Joe Posnanski : Royals :: Me : Giants

It's no secret that Joe Posnanski is one of my favorite baseball writers. Aside from his endearing man-crush on our own Kuiper, he's just very good at what he does.

This morning I was reading his blog post about a "sixth stage" of grief with respect to his team, the Kansas City Royals, and realized that his feelings about the Royals' GM and his construction of the team's roster easily mirror my own about the Giants. He describes the stages of Royals grief. Here are my stages of Giants grief.

There's the Anger. That's how I feel about the Molina signing. Not because Molina is necessarily worse than any other player available (although I'm not sold on his contributions to the team), but because I can't believe that his attitude will change this year, and because it shows how the front office just so easily reverts to the same rut it was in before, while touting it as a good move.

Bargaining. Like JoePo, some of us have hoped that certain signings from this off-season and last would somehow revert to form. Not going to happen, I'm sure, but a part of me does hope that it's possible. Will F Sanchez recover from his various surgeries, and somehow recapture his batting stroke from 2 years ago? Will Huff provide some fo the offense he exhibited a couple seasons back? With Renteria's off-season surgery return him to form? Doubtful, but wouldn't it be nice?

Depression. That's brought on by the ages of our starting lineup (Panda excepted). Gah.

Acceptance. Okay, I'll admit I'm not all the way there, yet. But what can you do - the roster is what it is (wait - did I just reach acceptance?).

Now here's where JoePo sees into my soul and expresses what I feel. He comes up with a "sixth stage" of grief - Bafflement. This probably describes more precisely my reaction to Sabean's moves this off-season. Read what Posnanski says about the surplus of mediocre, aging outfielders on the Royals. Sound familiar? Now pay close attention to the discussion of Bill James' analysis of how aging affects players' abilities, and his conclusion of how the Royals' FO ignores this kind of thing based on the signings of older players: "I suspect they're not investing enough study time in the aging process." Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so.

Other quotes that capture my feelings about the Giants:

But what makes the whole thing so baffling is that I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to accomplish

In this one, sub "Giants" for "Royals", and this describes our team pretty well, too:

. . . they are going around the league and signing 30-somethings that nobody else wants. It is troubling that the Royals apparently plan in 2010 is to make fans hope that a bunch of older players will recapture their past glory — or at least their past moderate success.

And finally, this seems eerily familiar as well:

It is troubling that Dayton Moore’s entirely sensible plan for success — find young players, develop them, bring them to the big leagues — seems to be spinning in the mud. If you are going to be that kind of organization, you actually have to BE that kind of organization. I don’t know if Jason Kendall, Scott Podsednik, Jose Guillen, Rick Ankiel, Yuniesky Betancourt, Kyle Farnsworth, Juan Cruz and so on are are blocking any promising younger players from the big leagues.

But I guess that’s the point: If they ARE blocking younger talents, then the Royals are doing a lousy job of developing players.

And if they ARE NOT blocking younger talents, then the Royals are doing a lousy job of developing players.

In short, I think that maybe Giants' fans alleged negativity this off-season may have more to do with this "sixth stage" of grief of Bafflement, more than anything else. We love our team; we've been lapping up promises of going younger and looking for success, only to see a bunch of old guys. And we're not seeing our supposed prospects being cleared for a role with the team. We're not overwhelmingly negative. Maybe we're just baffled.

Ready for more Sabean and Bochy?

I'm watching Baggs' live chat this morning. This exchange came up:

Q: Bruce Bochy and Brian Sabaen's contracts are both expired after the season. How successful do the Giants need to be (playoffs? world series appearance?) for Neukom to bring them back?

baggs: Pretty good chance they'll be back based on the team's progress to date. Remember, Neukom's goal was to be .500 this year. They're ahead of schedule. And they had what most observers believe was another decent draft. The minor league system is healthier. It seems like Neukom has a great respect for the way Brian and Bruce go about their jobs. When I asked him just prior to the All-Star break if Bochy deserved credit, he said yes, the manager has created a good esprit de corps and has put players in position to succeed. I've been told all parties intend to honor a pledge not to negotiate extensions until after the season, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've already come to some kind of loose arrangement. If they go to the playoffs, it'll be all the more automatic.

