Brew Town
Turns out we played yesterday. I thought it was an off day for some reason. Man, straight from SD to Milwaukee. No rest for the wicked (losers).
Brewers are only -180 to beat us tonight. LOL. Should be -500.
We added Devers, Adames and got a full year out of the Hooligan. And we got worse than last year. How?
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
Baggarly’s crystal ball view of the roster Buster needs to build for next year:
“Strikeouts are part of the bargain with Devers, Adames and Chapman. It’ll be part of the bargain with top prospect Bryce Eldridge whenever he arrives in the big leagues. So it won’t work to have complementary players with 30 percent strikeout rates.”
yeah he brought up how Padres K fewest in all MLB and added Verlander quote “they put the ball in play.” I think Chron column said SF gave up 44 runs (while only scoring 13) in last 7 games with them–that’s far too many runs allowed for this lineup to be competitive. Pitching and D haven’t held up.
see what happens with pads, who are 2-8 vs. LA so far and host them for 3 .
his point about matos was deceptively damning. That guy is our best contact hitting prospect?
apparently.
Baggs knows where to go for material…
snarkk said, on August 19, 2025 at 10:48 pm (Edit)
That’s the point. He’s not hitting, so the K rate is magnified even more. Compare Alonso at 26+% K rate, and he’s clubbing HRs and an OPS of .871. You can accept these days a slugger at 30%, but not a utility infielder whose glove is just OK and OPS at .616. He’s less than a dime a dozen…
It’s an off day every day the Giants play BF..
What’s this second rate paper called the SF Standard?
I’ve heard of John Shea so that makes sense he’s second rate as well in his twilight years still grinding like are own K&K..
Now u know it’s no good when Pat Burrell did an interview on being a hitting coach trying desperately to defend his job for next season when it’s clear Posey needs to dump his old cronies and go it yet another direction with a new manager and his personal staff( minus JD Martinez the only bright coach they have)
Xoot, Baggarly’s quote is the MOST SUCCINCT AND ACCURATE DESCRIPTION of the Giants woes (now and in the future) I have read to date. Thanks for sharing.
Also, I am wondering about Willie’s Verlander quote – did Verlander imply that the Giants do not provide support, i.e., sort of a back handed insult to the Giants offense? If so, I suspect he will get blowback from this?
Verlander is just telling the truth. The truth will set you free.
Kruk this morning was trying mightily and to me, obviously, to protect the coaching staff from blowback of the cratering. He said the league discovered pretty early this season that the team can’t hit high fastballs. Kruk said the Giants coaches months ago were onto this weakness and the league’s attack on it, and have been trying constantly to get the players to respond to this attack, to no avail — hence all the Ks continuing.
Hmm. Couple of things on that, if true about the coaching. If these players can’t execute adjustments that the coaches are constantly working with them for months, seems to me there are 2 possibilities: (i) these players suck, or (ii) the players are OK, but the coaching is flat not good enough or the players for some reason are just not paying attention to or are blowing off the coaches some reason. If it’s (i), then get rid of these players, blow this roster up in the off season. If it’s (ii) you can’t get rid of the entire roster, especially the 3 big contract guys that K a lot, but you can and have to ditch an ineffective coaching staff, regardless of why they’re ineffective. The Melvin/Adames episode the other night comes to mind.
I think it’s a combination of the 2, mostly that the players just aren’t good enough. Lousy players, lousy team, lousy record. Like Parcells said, you are what your record says you are. But, from the Matt Williams bonehead actions at third to the constant Keystone Kops clueless play the last several months tells me the coaching is certainly culpable, too. Time for Buster to deal with both of these sides of this historic dumpster fire…
What’s left out of this is that the 3 most culpable players — Adames, Devers, and Chapman — have been very successful high K players their entire careers. They bear the heaviest share of the blame for the team’s failure. Who else is not listening to the coaches that anyone believes is better than what they are showing?
Kruk didn’t identify any specific players. It’s not left out in what I said, I identified those 3. They’ve been horrendous. You can’t do anything with those 3, but hope next season they K no more than this season, but hit more HRs and SLG much better. Kruk is a management shill, he knows those 3 are untouchables, so he’s not going to single them out else it makes ownership/management look bad…
I think Baggs was just trying to reinforce his point about how often Giants K as opposed to Padres . Verlander previous outing vs. Tampa he K’d 8 in 7 innings. Last 4 he K’d 25 in 22 innings per game logs. Yesterday he was sailing along retiring first 9 in order (followed online via mlb.com as I wasn’t watching) til roof fell in for him and Gage behind him.
Stats are fun. Ks don’t seem to hurt the Dodgers, Mariners, Red Sox, Tigers, or Yanks.
