even come down yet? Moore is King Honky and his rule is as long as it is stupid.

Mike Clevinger goes tonight. Feels like he might no hit us. Why not? We have to sprinkle a no hitter or two in there if we’re going to go full-honky on this miserable season……

Cleveland tonight. Or whoever. It doesn’t really matter. After throwing our 3 best pitchers at San Diego and losing 2 out of 3, now we get into the real meat of the honky end of this rotation: Moore, Blach and Cain. So I think we know where this series is going.

And the worst part is that nobody cares. Did it look like any of those guys gave a shit yesterday? Its become so repetitive, so predictable….they get paid the same no matter what. And the fans tonight are going to be gleefully glued to their phone screens. Seriously, why go to these games if all you’re going to do is fiddle with your phone? And god forbid they boo any of these guys. That would just be mean.

Twin responded to my email. I’m not going to repost it since I didn’t ask his permission. In summary, he isn’t watching much baseball these days, has other things going on (though it didn’t sound like it had to do with his health) and that he wishes all you guys the best.

So that’s what this season has come to. We can’t even get Twin to come back and set us straight with his honest take. He doesn’t have one to give.

When you suck, the season is looooooong. I just realized we have two and a half more months of this shit.

The two worst run differential teams in the league square off again today. We throw yet another stud pitcher at them, let’s see if we can close the gap to 4 games in the only race left that matters for us. If we can’t close the gap, can we keep it at single digits? I have accepted that at 28 games behind the LA we are probably not winning the west this year. But it would be really embarrassing to finish 10+ games behind the Padres. Right?

So we need a win today bad or else we’re closer to 10 back than 0 back. We need little mind games like this to get us through the next two and a half months…..

Still winless on the season, let’s see if the Giants can get this Bumgarner guy a win today. I am very interested to see how how he does. I could see this going any direction….

This blister thing with Cueto is frustrating. He thinks it has to do with the ball being harder or flatter seams or something. He’s probably not going to make his next start and he is completely untradeable at this point.

More and more pitchers are dealing with blister problems. MLB is probably more interested in all the home runs that are coming from their juiced balls so I don’t expect we’ll see any changes to the balls. So either Cueto has to figure out how to throw these new balls without scuffing up his finger or he’s got a big problem on his hands (fingers).

This Pablo Sandoval story at espn is unreal. He’s saying things like it’s the first time he’s ever said it. I’m not sure how he can even keep a straight face. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link:

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/18236953/pablo-sandoval-boston-red-sox-ready-start-my-baseball-career-all-again-shoulder-surgery

This is the line that had me lol’ing:

“It has not been easy to wake up every single day at 6:30 in the morning to then head to the gym and start a full day of work. But you have to have that kind of dedication if you want to achieve the goals you have set for yourself.”

Man, I’m not sure how you survived getting up at 6:30 and “working a full day”. Jackass. If I’m a Boston fan I’d look at this guy and just want to puke.

Another day of reprieve before it begins again….. It rubs the lotion on it’s skin or else it gets the hose again…..

Remember this exact time a year ago? On Sunday July 10th we peaked out at 24 games above .500. Think back and bask in the absurdity of that for a moment…..Ok done? Back to reality.

We started the second half in San Diego and that’s when the losing began. Bum shockingly lost that Friday night game 4-1. I was down in San Diego at the time but I was at the track with Diggity. I flew home Sat night and turned my phone on. Saw we had scored a run to go ahead 6-5 in the 10th and breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t going to lose 2 in a row to the worst team in the NL. And then literally before the bus dropped my ass off in the long term parking lot fucking Casilla had blown everything to shit and we lost 7-6. Even though I didn’t see it live, looking back on it, that game marked the beginning of the end of Casilla as well as our reign of success in 2016.

And now we are back in San Diego under very different circumstances. Cueto is scheduled to go. The more I think about it the more I’m kinda hoping he sticks around. Seriously, why sell low on him? If you believe his underwhelming year is due to blister problems and that he should bounce back next year, wouldn’t we want to keep him? We’re up to our necks in Chris Strattons around here, a healthy Cueto might be very useful in 2018.

“Hi, Toronto? This is Bobby Evans, I’d like to make an offer for Donaldson….no, no, no, I AM the GM, you can talk to me. How about Nunie, Gillaspie, Williamson, Parker, Strickland and The Donger….who’s The Donger? Big time South Korean secret weapon. He need food. So do we have a deal or not? ……Hello? …..Toronto?”

I woke up wondering what it would take to realistically get Donaldson and I was having trouble coming up with the right mix of players. Looking at the current roster, Strickland is the most likely reliever to get moved. His numbers this year are very good and Buster thinks he’s a douchbag. He could easily go. Nunie, too. And then Cueto. Obviously Nunie needs to prove he’s healthy and he’s really just about run out of time to do that. And Cueto is probably not going to get his hand right till he can rest it in the off season so I’m really worrying about his value at this point. He says he wants to stay but that’s probably just some shit he’s saying. Would it really be a bad thing if he got rid of the blisters and came back next year as “The 2016 JC?” I’d take that.

But back to what it would take to get Josh Donaldson. He’s arb-eligible next year and a free agent in 2019 so I don’t think it would take 2 of your best prospects to get him.