Are we ready for more of these two? Have the GM and coach done well enough to come back for more? Admittedly, the Giants have done much better this season than I anticipated. But I can't help but shake the feeling that the team could have done even better with a different skipper.

"Zeet Games"

There's a new baseball stat, courtesy of Tim Kawakami: "Zeet Games": http://tinyurl.com/lsbt4k. The leader in ZGs? Barry Zito, of course.

Sadly, Randy Johnson has also logged a number of Zeet Games.

I have to agree with Kawakami - when does management decide that Zito is hurting more than helping in the wild card race, and stick him in the 'pen?

I'm suspicious of my mailman. . .

I've subscribed to Sports Illustrated for at least 15 years. My absolute favorite issue is the annual baseball preview issue. And yet, for the last 8 years, I have never (and I do mean never) received this issue in the mail. All other issues (including the swimsuit issue) arrive week in and week out without fail. But the baseball preview issue? Never comes.

I've had a number of years to ponder why. And I have no good answer. So I let the irrational part of my brain try to figure it out. And my crazy side determined that my mail carrier is a stinkin' baseball preview issue thief. I'm picturing someone sitting in the post office, sorting mail, and saying "This here Sports Illustrated baseball preview issue has a GIRL's name on it. No way a girl likes baseball, so I'm sure she won't miss it if I take it home to read in the john." And so he does. And then I never get it (although I suppose I should be grateful that the mailman doesn't deliver it a week later after enjoying it on the throne).

So today I put in my annual request to Sports Illustrated for a replacement copy.

And I'm gonna give my mailman the stink eye next time I see him.

Barry won't be a Twin (duh)

The Twins have passed on Barry Bonds this year. The GM says their OF is fully stocked, and they don't need a cranky old man with creaky knees (you gotta read between the lines to pick up on that last part).

Should we expect 30 stories about each team that passes on Bonds?

As much as I would have liked to see Barry play one more season, I'm not sure I want to see 44 year old Barry try to strap on the elbow armor at this point.

Google Calendar Hates Baseball!

Okay, maybe not. But I did discover yesterday that Google Calendar has made adding a SF Giants game schedule to your calendar a lot more difficult than it used to be.

It used to be that when you wanted to add a public calendar to your own, you could browse through a "gallery" of calendars, searching by calendar title, to find the one you want. There would usually be a few SF Giants schedules available, complete with broadcast info. You'd pick one you like, click on a little doo-dad button thingy, and it would be added to your calendar. Easy-peasy.

So in anticipation of the start of the 2009 season, I opened up my calendar and clicked on the "Add" button, only to find that there was no more browsing capability. Turns out Google decided it was too hard to maintain the list (umm, isn't finding and pointing to information kinda what they do?), so they killed it off last month. It took a bit of searching through the Google Calendar support forums to figure this out. Funny thing - Google puts all sorts of crap up in the top corner of my calendar page to point out the useless stuff they add to the calendar, but they don't bother to tell you about the useful stuff they take away.

At any rate, to add a public calendar now, you need to know the URL. How the hell am I supposed to know the frakkin' URL of a public calendar that somebody makes? Fortunately, the SF Giants schedule page offers help to add the schedule to your Google Calendar. Unfortunately, the URL they give you is incomplete and useless (at least using Firefox on Mac - YMMV).

Not one to give up easily, I perused the page source and found the correct URL, and finally added the schedule to my calendar.

For those of you who want to try this at home, ignore whatever the SF Giants schedule page tells you to do. Here's the right URL: http://mlb.mlb.com/soa/ical/schedule.ics?team_id=137&season=2009

Now go ahead and add in the schedule, so that you never miss a game!

Interesting Perspective on A-Roid

I spent some time reading what FoxSport's Jason Whitlock had to say about not just Alex Rodriguez and his little steroid problem, but the issue of steroids in general and where the real culpability may lie (hint: not necessarily the players, but maybe the owners).

I don't have much time to add commentary right now, but wanted to post the links to Part I and Part II. Go read 'em. I may get a chance to write something about it later.