September Malaise
Remember the good old days when playing the Cardinals meant something? When playing ANYONE meant something? I’ll always claim that those three beauties have insulated me from any type of September rancor but the reality is that I am missing meaningful baseball and have accepted that we will be terrible for the next several years.
Anyway, we’re in St. Louis today. I’m drinking my morning coffee out of this little mug, it’s not road trip worthy but for a morning cup of Joe while I type this post, it’s not half bad….
San Dawg may be a bigger fan but I’M the one they’re writing letters to. Although if me and AMPM were truly friends they would have sent a bigger cup…..
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
you are where you are. Looking at records of few teams and how they stand:
Tampa 85 Ws 18 games out straining for playoff
Seattle 84 Ws 11 out no playoffs
Cleveland 85 Ws clinched division easily
LA 85 Ws have biggest lead all season 2.5 games
STL 84 Ws 5 out battling for WC
ATL 85 Ws got division pretty well sewed up
No reason to concede anything before it starts, next year or beyond. Giants actually had winning pct. vs. NL West and beat every team in it except Sherps. Get to .500 by deadline anything can happen—unfortunately for SF that’s when injuries and hitting slumps did them in is my take.
Don’t have any GIANT mugs? Not buying it. Seems like you really need to look to the commercials for guidance here if you want the big cup. I’m not suggesting a full on spread but maybe a few well placed bags of chips and a come hither look.
” your friends at AMPM”
how can it get better than that?
Grateful Dead…first and last LP I had was the one with Me and my Uncle (great cut) Mama Tried. good stuff.
Never saw them but did see New Riders, outdoors at Frost early ’70s.
Good for B Mayfield and Browns. I think one of cool things about NFL is to see how well some of new QBs can be right out of college. Niners at KC this week very cool. T Hill is one cool player to watch.
Saw the Dead about a dozen times. Last time was at Cal Expo in ‘94 on my BD. First Dead show was Tulsa, OK in ‘79. They opened that show with Jack Straw (great song).
Two flaps up for a GH happy birthday.
The Dead is one of those bands I got into later in life. Same with Michael Jackson
You being a Dead fan is something I didn’t see coming. At all. But then again, you think For Those About To Rock is a “great” song (It’s average at best in my book) and you can’t stand the Beatles, but prefer Lennon, but only list Paul songs when mentioning the few Beatles songs you do like.
Happy B-day G-Head!
i preferred Lennon as a person. If I had to choose between the two I’d go Lennon easily.
You’re on a roll with these Toomgis posts, along with your September 15th “Getting Rid Of The Problem” thread opening. Both made me chuckle out loud. In a season of lows, I can barely pay attention – so humor about our situation and doing other stuff to fill the void is important.
Question to all . . . Apparently, Madbum wants to stay here and is open to extension negotiations. However, the Giants have not contacted him, nor his representative. Do you guys think that they should punt the decision to next season’s July deadline (obviously meaning that they exercise his 2019 option) or even wait longer and make a decision after the 2019 season? If they wait, they are taking a chance that his value continues to decrease.
I would like them to make a decision now or as soon as relatively possible. Specifically, my preference is for the team to move on and start the rebuild as soon as possible. Trade him while he still has some worth (by the by, tonight’s start, along with any other starts he makes this season are big if they decide on this route). I would also not have a problem with an extension, as long as he gets paid for what he is . . . not for what he accomplished on the back of his baseball card, e.g., maybe $14-16 million per season, w/4 year contract and one team option. That would be $64 million maximum with another potential 16 million option (buyout of $2 million), for a total of $80 million. Obviously, these numbers change if an agreement doesn’t occur by the end of the season or shortly thereafter during the hot stove season. It’s also important that he finishes strong the rest of this season.
I want them to submit an extension offer to him this afternoon……4/80 is fine with me.
Actually, 4/64 with team option. However, it’s great that you came down from your $90 million, 5 year contract proposal last week.
