Gonna Have to Pay $, Not People, To Keep This Fix Going
Can’t imagine we have enough fire power to pony up for McCutchen. Unless we want to give up Ramos. The Reds are insane if they want Ramos for BillyHam. This is the problem with having exactly one blue chip trade piece. He’s the only one anyone wants….
This is why we are probably going to have to bite the bullet and pay up the compensatory picks for Cain. I’m not happy about it either but it’s not like a couple of picks are going to magically fix our shithole system.
But something has to give. Not even Booby could look at this outfield of Pence and Gorks and….? and think we are good to go out there for 2018.
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
Ehire is #1…at least he is first guy mentioned on MLBTR site column on arb signings. He and Twins re up for 1.1 mil. Um, glad he’s still around and somewhere else. I think he actually hit pretty well last season.
McC has column on pen guys and arb, centered around Gearrin and Dyson mostly. I can see pen being a lot better if everyone is healthy. Dyson was pleasant surprise…is how well he pitched sustainable?
BF, you have a great way in describing the current Giant’s system. Maybe you should be in politics.
OSF
Or others should be out of it . . . I’d vote for Flav in a New York minute.
They came in to last year with pretty much the same idea for the OF. I bet if you look at the posts from a year ago, it’s the same old song and dance.
When I was in Munich, I took a guided walking tour of “Hitler and Munich” and spent several hours in the Nazi museum. The museum is fantastic, right next to the old Nazi party HQ building, which still exists, used for other purposes, obviously. The activities and conditions leading up to the Hitler take over in Germany over the course of little less than a decade are frighteningly similar in many ways to what is going on here. A movement leader initially not taken seriously and considered by many a buffoon, racial and immigration scapegoating, nationalism run amuck, bald faced lies slowly taken for truth or discounted as just innocuous nonsense, quiet and creeping acquiescence to completely abnormal government behaviors over time, including a judiciary willing to go along. Also, the military leadership has to see something in it for them. Finally, a pliant parliament willing to ignore suspected evil due to a manufactured crisis. The big difference still, IMO, is there is a need for a cataclysmic event like a stock market meltdown and substantial employment dislocation throughout the country to tip things towards broad societal acceptance of a true authoritarian rule. Many Germans that ultimately were believers or just acquiesced to the ideology immediately found out, after the takeover, that they were, surprise, no longer needed. They were OUT, nothings. Germany in those days was as educated and cultured, even more so, than the US, and had a Constitution, too; but conditions gradually became ripe for a horrendous turn to darkness at the proper trigger point. In many ways, Drumpf has already succeeded fairly far down the road, he’s already in power with a pliant Congress. He doesn’t need to give speeches in beer halls and circulate pamphlets. He’s already in power, he tweets out his crap everyday immediately to his millions of minions, and has a TV propaganda network at his beck and call. Only the lower levels of the judiciary seem to stand in the way, plus opposition state governments. Drumpf is nowhere as shrewd as Der Fuhrer was, but a fool in power can be just as effective and dangerous through manipulation by others. The ultimate takeover and abdication of civil rights in 1933 Germany was completely legal, the problem was with who was making the laws. With the DOW in the stratosphere, ex-generals essentially running the White House, and a right wing SCOTUS, all of this definitely gives me more than a little pause…
Well said. The difference in America is I think there is a lot more resistance to Trump’s actions than in Germany. The people may be forced to rise up at some point in the not-too-distant future should we continue down this path.
I’m curious to see what happens on Jan 20th. Millions marching on Washington and all across the country.
Well if true that the Giants offered Jay Bruce $29 mill for 3 years is laughable. That is going hard after a player??? He hit 38 homers last year and they offered him less money than Spam???? Where are the Giant beat writers and how are they not laughing at Evans.
Further proves mgmt not really interested in making the team better, just want appearances of trying to make it better.