They don’t need a first baseman since Smoak has blossomed into an all star. Otherwise, I’d offer them Belt and Strickland for Donaldson. So my offer for Donaldson would be Strickland, Nunie and Arroyo.

And if they didn’t take that I really wouldn’t have a counter in place……

So, all star game tonight? Do anything for ya? I can proudly say I didn’t watch a single swing of the HR Derby. Until they do something about those juiced balls it’s just a joke.

The all star game does literally nothing for me. It’s so funny to look at other teams twitter accounts. Leading up to the end of the all star vote, teams dedicate nearly their entire twitter page to pushing fans to vote for as many of their teams players as possible. That’s actually completely irresponsible. And it’s just more propaganda pushed by the man.

You know what the HR Derby and the all star game are for? They’re for loser fan bases who don’t ever win anything and in the tiniest way they can cobble together some “knowing dude head nod” energy if one of their players get voted into the game.

I’ll take the 3 in the bank we got in 2010, 2012 and 2014 and be happy with that. Loser fan bases that haven’t won anything in 3 decades can fiddle around with the HR Derby and the all star game…….

Mercifully, the first half has ended. For us, “The No-Star Break.” Or “The All-Crap Break”. There is no stat to take comfort in. We continue to only out-pace the Phillies. San Diego has jumped 5 games ahead of us.

We have the third worst ERA tied with Atlanta at 4.68. Our hitters are last in OPS at .677. We are last in home runs by a mile, 12 behind Pittsburgh. We are mid pack in SB’s thanks to Nunie who doesn’t play baseball anymore. Without him, we’d be last.

There isn’t a single player I look forward to watching hit except The Donger. And he has been given food and it turns out…….he’s just ok.

So where do we go from here? In a buyers market that is expected to be overflowing with sellers, I’m holding about as much hope that Sabveans gets a meaningful deal done as I hope that we score 700 runs in the second half of the season. ‘Taint gonna happen.

From here on out we pay the baseball gods back for the bounty of riches and basking they bestowed on us in 2010, 2012 and 2014. The price is steep.

We are slow. We are weak. We are boring.

Try to refute any of this.

Well, I got the o/u call correct. No thanks to Matt Moore who sucks shit. Baggs noticed that the AT&T crowd seemed pretty disinterested when Moore came off the mound.That’s lame. Boo the bejesus out of him. If he doesn’t think the fans care why should he? And maybe it’s just his temperament but he sure seems like he could give or take any of this in his post game interviews.

The fans don’t care. Moore doesn’t care. What is going on here? Since when is any of this nonsense acceptable?????

I want heads to roll. I want guys getting fired. Or released. Or benched! Let’s go!!!!!!!

Matty Moore Friday. Ugh. I used to look forward to these. He’s back at home, that is suppose to help him. I’ve actually found a reason to be optimistic today: The biggest gripe we all have with him is his nibblin’ ways. And all the walks. Well, Miami takes the fewest walks in the NL. Maybe Moore nibbles his way to victory tonight. Hey, if they won’t LET HIM walk them that’s gotta be “Advantage Moore” right?

I expect tonight to be a low scoring game. The o/u of 8.5 looks out of whack to me. Bet the under and you’ll laugh all the way to the bank…….

Pitching did not go well for MadBum last night. Here’s a pic of the guy who caught the 476 foot bomb Bum gave up to someone who hit two home runs off him. In the same inning.

The more I stare at this pic the more I like this guy. Nice phone. And he is the perfect visual representation of what happened to this lost season.

This one could get ugly. A parade of big-stick wielding Tigers will make their way to the plate today against poor Ty Blach. That left field wall is gonna take a pounding–if we’re lucky. Several balls could go flying over it.

Our chances hinge on getting into that Detroit bullpen. Daniel Norris is a young guy with good stuff but he can be prodded and flustered. If we can cobble together an inning where we pound him, get him out of there, then feast on their bullpen, we might get back to our winning ways…..

That’s more hope than anything else tho.

Why do we have another day off? This is baseball season, play every goddamn day till there’s a champion.

When we do play again…..

Ripping off 5 in a row is how you get 99 losses DONE dawg. Now at 32-51 we are only two games off the Padres and much, MUCH closer to not losing a hundo. I got 99 problems and the Giants losing 100 might not be one of them.

That coffee video Snarkk posted on the last thread continues to have me doing a slow, simmering burn. You want to see a guy lose his edge? Have him start drinking coffee made with unsalted butter and freaking coconut oil that takes 20 minutes to brew. Fuck that.

I caught a great deal of heat from Pa Salon, my main man on the scene in Reno. He didn’t take too kindly to my Duffy digs in yesterday’s thread. Seeing as how he’s picking me up at the Reno airport tonight at 6:30pm I want to officially and publicly apologize for having such a flippant attitude towards our one-legged former 3rd baseman. How about this: Duffy? Man he wasn’t just all right, he was ok, too.

Better?

Matty Moore Saturday. Can’t believe how low this guy has sunk. Makes me wish we didn’t trade Duffy for him and I never gave a rip about Duffy. I guess there’s still time for him to turn it around and we have him controlled through 2019. I guess if we really had control over him Raggs could just give him a direct order to pitch better.

Belt is hot, freaking Span is hitting .300, good times are rolling along nicely for our SF Giants.