Three games, three runs. The almost-thrill of having league-average hitters in several lineup slots? Replaced with the fear that the second-half Giants will be just as bad offensively as everyone expected them to be for the whole season.
You can put a frog in a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat, the old story goes, but the frog will stay put until the boiling water kills it. I present your official 2008 second-half Giants metaphor. The heat is suck. The frog is us. If the Giants' hitters from 2007 show up in the second half of 2008, they'll still get their playing time. The decline won't be obvious when Bochy looks at the numbers. It'll be just like a fire slowly getting hotter.
Wait, maybe that means the hitters are the frog. No, wait. The hitters would be the suck-fire, and we're still the frog. No matter. It's still easy to picture a progression like this:
...huh...that's weird...I thought Durham was hitting higher than .260.
August
...I guess there weren't any takers for Aurilia...at least he's still hitting...wait, how did his home run total go down?....
September
...how can Jose Vizcaino be a September call-up? He wasn't even with the organi...wait, I wonder if he could play third?...I wonder if he could hit third?...Things are looking up!
And the whole time, the struggling hitters will stay in the lineup, as the decline of everyone in the lineup will be too gradual to notice. The exception will be Omar Vizquel, as he'll slowly crawl up to the Mendoza line, and the organization will point out that, heck, just (blank) weeks ago, Vizquel was hitting .155, so proud we are of him to get back to .200.
I got nothing. The offense has been better than expected so far. It's probably going to get worse. Open moping thread.