How would Lorenzo Cain on his own make us better??? Spending on a slugger has to be the primary focus and then filling in with a speedy CF at the cheaper Dyson level makes a whole lot of sense to me. But I just dont have much trust in mgmt. At least I am not spending any dollars on this 2018 joke…
God this teams gonna suck!!
100 plus losses is a guarantee!!
Man, this place has gone full fucking doomer. I guess spring will be the time for some positive vibes.
According to Brisbee, the Giants outfielders had a combined WAR of -6 last season. It’s kind of hard to be that bad; it takes real concerted effort.
BillyHam would fix that faster than 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail
Not big news:
John Shea
@JohnSheaHey
Can confirm Giants and second baseman Joe Panik have settled for $3.45 million, avoiding arbitration.
On the Turner Classic Movie channel I recently watched two well-known movies that I’d never seen before: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Summer Place. They both hold up pretty well. Today’s viewers would find them interesting views into an earlier era.
WAVF is a tour de fierce by Taylor and Burton. I’ve never bought that they were just acting out their own relationship on screen. It’s a play on film, no special effects to hide bad acting. Why only Liz got the Oscar was a shame. After watching it, You need time to decompress– or half a bottle of wine. But well worth seeing the rawness of it. Liz is so far beyond national velvet in this, Or even Giant, it’s astonishing. In my top 10 list all time…
How to succeed in the Juiced Ball Era at AT&T
Ground ball pitchers and flyball hitters
They’ll always need a CF and RF with range, Pence is now a LF
Marte, not McCutchen is the Pirate they should trade for.
Cueto for Gardner or Hicks. Or maybe an old school blockbuster trade with a chips-all-in team. Bumgarner and Belt, for Bird, Adams, and Clint Frazier.
Under no circumstances trade Ramos. Fast track him to at least AA in 2018.
You’re welcome!
The scourge of Walnut Creek returns!
SOAD!!!
Evans on KNBR:
“Our priority is to address our outfield, address our lineup. We look at the addition of Longoria as a middle-of-the-order hitter, which will help strength us and we want to keep doing that with our lineup and our outfield is really the area to do that,” Evans said. “With 160 free agents and we’re down to 128, there’s still a lot of options and we’re excited to find the right fit for us.”
You can thank Bob Fitzgerald for that. He made a couple of observations that were so stupid, you’d think he was a KNBR caller.
The first: move in the right-centerfield fence. It’s the reason why Giants can’t score runs,
No, it’s not a fence, it’s a brick wall, the signature feature of the most aesthetically pleasing ball park in MLB. Also, it helps the Giants win games, here and on the road, assuming they have the right outfielders. They need range and arms as well as the ability to contribute run production. It filters out one-dimensional free agents, which other than Cain, is all of ones this year.
The other dumb comment Fitzgerald made was saying the Giants were the worst team in baseball over the last season and a half.
Actually, in 2016, they had the 4th best second half in the NL. You think the Mets, Cardinals, Pirates had better. They made three good trades, swept the Dodgers to win a wild card slot, beat the Mets, should have played a deciding game in Wrigley Field.
The reason they were so bad last year was the decline of their outfielders (always the key to success at AT&T) and the juiced balls which hurt their flyball pitchers.
The fence talk I’m sure is flying around the front office. Don’t be surprised if they change that. SD already adjusted their field and their park is newer than ours.
The brick wall helps them win on the road? No it doesn’t. that’s crazy talk.
The Giants were 30-42 in the 2nd half of 2016. That ain’t 4th best.
Unless they install a Veeck fence, visiting teams will benefit as much as the Giants hitters.
Before the juiced balls, trading HR power for line drive hitting OFs with range helped them win on the road against three West Division rivals (SD, LA, COL) as well as MIA, NYM, PIT, OAK- hurt them at CIN, PHI, CHI.
Only the three NL division champs had better second halves in 2016. They only needed to win 30 plus the wildcard game.
I’m for moving the wall in but I give it about a 0.8% chance of happening. Baer might combust before he signed off on that.
