Category Archives: Giants

2011 San Francisco Giants: 5 Unexpectedly Good Performances by Giants Players

The 2010 San Francisco Giants won the World Series on the strength of their excellent home-grown starting pitching, lights-out bullpen and clutch (if not overwhelming) offense.

This year, as the champs do their best to stage a repeat, they’re going to have to step it up even further, facing the likes of the Phillies Big Four pitchers, the surging Diamondbacks and the always-dangerous Rockies.

Still, tell any Giants fan that Tim Lincecum or Matt Cain are having good years, and they’ll shrug and say “yeah, what else is new?” Mention that Brian Wilson has converted 20/22 saves this year, and hasn’t given up a run since May 18th, and they’ll yawn.

We’re truly spoiled this year, so I’d like to mention five players who managed to fly under the radar, but whose great play on the field has helped keep this team in first place.

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What’s Cooler Than Being Cool? (This Team is) ICE COLD!

I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I said, WHAT’S COOLER THAN … oh, never mind.

It’s a pretty helpless feeling, sitting at home, watching this team flail away at hittable pitches, booting balls, misreading easy plays, crushing the ball directly at the defense, making Ruben Rivera-style base running mistakes, wasting quality starts, and generally playing less like a championship team and more like the Twins.

Not the Minnesota Twins, mind you; the Little League team I played on when I was nine, when I got a total of three hits the whole year, won the “Coach’s Choice” trophy (everybody had to win a trophy), and my crowning achievement was striking out my friend (looking), the friend whose house I visited for several hours a day to play Curse of Monkey Island.

Sure, feeling like I’m single-handedly responsible for breaking my team’s slump may be putting a bit too much on myself, and may indicate just a weeee bit of pyschosis, but as you can see, we’re way past that. My hair is turning more dark-brown than black, my sentences are becoming more run-on, and my metaphors are making even less sense. WE NEED SOME WINS.

But let’s take a deeeeep breath, and examine what’s going on here.

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Frustrations and Schadenfreude

There's a reason pandas are so easily found in the wild.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a fan of the Washington Nationals.

You’re an 11-12 team, and you’re starting to get pretty disappointed by your team’s long-term, big-money investment in Jayson Werth, who even without his caveman beard is batting a scant .221. Your most promising pitching prospect in quite some time, who could easily break a few records in his career, will miss at least the entire season recovering from surgery, and you need to bat against the Phillies rotation 18 times.

Today, your team is facing a pitcher that can charitably be called “erratic,” who is doing his very best to leak some runs. He walked three batters in the first inning, and wound up with five walks and two hit-by-pitch in the first two innings. The one mistake that your team made, when Ian Desmond got picked off at first base, didn’t end up costing anything, because the shortstop dropped the ball. You even caught a break, when Mike Fontenot’s double hopped over the wall, preventing Miguel Tejada from scoring.

So how did they manage to score just one run?

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