A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball

Well, at least we got to the truth about what happened that fateful night at George Harrison’s house. And I didn’t have to spend even a second in a store yesterday. So, all in all, a pretty successful Black Friday.

One thing I miss about Sabean: he did some early damage in free agency. That kept November and December interesting. He would then retire for 10 months. Young Z doesn’t seem to interested in forcing a move right now. He’s letting the market come to him. Genius.

….to Flappers far and wide. Football and food, all day.

Looking forward to hearing how Twin’s brussel sprouts turn out. And if anyone makes something kick ass share it here…

Have a good one.

Make it so, Young Z…..

My daughter turns 17 today. That’s a fairly incredible and daunting number for me to process. In my mind she’s still 7 years old running through the rain in her bare feet. What a great night this was….

https://oneflapdown77.com/2010/10/24/glory-today-but-destiny-awaits/

If you read this and even think about it for a second you realize how stupid this sounds. This time of year it’s basically just a bunch of monkeys banging the keyboard randomly stringing words together.

Katie has a friend in town for Thanksgiving this year from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re mostly staying at home but her friend is interested in a *real Black Friday Union Square style*. LOL, have at it kids, you can take the train up to that. Big Flavor doesn’t do Union Square on any colored Friday….

I might go back and look at some old Thanksgiving Day threads. Twin used to really shine with the recipes back then.

The thing that continues to surprise me about this Niner team: they keep having guys go down on defense and the defense is playing….better? How is that possible. I’d love some baseball news to kick around but until that happens I will continue to churn out “we needed a new thread” thread….

Sunday! That means we need a new thread and we’ve got a lot of football to watch. Niners in a weirdly tough game tonight, I don’t have a feel at all about how it will play out.

Cal still smokes my pole….

I know I just read a blurb about this, maybe Schulman goes into more detail about who this dude is. Did anyone read it? Who is this dude? If Baer AND Zaidi are reporting to you that sounds like a big deal, no?

I mean, does Zaidi just treat this Johnson kid like a bitch? Does Larry treat him like his wife? Or does this new young silver spooned fellow have his finger prints all over our team? Is this a big deal or is this just like when that cousin fucker Rudy Giulani got his dopey son this job:

While watching the Warriors get the absolute shit kicked out of them last night I tried to figure out why it didn’t bother me in the slightest. All I could come up with is that I’m still so drunk on Bay Area championship teams I don’t seem to have it in me to fret over bad seasons.

And when our teams win they really go on runs, don’t they? This ain’t no “Chicago White Sox 2005” territory. When I was a kid all the Niners did was bang pussy and take down Super Bowls. Then once the Giants finally won they became the team of the decade with 3 in 5. The Warriors did the exact same thing winning 3 in 5 (and going to 5 straight NBA finals).

So when we suck, I just can’t really work myself up into a froth like the old days. In fact, I was thinking “this is cool, we’ll get the number 1 pick in the draft, reload, and be right back on top in a year or two.”

In a way I kinda miss the old days….

It was at the exact moment that I was googling “who was Sonny Dove” that I realized we were a smidge thin on content for the blog this morning. Anyone got any good Sonny Dove stories?

Surprised I’ve never heard of him, he died in the ballpark of when Len Bias died and everyone knows who Bias was.

Maybe time to give Phil Nastu another phone call?

Not even a rumor about the Giants, unless you’re into the Yomiuri Giants.

Niners won.

Warriors lose to keep the steamroll ahead to the #1 pick.

We needed a new thread.

How good would Kaepernick still have to be in order for you to be an owner and want him on your team? I’m assuming he would at least need to be a starting QB, right? Nobody is gonna put up with all this shit for just a back up quarterback. After that, he couldn’t be a “Ryan Fitzpatrick” type either. Showing up with the occasional *magic*. He would have to be like, what, a top 10 QB?

Someone described Kap on twitter yesterday as “worst than an IG model looking for attention.” That isn’t far off. This dude makes everything so complicated. If he really wanted to play he wouldn’t have had a hissy fit about that minor waiver issue. He wouldn’t have ended his press statement (of course it wasn’t a press conference he doesn’t do those) with that silly comment telling the owners to stop being scared. Honestly, who is going to hire a guy who is already mocking you before you even sign him?

He wants attention for his causes and I respect that. But he’s running out of legitimate ways to get that attention.

And he doesn’t want to play football anymore and hasn’t for years. I am nearly positive about this…..

So how long should Myles Garrett be suspended for? It has to be the rest of the year. The entire Cleveland team plays like a bunch of undisciplined criminals. I hope the league sends a message that there must be at least some respect for rules shown on the field.

I’ve worked myself into some kind of hazy fantasy froth that Z-arris is going to be able to get rid of some of the rotten core and add some pieces we can use in 2020. If he could hookwink the Braves into taking Melancon he can do literally anything. So while 2020 appears on paper NOW to look like 90 losses I’m going to remain positive this off season.

Now that the dust has settled and all that remains is the rubble juxtapose Gabe Kapler’s peaking biceps it’s important to remember where we are:

It’s November 14th. We have a great leader with a sound vision in Zaidi. He has just saddled a trusty lieutenant to his side (Harris). And he has found a man to succeed Bruce Bochy. That is some pretty solid ground work for this time of the year….

