Not again: Niekro injured

I was going to mention Niekro's penchant for injuries in my comment to the posters of comments to my last post but I thought I was being unfair to him. Lo and behold, minutes later I learn that Niekro hit a foul ball off his left big toe and had to be brought to the hospital. Hopefully it is just sore but if not, then Snow will be the beneficiary of this, maybe he can use this opportunity to get hot hitting like he did last season.

Oh, by the way, the Giants lost again.... I just realized that Barry's problems mirror the Giants woes. He had an infection so bad that he was just worried about surviving it intact, let alone recovering enough to play baseball. The Giants are losing so much that right now all we can think about is surviving it OK, let alone recovering enough to make the playoffs.

Not to sound Pollyannish, but the Giants are still not that far back that they cannot put together a good run and get back into the thick of things. Just like the past few years, the fast sprinters that took first slowed down and fell back to the pack for another team to sprint to take first place and so on. But it won't just happen, we need someone to lift the team on his shoulders and push them forward and upward. Hopefully Linden can continue his streak of hitting in AAA here in the majors, if he can put together a nice run of power hitting, it might just give the team a spark. However, like a infant, first we need to learn to crawl before we can think about walking and then running...

One thing I've been wondering is why Alou still hit Vizquel 2nd? He has usually been pretty good at discerning the cold hitters and moving them down but Vizquel hasn't done much in the 2 spot for a long while now and I was wondering how it would work if we led off with Durham again (now that he's hitting again) but hit Ellison 2nd? Then we bat Vizquel 8th to put speed down there and have sort of a leadoff hitter to get on for the pitcher to advance. Couldn't be any worse than what's been happening lately.