Kristin made pancakes for breakfast yesterday.
They were good pancakes, whole wheat, made on a new griddle that we bought Sunday night because our stove is broken and our new one isn’t coming until the end of the month. They soaked up the syrup a bit more than usual, but it’s not like that was a problem; the pancakes still tasted like syrup, which is the important thing. When we were done eating, I did the dishes, and then I put on some non-pajama clothes, applied sunblock, and went for a walk.
At this point, it was 10 AM. I was aware the Giants game was starting soon, but I wanted to get outside. I listened to a couple podcasts — learned all about Kalmykia! What fun! — and by the time I got back it was about 12:30. I jumped in the shower, shaved, washed off the sweat, and when I got out, I finally checked the score of the Giants game. The Cubs were up 5-0. I think they won a few minutes later.
I hadn’t watched one second of that worthless fucking game. And it was the right decision.
I would venture that, as Giants fans go, my commitment to them is above average. I consume Giants content. I create Giants content in multiple formats. I read about them, think about them, argue about them online. They take up an inordinate amount of space in my brain, to my detriment in many, many ways. I am literally writing about them right now instead of going to bed — as I am writing this sentence, I have to get up for work in exactly 7 hours, and I am not close to being done here — and I do this all the time. All the time. This team would have to work so, so hard to lose me.
And I don’t want to watch them.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I will. Today, they’ll play at 4:40 and sure, I’ll watch that. But will I enjoy it? Will I have any hope whatsoever that what I’m doing isn’t a colossal waste of time destined to end in disappointment? No, and don’t you dare bring up how that’s a metaphor for life. I have enough to deal with right now, what with watching an entire Giants game today for some reason.
But they’re hopeless right now. Even the flashes of excitement they’ve shown in the last week or two — come on down, Kyle Harrison and Alex Cobb — have been entirely on the pitching side. The offense has been a pure catastrophe, and they won’t stop being awful. We all know they won’t stop because we’ve been watching them, hoping it would turn around, for months now. It won’t turn around. Nothing good is coming.
You don’t need numbers to quantify this, but let’s give you numbers anyway. Since July 1 — more than two months! — the Giants have scored the fewest runs in baseball. They have scored 23 fewer runs than the A’s, the next worst team, and the Giants have played two more games. The gap between them (188 runs) and the 29th place A’s (211 runs) is smaller than the gap between the A’s and the 22nd place Mets (233 runs). The Giants have by the worst OBP in baseball since July 1 (only two points behind the White Sox, though yesterday’s games, not included in those stats, won’t help). They have by far the worst SLG in baseball since July 1, with the gap between them (.342) and the 29th place Pirates (.380) smaller than the gap between the Pirates and the 15th place Rays (.417).
They’re ranked 28th in baseball in making hard contact. They have less isolated power than any other team. They are the slowest team in baseball. They’re 27th in average exit velocity. They’re … they’re bad, okay? They’re just really fucking bad.
Working the system to find small advantages isn’t working anymore. You can’t compete with the best teams who are loaded with talent if you’re not loaded with talent, and the Giants aren’t. They’re so desperate for any hint of talent that they threw at-bats at AJ Pollock and are currently throwing them at Paul DeJong. DeJong, at least, isn’t blocking a clearly better player, which was unequivocally not the case with Pollock. But there’s no ceiling there of 2021 Darin Ruf, who can mash the ball in his platoon at bats. There’s no ceiling at all. There’s just this.
Two months of watching a godawful offense is a long time. It becomes a habit, an expectation. The Giants had a good offense in June with a .320 BABIP; since July it’s been .272, and I don’t think that’s luck. That’s poor quality of contact. That’s hitters who are perpetually overmatched. That’s a team that does not belong at the major league level (not you, Wilmer, you’re good). That’s an unequivocal failure of the front office to build a major league offense.
And so they’re unwatchable. Sure, they’ll win a close one on occasion, but not often enough to make it fun. They’ll never just go out there and mash the ball and give you hope that better times are coming. They played 26 games in August, and scored at least 5 runs in exactly 9 of them. Since the beginning of July, they’ve scored at least 10 runs once. In one game. They are averaging 3.6 runs per game since July 1, a truly pathetic total.
They look like it. You can never mistake the 2023 San Francisco Giants for anything other than a terrible offensive team. They have utterly fallen apart since June ended, and it won’t get better before 2024. There’s nothing entertaining about these hitters. It’s just bad ABs all the way down.
In 2008, the Giants were bad, and The Onion published an all-timer early in the year about them:
That’s where we are now. That’s who this team is again. Perhaps there isn’t a literal Aaron Rowand, but his spiritual children are scattering the landscape, wreaking vengeance upon us for our callous, arrogant belief that he would never return. We’re back to the hopelessness of the darkest of the Sabean years, back to the resignation that nothing they do can possibly work. The guys running the team now were supposed to be too smart to let this happen, and yet it’s happening, so they weren’t. It’s miserable for everyone, and there’s no reason it would stop anytime soon.
They suck, is what I’m getting at.
2 words: Third Wild Card!
Wait that's 3 words and punctuation… but, more importantly though, Pecota gives them a 31.2% chance of making the playoffs, and Fangraphs is even more optimistic at 35.3%. Sure, I would take the under (maybe 1 in 4ish?), but since the MLB playoffs takes the top 40th percentile, we’re reminded that a very meh team will likely make the playoffs, and that very (very) meh team could just be the Giants. So, keep watching because flipping two coins only to have them both come up tails still happens.
It seems that you, Grant, and I are in agreement. The talent gap is….. well….. staggering. Focusing this last draft on hitters seemed like the right choice at least.
On a brighter note, please say hello to kdl for me😊.