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Weird thing about the Giants this year is that they are fifteen games under .500 and yet considered to be a team that is better than expected. Even mildly enjoyable, especially compared to the last few years which brought on the same sort of enjoyment as would watching three Kate Hudson romantic comedies in a row. Now how can one say that of a team featuring some dude seemingly picked up from a local corporate softball league playing at third? Well, you can if the expectations were low. Really low. Like really, really low. At the beginning of the season, most fans and experts predicted that the team would lose somewhere around 140 games and be lucky to score even a run a game. We mean, how good can a team be if Bengie Molina is your friggin' cleanup hitter? Yet despite all that, the team has had just enough good pitching and just enough offense to at least be competitive in most of their games.
The team has also given Giants fans' a few treats to go along with their not-as-bad-as-expected-ness. There is, for instance, the ascendance of Timmy Lincecum to Pitching God and SI Cover Boy. Then there's the emergence of Jonathan Sanchez, Fred Lewis, and Brian Wilson as genuine major leaguers and the out-of-nowhere competence of Emmanuel Burriss and John Bowker. In other words, there's been just enough surprises to make things half-way entertaining. Kinda like Hancock.
Despite the fact that the team is, somehow, inexplicably still in it (they're only seven games back and in third place), the big question is whether and when the Giants will sit down their aging vets-- mainly Vizquel, Durham and Winn-- and let the kids play. Scuttlebutt has it the Giants keep trotting out the geezers because the front office thinks they can contend. Either that or they're hoping to entice some team into making a trade for them. As a result, there's been some hueing and crying from Giants' fandom to go young, something that will only intensify the more the season goes on. Our pet theory is that the front office won’t do it because they know they have no kids to play and aren't willing to pull a Kansas City Royals, but what do we know?
So what should we expect for the second half? Probably the same ole same ole-- occasional bouts of being followed by occasional bouts of nothingness. Actually, if Cain is officially out of his funk and Zito starts to become a real, live starting pitcher, the team could do better in the second half, but there's still no way this team can even think about contending.
There is good news, out there, however. The front office has shown signs of life and had themselves a great draft this year (their #1 pick just won the baseball equivalent of the Heisman Trophy) and they just signed some sixteen year-old Dominican stud. All of which means we could be seeing the start of something special. In 2011.
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