Nope they don’t. Baggarly is peddling an aesthetic preference as analysis. Hitters who put the ball in play can suck, see Duane Kuiper, and a complementary player can hit a lot of bombs and add value that way, despite whiffing a lot and not adding much in the way of batting avg.
no. He’s performing a routine audit of the long term contract costs. Nothing he wrote is new. He knows that. His entire piece was tinted with shade. Face facts.
Reading charitably, I suppose one interpretation is that Buster is somehow currently constrained to look away from successful offenses that have no problem scoring runs with high whiff rates as models for SF’s future rosters. The Giants are in the middle of the pack in whiffs right now. Even if they add Eldridge next year, whether or not any other, new complementary player(s) is a high contact or high K player is irrelevant. He just needs to produce a decent OPS.
Despite recent pounding they’ve given Giants over last 7 with plus 30 run differential, Padres aren’t anything close to elite offense either. They’ve only scored 20 more runs than SF in entire season and have hit 10 fewer HRs. Difference is they still have best pitching in NL, great bullpen they added to at deadline and allow fewest runs.
Give Pads credit too for adding OF Laureano (who Kuip continues to pronounce Liriano) and DH O’Hearn at deadline, 2 hitters that have really helped along with new starting C Fermin. All 3 of them hurt Giants in last 2 weeks.
Yep, Willie, Baggs leaves that out, picking a game or series that goes badly and then using the contrast in style to promote his preferences.
I think giants are 20th in whiffs right now. And baggs clearly exploited the pods season series disaster to make a provisional point. Obviously, Buster will have more than contact hitting to consider over the winter and as everyone knows anything’s possible. Especially given how random, or perhaps fortuitous, baseball inherently is.
Can’t blame him. Baggs, I mean. he’s not phoning it in. He’s just going with the pitches he gets.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TNJoPi49-AM
Speaking of Keystone Kops.
When Kuiper is obviously pissed on a broadcast, you know it’s bad…
The Giants defense is terrible (26th = 5th worst in MLB fielding percentge). No news, there. And that doesn’t even cover the mental errors.
So, like the Padres did yesterday, if I’m Murphy the Brewers manager this weekend, and any other manager the remainder of this season, I would do everything I could to pressure the Giants defense to make plays.
Steal, hit and run, run and hit, challenge the outfield on first to third base running, challenge on tags ups from third on sac flies that are questionably deep enough, sac bunts, squeeze bunts and bunts for hits, etc. All of it.
Bradford Doolittle, Sports Writer, had this to say about the Giants . . .
“As the Giants’ once-promising season has settled into yawn-inducing mediocrity, we can identify when the wave broke and what has happened since it rolled back. The high point was June 11, when San Francisco beat Colorado for a seventh straight win to go a season-best 12 games over .500. The Giants were a half-game back of the Dodgers in the division race and topped the early wild-card standings. The Giants were on pace to score 684 runs and allow 567. Those paces are now 656 runs scored and 662 allowed. A slight decline offensively, but a collapse on the pitching side.”— Doolittle
I like this take too, as it shows that although the hitting has continued to be bad, the pitching has actually been worse.
yeah the dazzling SP fizzled at the back end, the pen got weary and lame (or traded).
That series of Webb starts really hurt. The defense has also contributed mightily to the excess number of runs allowed. Still, 662 runs allowed is a pretty good total in the abstract.
Yeah, blade, the pitching has definitely fallen off, particularly the Pen. Then the trades, and injuries lately to starters and Birdie turning into Steve Blass.
But, a fall off was predictable. The long history of MLB tells us some starters will tend to get hurt over the long haul. No Pen could stay as successful all season as that Pen was in the April-May period. The Pen got overworked early on, so Dog Days retrograde of the Pen was inevitable.
KNBR noted earlier this morning that compared to the entire MLB, Giants are absolute LAST in runs scored since the Devers trade in mid July. The worst in scoring. 30th of 30. Even if they had Marichal, Koufax, Seaver, Gibson and Verlander (when he was good) in the rotation, SF would be hard pressed to win many games while scoring so piss poorly over a near 60 game period.
The Pen backsliding was inevitable, unless it were refreshed by an influx of talent like the Pads did. But, Giants don’t have near that kind of quality minor league capital to make those kind of big time mid-season transactions…
49ers acquire Commanders RB Brian Robinson for a 6th rd draft pick in 2026..
A solid player with plenty of experience,great move for depth at the RB position full of question marks right now with injuries like the WR’s as well..
