A Bit of This and That

Okay, so I've let my blarg go a bit. I'm going to claim that the demands of real life have interfered. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The Giants' world has been busy the last week. I'll hit a few miscellaneous points that had caught my attention.

First off, I'm just lovin' the new managing partner's name. Neukom. Nuke 'em. The possibilities. . . Plus, he's a lawyer. It gives me hope that one day I, too, can run a baseball team. Well, once I make $100 million to invest in a club (a girl can dream!). I read through an article about Neukom. The quote that stands out most to me is from a former law school classmate (who is now president of the Seattle Mariners), who said " he doesn't like to lose." That gives me some hope - maybe he'll be willing to do something to get this team moving forward. And the dean of Stanford Law School says "He has the audacity to really set ambitious goals, and then he does it by sheer force of personality." That could also bode well for the Giants.

But will management be willing to go so far as Kevin Towers, GM of the last place Padres. He said "I'm certainly not going to watch this for another four months," he told reporters yesterday. He also said, "We've got some hungry players down below looking for an opportunity. There's not one player in the system who is going to turn it around. If we make changes, it will be wholesale." The Giants management has taken hesitant steps in the direction of bringing up the kids, but we continue to see the old (and ineffective) veterans in the line-up day to day, with the kids on the bench. And the results have been predictably dismal.

On the plus side, though, Eugenio Velez has been sent back down. I was initially a big supporter of Velez. He was fast and bold. But really, it turns out that he was inattentive and made bad decisions. His defense was suspect. And he got picked off way too often. As Bochy said: "It's a few things. He's been struggling at the plate. He's getting frustrated with that. It looks like his defense was affected. That, and the pickoffs. It seems like no matter what he did, things didn't go right for him. This is the right thing to do, send him down and get his game back." He wasn't ready for the bigs just yet, and it wasn't the place for him to learn. Sabean acknowledged as much: "It's obvious he doesn't have major-league playing time and doesn't know how to perform day in and day out offensively or defensively."

Next up: Taking a look at Tim Kawakami's blog about which players to keep, and which should go.