Thursday, May 05, 2005

 

The Food Is Bad, But There Is Plenty Of It

The San Francisco Giants played their twenty-seventh game of the season yesterday. Twenty-seven games comprises exactly one-sixth of a baseball season. That is a good enough excuse to assess the team's season thus far.

Going into this season, the conventional wisdom on the team included the following:

* The starting pitching staff would be better in 2005.
* The bullpen would be better, if only because of Benitez.
* The offense, in the absence of Barry Bonds, would stink to high heaven.
* Barry Bonds would return, and then everything would be all right.

The conventional wisdom is an ass.

The starting pitchers have ERAs of 3.76, 4.89, 4.96, 5.60 and 6.48. If those were on the Richter scale, people would be dead, crushed by fallen masonry and torn apart by shattered glass. Instead, the damage is to the standings. The starters are a collective 6 and 11. Jerome Williams has been shipped in a duffel bag to Fresno, and Jason Schmidt has issued a $100,000 reward for the location of his fastball. Brett Tomko is brilliant until he makes a mistake. Then his fragile psyche crumbles, along with his abilities.

The bullpen has been either a complete joke, or completely brilliant. However, Benitez is gone. The rest of the bullpen is scurrying to find their new place, as bugs do when you turn over a rock. Felipe Alou is hoping that Jim Brower will be the new Benitez, but it seems more likely that he might be the new Matt Herges.

The offense has been a pleasant surprise. Edgardo Alfonzo, J.T. Snow, Lance Niekro, Jason Ellison, Pedro Feliz, and Omar Vizquel are all hitting well, and hitting often. Even without SuperBarry, the Giants lead the National League in on-base percentage, runs scored, OPS, hits, and knee surgeries. This is true despite the horrible starts by Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, and Ray Durham. If the starting pitching had lived up to expectations, the Giants would be one of the best teams in all of baseball, even without Bonds. With Bonds, and with good starting pitching, they would be gods.

Bonds probably isn't coming back. His story is rapidly turning into a bad sequel to the Robb Nen movie. Today comes word that Barry's doctor is as professionally troubled as Bonds is. (Thanks to El Lefty Malo for finding this article.) For all we know, the doctor botched the first two operations, and we won't know about the third for a while. Even if everything is on the up and up, you can't operate on one 40-year-old knee three times in four months and expect good things. Brave Giants fans, face the future and prepare yourself for Bonds not to be in it, ever.

So here we are, lost somewhere in the outskirts of third place. Our map is wrong and the batteries in the flashlight are crapping out. We've sent out search parties to look for a way out. If we're lucky, one of them might not be eaten by Tommy Lasorda and report back.

Jefferson 3:08 PM

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