I see 49ers are collecting ex-Chief WRs the way we used to collect your old QBs. Skyy Moore was a huge disappointment except for a TD catch in a SB. Maybe he’ll turn it around…
I don’t expect much out of Skyy Moore Loo, like u mentioned he’s been a bust who drops passes,fumbles the Chiefs finally just cut bait with that wasted draft pick! Skyy Vodka would of been a better choice..
DJ, is he a kick returner?
Chuck, you’re the Niner guru. Seems almost every pre-season or season the Niners suffer a huge, huge number of injuries. I heard somewhere that they are near the top of the player-hours per season lost to injury or whatever the stat is called during the Shanny period. WTF is going on? Supposedly they don’t practice harder or any more than other teams, right? They’ve replaced the training staff at least once undery Shanny, as far as I’ve heard. What’s your take on this?
They’ve been in the bottom 5 every year under Shanny but for 2021. They got rid of most of the training staff after the 2017 season, but that obviously hasn’t helped.
And another thing is the 49ers went to hockey trainers in 2019 for whatever reason.
I just heard recently that Shanahan doesn’t use all the allotted practice time for stretching and preparing the players for the actual hitting that is to come up in practice. They get 3 hours, but Shanahan usually wraps up practices in under 2 hours, with minimal stretching.
If this is true, it is a ludicrous way to prepare a team for practice as a lot of these injuries are things like hammy and calf strains. Non-contact stuff.
Bottom 5 every year?
The stretching thing is insane. WTF?
I would think with a big payroll and a team supposedly competitive, you do everything possible to stretch these guys out and avoid soft tissue injury.
He can, Chuck…
Cool. They need help there. Just hope he isn’t a fumbler. Another fucking sticking point with me is the lack of attention paid by Shanny to the special teams. They did go and get Saleh’s guys from the Jets so there looks to be improvement this year.
And the defense looks worlds better, even with the backups playing most of the time.
Shanny’s utter disregard in the past for bad special teams seems like an apparent, similar disregard to figure out the solution to the constant failures to keep the players healthy. I heard him the other day in an interview recognizing the health/availability problem, saying that they’ll review and address it in the off season. Huh? If I were Jed, I’d be on this injury/availability thing big time with Lynch and Shanny — Jed’s paying millions every year for an abnormal number of guys who can’t play…
The thing about Shanahan, and sure a lot of coaches feel this way, is he ALWAYS thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. Being stubborn and intractable is fine in certain situations, but when the same problems crop up over and over, you have to listen to other folks sometimes.
The fucking 4th quarter failures over and over. Clock management. Putting games away. Special teams problems. Injuries. Penalties. Ignoring the O line. When to force the issue and when to be conservative. And his running of CMC into the ground in 2023 when Shanny had Mitchell and Mason to spell him. ALL these things are easily addressed. But it continues to be a problem under Cap’t Blight.
I fear the same thing this year. More overreliance on CMC, more overreliance on Purdy to break contain and make plays on the run, stupid penalties, and the hope against hope that his FG kicker isn’t the football version of Camillo Doval.
Doval line yesterday: 0.1 innings 2 hits 1 BB plus balk charged with 1 run. Was brought in to start bottom 6th with Yanks up 3-2 in game Yanks lost 6-3 to BoSox.gets blown save attached to stat line. Not well received by home crowd.
I thought you didn’t want the Giants to get O’Hearn? I was shooting for him in May.
he has hit well in small sample size, .250/.382/.500 in 44 ABs (3 HRs, 2 vs. SF) with Padres. No idea what O’s were asking. He is of course a 32 year old rental who hits left handed and has played 9 of 17 games as DH, 6 more at 1b.
Laureano I thought would have been better fit as RH OF who could cover any of 3 spots. Didn’t happen. Laureano is 30 and also rental but has very cheap team $4 mil team option.
I read an article just the other day that said the new WR’s that have passed through recently and the ones still around say that Shanny expects a full speed practice all the time. They made it sound like it was a constant grind and that they have never had to practice like that before. There have been a lot of wr’s pass through here in the last month or so. Good thing we don’t do the nutcracker anymore.
Touchbacks come all the way out to the 35 yard line now, apparently to discourage them and bring back the return game that they were discouraging a few years ago due to concussion risks.
Did I get that right?
Yeah. Now the kick-off kickers are practicing essentially a “pooch” kickoff. They want to drop the kick-off in a landing zone that doesn’t go into the Endzone for a touchback. The zone should be far enough outside the Endzone so the returners will actually take the kick and run with the ball, but not so far outside it that the returner can grab the ball and quickly return it upfield past the 35. I think…
They overthink and ruin everything. They did something to screw up the onside kick also. I believe that the one in the Saints SB win to start the second half wouldn’t be possible now…
Below is a description I found of the NFL onside kick rule. Surprise kicks are not allowed. Like the incessant penalties they call now in an NFL game that make it unwatchable. this makes the onside kick like part of litigation — slow, boring and often ultimately doesn’t decide much of anything to anyone’s satisfaction.