None of those 3 fellas are gonna matter one iota if we don’t get better players. I’m not worried about what the team looks like today because I am confident that Zaidi and Harris will shed some of the core and add a few under the radar studs to spoon feed Kapler. Despite losing out on the *coveted* Joe Espanda, I’m not giving up on the 2020 season by a long shot. Let’s see what the 25 man roster looks like in March….

I slept on it and the more I thought about it the more I realized this could be the perfect hire. Kapler is the anti-Bochy. Zaidi is not an idiot. Far from it, he’s smarter than all of us and most other mortal men. Why would he hire someone who could torpedo not just the team but his ascent to greatness? There is something there that maybe all of us don’t understand. And I’m ok with that, just like I don’t understand how electricity works but I trust the power company to understand it and be able to turn it on and off without disrupting my daily life. But that’s another topic.

Regarding the assault allegations, he gets a pass from me on that. Obviously if he blundered something like that again he’d have to go. But we are all human and the smart ones learn and adapt.

Look, this guy had Bryce Harper to deal with–a known drag on a team—just look to the Nats if you don’t believe that. If you don’t like that example just watch this jackass take his helmet off and flip his stupid hair back. That’s worth like 12 losses a year, at least.

Let’s see what he can do with a stud like *Z-arris* spoon feeding him studs to manage.

That was a hell of an entertaining game last night. I’m gonna go easy on Jimmy G though it was clear who the better quarterback was. He was throwing the ball to a bunch of back ups who couldn’t hang on to the ball. It’s wild to me the drop off from an elite pass catcher to whoever his back up is. I mean, that’s literally all you do all week, practice catching balls. Then one comes at you and it’s like a foreign object you’ve never seen before.

Probably best to no longer be undefeated, that’s a burden in many ways.

Interesting to read that losing a pick for signing a QO player will likely fall somewhere in the 70’s to 80’s (mlbtraderumors.com). That certainly isn’t the pain it once was. It’s also not much to look forward to if the Giants lose their QO guys……

Young Z has added a second big, pulsating brain to the think tank. No one among us should question the move. I get a kick out of old Giant lackeys like Marty Lurie and Schulman wondering when Wotus and Hensley are gonna get a shot managing. Man, these guys just don’t get it. Dudes like that aren’t getting hired anymore. They’re fine for making sure shifts are on and whatnot but they don’t understand the worth and reasoning of brains like Zaidi and Harris.

So now, just like when the power goes out at our house, we sit and wait. We wait while those brighter than us figure out how to turn the power back on…..

Good idea at the end of the last thread from PaulinAsia. Let’s see a spray chart for Oracle, or heck a spray chart for the history of the park, that shows how many hits close to the wall in RF would have been a bomb with the fences moved in 4-6 feet. My guess is, not many.

Anyway, I couldn’t find one and I looked. Will keep looking later today but if someone finds one before me, post it.

According to Henry Schulman, Bear has strong armed his way on this one. The right field wall will come in only 4-6 feet and the fence will come down a damn foot. This is SO STUPID. This guy shakes his wife to the ground, he should have been kicked out of the front office for good. But no, he gets a slap on the wrist, about a 1/10th of what his bride got. Then he comes back and overrules Young Z who was planning on doing the reasonable thing and moving those antiquated fences into at least view of the naked eye…..

Straight up stealing this list from mlbtr.com: Here are the 10 players who received QO’s.

Again, if nobody thought enough of Bumgarner to offer up a decent player for him at the break I’m not too sure I understand the logic that they’ll now want to give him 100 million AND give up a draft pick. But whatever, maybe I just don’t understand this process.

Everyone seems to think Will Smith will take the QO because he’s never seen that kind of dough before and for one year he’d be the highest paid reliever in baseball….

So if the projections at mlbtraderumors.com are correct, you can have Cole at 8 years/256 mil or Bumgarner at 4 years/72 million. I’d choose neither but obviously go with Bum if someone put a gun to my head and said “choose one.”

Bum’s deal, if that’s what he gets, is at least manageable and if/when he goes down again it’s not a deal that is going to paralyze a franchise—like the Cole deal will when he goes down.

Pitchers are built to burn out rather than fade away. The free agency system that forces teams to pay for the best of a players years already long gone on the back of their baseball card is broken.

The silver lining in all of this is that Young Z doesn’t seem like a guy who would get caught up in the madness of a Boras-fueled contract escalation.

The Padres are interested in Strasburg. That sounds about right for them. Double down on another “Manny Mistake.” Stras is 31, he’s coming off by far his highest innings total in years, and they’re going to throw 200 million at him, at least. That dude is the poster boy for an arm about to get cut open…..

If they were like one piece away, maybe. You roll the dice with Stras. But San Diego is *manny* pieces away from being a contender.

GM’s need to stop being lazy and signing expensive free agents. It doesn’t work.

Wonderful day of racing in Southern California yesterday. Sadly, in the final race, a horse went down and had to be euthanized. Horses are athletes, there is always going to be risk just like with human athletes who *take the field*.  It’s sad and unfortunate. But horse racing is an amazing, timeless sport. I’ll never apologize for loving it.

With the Dubs in straight up tank mode this is going to be a tricky off season for me. I love the Niners but that’s just one game a week.
I’ll try to get jazzed about the hot stove but right now that’s not doing anything for me.