8.04.2005

You gotta love these kids...

Well, doesn't that wrap the season in a nutshell: Moises Alou injured. This type of season is what the Warriors are suppose to have, not the Giants. :^)

Then right after we trade away our main backup catcher, our starting catcher is out on leave, and the replacement from Fresno costed the Giants the first two games of the series with the Rockies with his errors, as we would have won both games without the unearned runs that were scored.

The Giants already have enough problems generating power with Alou in the lineup. Without Alou and Bonds, it would be like the A's without Chavez' and Crosby's and Swisher's power. Which they essentially were the first two months of the year and you saw how many games they won doing that.

Now it would take someone stepping up the power and delivering or we'll be 7.5 games back after today (SD won already). Because we are not really a speed team either, Vizquel and Winn are good basestealers but are not ones who can drive that type of offense, they are complemenary pieces.

So, just mere days after acquiring Winn, supposedly to go for it all, the Giants have reversed field and announced that they are going young (for sure, really, this time we will): Rueter has been placed in the bullpen again, Correia is taking his place today, and Niekro will be seeing more of the ABs at 1B. All said and done and reversed before, so we'll see what happens now.

But Niekro needs to learn how to hit RHP. Adding Winn improved the hitting vs. RHP but taking out Snow and putting in Niekro just negated that improvement, if not dropped it overall. He needs to start figuring it out (I wish I could find his R/L splits for 2004 somewhere to see if there is any hope along those lines).

In addition, we need the vets to step it up, Durham has for a while but Alfonzo is MIA since coming off the DL. If he can come around and be as hot as he was in April, that would be extremely helpful. Hopefully Tucker can start getting hot as well, he and Ellison are probably going to platoon in RF while Alou is out. And Feliz will have to start knocking the ball out again, he has cooled off a little after his hot streak, we need another one while Alou is out.

I had thought that maybe the addition of Winn plus news that Benitez is pitching and may return soon, could be a good impetus for the team to start winning, but the loss of Alou and the poor defense of the new catcher, has really costed us the past two games. There are too many IFs that has to happen now for the Giants to compete and yet it has happened before, so I wait and see.

But the two losses have been severely damaging to their chances, though they continue to hang by the same few threads that they had before. And I see that there are just a few grains of sand left in the playoff hourglass for the Giants, it was suspended for a while by the 'Dres' losing streak but has begun falling again. The end is near unless someone can turn it around...

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