Trade Bum before November ends, get all you can get. He’s on the downhill, SF needs bodies, good ones…
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the Flap is a great read when the Giants are doing poorly. Some of the best material in here is non Giants talk.
That’s pretty cool they sent you a handwritten note with the cup. That’s fantastic customer service and something you rarely see.
It will never happen. He’s a deadline deal if we suck. That’s it.
With all the tax threshold talk this season and money coming off the books with Pence, etc it isn’t that surprising that the Giants and Bumgarner haven’t talked recently. Over the last 2-3 spring training reports out of camp have been that they have regularly engaged in contract discussions. I’m sure both sides have a rough idea of what a deal would look like.
This off season will be interesting. I’m hoping the club finds more players to add like Uribe who have been winners in the past.
Diggity– I got into the Dead in college, I went to Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore. Back then L/C was a hippy school, it’s gotten a lot more conservative since then. I got exposed to a lot of music there that I wouldn’t have otherwise ever listened to.
Gotcha. Makes sense.
Flav, I think you should get a hold of some 7-eleven stationary and send AM/PM a note thanking them for the mug but explain how you had your heart set on a giant mug, like the Ultimate Gulp as an example.
Comes with 5 free insulin syringes!
Haven’t been on much, but not related to you Flappers…just been in a baseball funk (kind of like our Giants!
Here’s an article I saw yesterday about the status of our team. Nothing we didn’t already know. Picture of Bochy says it all for the past two years.
https://tinyurl.com/ydcfdw4z
Also, big BD shout-out for G-Head.
Is Bum going to have to swallow the fact that he won’t get one of those 7 year/$210 million types of contracts from somebody? Do those contracts even get given out anymore? A few years ago, Bum seemed like a sure thing to get one of those. But now he’s had injuries and some decline, and GM’s are hugely sabermetric now. Well, the majority are.
No way Bum gets less than 5 years at less than $100 million…
Addison Russell was placed on ‘administrative leave’ for a spousal abuse investigation brought forth by his ex-wife. Apparently the investigation started June 17, 2017.
I could watch BattleBots 24/7…
To borrow one of your lines, I had to Google that.
I think their target audience is 12 year olds…
Not sure what to do with Bum, it’s hard to say thank you for your past but what have you done lately for us, and really the Giants pitching is not the problem. There is a thing called offense that is totally lacking on this team, and nobody seems to know why. Certainly not the home park cause other teams hit here just fine. Did the Giants have mediocre hitting during the 3 WS and they won because of their pitching. So because they won no one wanted to bring up the lack of hitting. During their WS games they got “timely” hitting, but none of the players were truly great hitters, maybe Posey. But the rest were probably average at best? The Players who did well in the playoffs and the WS did get timely hits. I am not a stats guy so someone who is will have to say whether their were .285-.300 hitters for the seasons of the WS. I say go get hitters and leave the pitching alone.
I am so done with this squad’s total ineptitude at hitting with RISP. Phuck this team, tear it down and rebuild !!….
I guess a couple of walks with RISP is the next best thing.
An rbi!
Ron Gant might have thrown more strikes.
bugs me to watch Cardinals players Giants might have had shot at past off season—Ozuna, J Gyorko or that J Martinez guy. Their pen still sucks and Giants have abundance of them…
All of them can hit, with power. Martinez whacked the ball when they came here last year and has been moved to OF from 1b and isn’t much of fielder either position. But any of above would be great in Giants uni.
Piscotty too. Cards were perfectly willing to trade him here to be near his dying Mom and weren’t asking a lot. They dumped Grichuk to Toronto. And he has had career year for the A’s. Missed opportunity definitely.
all those guys you listed are pretty young. Going after that type is definitely not the giants way. It’s like they can’t act unless the baseball card is at least 10 years deep……
Agree Willie. Ozuna, Piscotty and especially, the guy I like – Yelich. Shaking my head that the FO was essentially comatose on these good, young outfielders. Instead, we sign Longo, where his 2017 season should have set off alarm bells. I can understand going after Cutch, as he was ascending in the last part of 2017. Equally important, it was for only one year. However, Longo is going to hurt us into the 2020s.