Two years ago, I would have said no chance to them moving the walls in. Now, as we are just beginning to enter the juiced ball area, I say it’s 50/50 by next year and a damn near guarantee by 2020. My guess is Baer is getting arichitecural plans drawn up as we speak. They can move the walls in and still keep it “aesthetically pleasing” or at least that will be their mantra. I am sure Baer will figure out some way to add an upscale field club type section in right center to sell a few more corporate season ticket plans.
And by the way, I am pretty sure that brick wall is prefabricated. Moving it in thirty feet isn’t like having to rebuild the Great Wall of China.
all of the bricks on the building, inside and out, are facade–cladding, covering; they’re not structural elements. Each “brick” is probably 1 inch thick. The steel and concrete structure behind the bricks might not be easy to move. It would be easy, however, to alter the RCF fence to eliminate triples alley. Lots of potential renderings are out there. New bleacher seats would fit into the space, maybe similar to the changes in Houson when the new owners got rid of the hill and flagpole in CF.
What Wilco and Xoot said is accurate. As a former occupational safety and health manager – you NEVER use brick as a building material in earthquake prone areas.
According to B/R, Hamilton had 1.0 WAR for 2017. Let him do that for someone else, pls.
He would improve our outfield to -5 WAR!
🙂
You don’t move fences in. You move up home plate, then you add more seating if you want. Dodgers and other teams have done this. Keeps park like Dodger Stadium looking aesthetically pleasing. Giants could do the same.
San Diego and Houston recently moved the fences in. HP move at China basin would be a challenge. And club level would lose some valuable proximity.
Snarkk, I agree about the acting performances in Virginia Woolf; everyone’s great in the film. There’s never a dull moment. All the dialogue is raw and compelling.
Yep. I obviously have not seen every film made since that one. But, I doubt there are many English language films since that are filled with raw, soul-bending emotion at every turn like that one. It is really jaw-dropping astounding and exhausting, almost, to watch it. Obviously, many actresses and actors have performed it on stage, the writing is incredible. But, I dunno how many could pull it off like that on film like Liz and Dick did. For every critic of Liz Taylor who maligned her as a cream puff, pretty face actress with no chops, she is anything but in this one. I can’t imagine another film actress doing that role justice. She just annihilates and inhabits that role, a total badass. Truly the most remarkable performance of her career…
They’ll re-build Candlestick before they change the park that they won 3 WS titles in…
In this new live ball era, if the Giants aren’t going to adapt and increase power on their own team, maybe they should be thinking about moving all the fences back, not in, to keep the other teams’ hitters in the yard… kinda like leveling the playing field in a backwards sort of way…
that’s not bad.
And BTW, moving the fences in would probably benefit the opposition more than the Giants. And don’t tell me FA won’t come here because of AT&T. Money is all that matters. Everywhere. All the fuckin’ time…
What you said . . . Everything.
Ridiculous to even think they would consider a modification of this park. Equally important, if you have shit players (as we do), how’s that going to make us better, when the MUCH better opposition gets to hit too?
Your last point is the most important one – money talks. Quite frankly, it isn’t because of their stats being affected, but what isn’t talked about, i.e., the 800 lb. gorilla in the room – California State taxes.
If the concern is the performance of the team, I’m not sure I follow the logic of moving in the fences. It could make the park more attractive to FA, although recently Stanton rejected SF because he knows this is not a good team and they lowballed Bruce the lefty. The dimensions aid the pitching staff as much as they radically diminish the hitters’ stats. Shifting that extreme to make the current team look a little less anemic might make the shittiness somewhat less boring and easier to endure, but it would have no effect on the W-L record. The SF staff had a 3.73 ERA at home, and 5.34 on the road last year. In a league average ballpark, last year’s team would have given up 850-900 runs.
Again, correct. Ludicrous to even think the park should be modified. Keep your eye on the ball – it’s the team that STINKS, not the ball park.