No, the Giants' home opener yesterday didn't go so well. Yes, the 1-6 Giants have the worst record in the National League. How does this story end? Tim Kawakami offers some grisly details:
Can you blame the negative hooting from the crowd when Barry Zito was announced in the pregame introductions and when the Giants went down in order six times in nine innings?
How does 55-107 sound? Like this: Boo!
"You can't win every game 1-0," catcher Bengie Molina said. "I wish we could, but we can't. It's just the reality. We need to hit."
They need to do a lot of things, but clearly, the lack of a single dangerous hitter in the lineup is Problem No. 1.
The Giants are averaging under three runs a game, and I believe that's an over-achievement, given the swings I've seen.
--snip--
The remarkable thing about the badness of the 2008 Giants is that they can be bad in a multiplicity of ways.
They can be bad old (Rich Aurilia, Dave Roberts, Ray Durham, Keiichi Yabu). They can be bad middle-aged (Barry Zito, Jose Castillo). They can be bad hurt (Omar Vizquel, Randy Winn). They can be bad young (everybody else).
They have a manager who is stuck with what he has and isn't very good at figuring out how to maximize what he has. Their most expensive player is a pitcher who is trending toward disaster. They have a farm system that won't be providing significant talent for years.
It isn't yet mid-April, and they already are playing out the string. They're that bad and I swear by July, we're all going to need a thesaurus to describe them.
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I don't disagree with anything Kawakami writes, here or anywhere else. When he mentions 55-107 (boo!) it doesn't
feel wrong, does it?
But what has changed since Opening Day, exactly? Sure, a few nicks and scrapes here and there, same as most teams are going to suffer over the course of a typical week. Nothing that's going to significantly impact the figures. And just one week ago, the figures didn't suggest the Giants were anywhere near lousy enough to lose 107 games.
I sort of collect preseason projections, and this season I collected six of them: five "computer" projections and one betting line. The Giants' record this season, as predicted by those six: 73-89, 74-88, 79-83, 74-88, 69-93, 71-91. If you average all those records, you wind up with 74-88.
But I didn't believe the Giants would be that good. So I went way, way, way farther than usual and knocked four wins off their consensus projection. Let me be clear about this: While I often adjust the figures up or down for various reasons, four games is a real stretch. So I took this drastic (for me) measure … and I still have the Giants winning 70 games.
Why? How? I don't know. Even if I checked projections for each Giant, I probably still wouldn't know. What I do know is that a great way to go broke quickly is betting against the consensus projections. Last year the Nationals were supposed to lose 100 games; they went 73-89. The year before that the Marlins were supposed to lose 100 games; they went 78-84. In both cases (as I recall) the consensus projections suggested that neither team would lose anything like 100 games.
So yes, the Giants look
bad right now. Also: abominable, atrocious, awful, crappy, crummy, deficient, dreadful, god-awful, gross, inferior, lousy, stinking, substandard and the pits.
But they don't look to me like a 100-loss team. Not yet.
Rob Neyer