The Giants whiff as much in the field as they do at the plate.
No shit. What’s that? 10 SOs in 6 innings??? Sheesh.
I look forward to the end of seasons like this…
Twinner’s first missed one in what? 65 years? He didn’t miss much.
As Loo said, wilderness years for the Giants.
I’m guessing many of the players also look forward to the end of seasons like this. I recall being at the last game of some dismal season at Fenway, Orioles were in town and also closing out a shitty season. I was sitting down along the 1st base line, Dwight Evans hit a ground out for the final out, and after the great Eddie Murray took the throw, he high-fived Evans and said “see ya next year” with a tired little smile and a shake of the head, and the players just slowly wandered off into their 4-month break like they were vanishing into that Iowa cornfield….
Slater and Hanson. Wave of the future. 3-2. Add in Shaw Garcia (maybe somewhere) and healthy Duggar. These are all Sabes guys, plus Holland DRod Suarez Moronta…more than a third of team is already news and except for Holland younger. If it matters to anyone, cheap too.
Panik with a brutally worthless AB.
Panik could possibly never get a big MLB contract because of his decline. That seemed unthinkable a few years ago.
That was a big SO, as Panik rarely SO.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t this guy Hicks have a fastball that’s faster than Chapman? Maybe I read that he recorded the fastest fastball for 2018.
I think he hit 105 this season.
I thought he topped out at 104. 😉
OK, I admit I do not understand baseball in 2018. Can one or more of you guys that follow this better than me please tell me why in any form of common sense is Blanco (ave.=.221) batting lead off for the Giants in this forlorn year?
Did they sell the whole farm system to the Yankees?
OSF
Bochy has spent years believing Blanco is a leadoff hitter. The stats have never supported that.
I’ll go along with Piscotty being a missed opportunity, but Ozuna and Yellich? No way in hell could we have made a play for those guys with our barren farm system.
You’re probably right.
The Giants are in good company; Churchill had some wilderness years, too
Let’s hope the Giants’ wilderness years don’t result in anything near as much as a 4 DVD set…..
Good point!
Crap.
That’s on Melanoma.
Hanny competes; you gotta love that.
This game reminds me of my trip to Ireland last month. In Marsh’s Library (est. 1707) a young guard sitting at the famous ancient reading table said, as I walked by, “So you follow the Giants then?” He pointed to the rain-wet hat in my hand. Turned out he’s a Cardinals fan. He woke every day eager to see the box score, to see how Carpenter’s doing. He’d visited the USA when he was younger and the highlight of his trip was a game with his brother in SF where Bonds hit a homer. (“Number 747, it was!”) Through an open window I could hear the soft Irish rain falling softly into a lush Irish garden. Otherwise the library was silent. The young Irishman leaned back in the chair where Bram Stoker spent many hours poring over tomes about disease and morbidity and exotic continental lands while he devised his Dracula tales and I leaned on the chair where James Joyce spent many hours in 1902 studying rhetoric and early English literature. And the young Irishman and I talked about baseball.
Cool story Xoot.
Very nice!
There goes a .500 season.
So much for that.
Sometimes I feel sorry for Bochy, and then I remember he’s getting paid $6 million this season.
Giants gave them a battle and looked like they had momentum until the disastrous 8th.
Melancon.
Eat some salary, and trade this sorry ass Bust on November 2…
Of the pitchers currently on the roster, he has the worst WHIP @ 1,56 . . . That’s pathetic for a pitcher, especially a relief pitcher.
He still occasionally has a great “12 to 6” curve ball.
He just rarely shows it from 7 to 11…
solid gold Loo. Did you steal that or make it up? If that’s an original I tip my tiny mug in your general direction and say “well done”
After doing a tear-down/rebuild that lasted a few years, the Braves are going to win their division.
Can’t believe the Dodgers put Axford out there.
A rare Dodger loss to the Padres.