———
“With the NFL’s new kickoff rules, teams will have to declare an onside kick to the officials so both the kick and return teams can adjust where they line up.
That means there will be no more surprise onside kicks like former Saints head coach Sean Payton pulled off to open the second half of Super Bowl 44.
The biggest change is that onside kicks will only be allowed in the fourth quarter, and the team attempting the onside kick must be trailing.
The NFL did note in its official rules release that the kicking team would be penalized if the onside kick goes beyond the “setup zone” untouched, and the return team would start the draft at the “A20-yard line.” There were no specifics written as to what the “setup zone” qualifies as for onside kicks, though.
The rest of the current onside kick rules will remain in place, with the ball having to travel 10 yards before it can be touched by the kicking team.”
My head hurts…
NY baseball 2025:
If you’re a Met fan who pays extra for SNY network, you’re out of luck tonight cause they’re on Apple TV.
If you’re a Yankee fan who pays extra for YES network, you’re out of luck tonight cause they’re on Amazon Prime.
wow Matos says I got your splits right here.
Luis El Contacto Matos!
Whis needs another pitch to keep his pitch counts down. Not much deception on his stuff so far, all under 95. Sorta like Woody was, but not the movement. These guys are going to foul off a ton of his pitches…
Although what Quintana has that Whisenhunt doesn’t isn’t apparent watching on TV, at least not to me.
“the best changeup in baseball” someone once famously wrote. Well, it’s pretty good.
see https://www.mlb.com/milb/prospects/giants/carson-whisenhunt-687931
Bailey has his moments.
The best base running team in baseball, highlight of the game.
Right. They are 80-48 but we showed ’em!!!
They’re an excellent team, I despise the baseball the way it oughta be hype around them. The Brewers were built by a data nerd, kinda like the one we had.
I guess their data nerd is better than ours. Hard to fight the results. Then again they need to take LA out to make me happy.
So, this is it for the scoring?
Wow. Strike 3 for Devers. Hey. A walk.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Nice AB from Schmitt to get BB and load them up for Lee. Giants battling.
And then Lee whiffs after fouling a hit-me fastball for strike 2.
Chase chase chase. 2 fat fastballs over the plate fouled off. Work that hitter’s count to a K.
This pretty much guarantees we lose the lead this inning.
Good to see that Bernie has a side piece in the chalet.
That naughty bastard.
Ho hum. Another stupid play by Matos.
If the sliding into third base coach in AA knew what he was doing, Matos would have made it.
I bet they don’t contend with those cumbersome oven mitts down there.
Matos did that all on his own.
Casey throwing knucklers to 1st . . .
I meant the failed sliding technique.
He shouldn’t have run in the first place. He was in scoring postion.
So you are pissed that the Brewers built a team that runs the bases well, moves runners, and ‘plays the game the right way’?
There was only one out and he would have made it easily with a normal slide. No, what I hate is the incessant harping on the least important parts of their success.
How the fuck can Posey not just say ‘hit the road’ to this coaching staff?
And most of these players?
Christ. This is just too funny to even get pissed about at this point.
Flappers, the key to watching Giants games is: 1. Watch the first 2 innings, when all the action occurs; 2. Go run errands and/or make love to your significant other during innings 3 through 7; and, 3. Tune in for the final 2 innings.
”You’re a wild pitch away”
LOL!!!
Giants tie it up. Have a night Luis Matos
What a gift of a wild pitch with feeble Bailey the Giants’ last hope.
a dink, a lucky come backer, and a terrible wild pitch. Come on now, RR. Let’s drag this out!
gut feeling: fitz will blow it somehow.
well. Fitz handled the grounder he got with no trouble.
A poor decision by the Brewers’ CF leads to the tie score. The lousy fundamentals probably won’t cost them the game, but their manager might withhold the post game spread because he just won’t stand for it!
Brewers enjoying themselves now, but they always lose in the playoffs.
Tough loss.
Well, poor Doval. Stuck in that Yankee nightmare. Fans that viciously boo their own players deserve to lose.
That’s about all of em Zum…
Yep. Johnny Disaster. Armando Benitez.
the San Jose giants are on one of the alternate nbc Bay Area cable stations. V Fresno, 4th inning.
I’m getting the River Cats tonight on a local channel in the Central Valley. They’re losing 12-0, so nothing to see, though.
I got to see Jhonny Level strike out.
Tough night for the Valkyries. Phoenix is a challenging opponent.