Brewers/Giants series preview

When you're rolling around in a pit of your own misery and self-pity, think about the Brewers. Think about their season. Because I can do this:

Boy, the Giants sure are awful this year.

/turns rainglobe over
/giggles and claps hands
/laughs at Matt Holliday for an hour
/unwraps cigar, mixes tobacco with confetti

Ah, but it's more than simple nostalgia getting me through the dark times. Buster Posey is in his prime. Pablo Sandoval is still young and on the team next year. Brandons Belt and Crawford are young and around for a while, and the same goes for Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner. While I'm not happy about how this season is going, I'm not exactly writing off the future. There's still young talent on this team (and a lot of money coming off the books).

The Brewers, though. Man alive, this is not a pretty season for them. Consider this:

• They're about to go through the Bonds thing with their franchise cornerstone, Ryan Braun. That's all people will talk about with the Brewers now. And they won't even have home-run chases to distract from it.
• Braun wasn't having his typical season. Maybe he needs the super serum to be an MVP-type after all. Which would be a lousy thing to find out two years before his gigantic extension even starts.
• Rickie Weeks is broken again.
• Almost all of their young pitchers are broken, too. Or, at least, struggling.
• Yovani Gallardo is broken, and he doesn't have the K/BB numbers like Lincecum or Cain to give you hope, even of the false kind.
• Brewers fans thought they had Norichika Aoki for the next four years. They were wrong.
• They might have the worst farm system in the National League.

Other than that ...

It's been an amazingly awful season for the Brewers, in which they're wasting breakout seasons from Carlos Gomez and Jean Segura. Imagine if Brandon Crawford kept his April production up and Brandon Belt was hitting .300/.380/.480 and the Giants were even worse. Actually, don't.

And now they're in San Francisco for a four-day awful-off. Think of it as a playoff race to the bottom because here's the current 2013 MLB Draft order:

1. Houston Astros
2. Chicago White Sox (4.5 back)
3. Miami Marlins (7)
4. Milwaukee Brewers (10.5)
5. Chicago Cubs (12.5)
6. San Francisco Giants (13)

It's too late to catch the Astros, and it would be too depressing to catch the Marlins. So catching the Brewers are the only consolation prize worth begrudgingly accepting.

As always, the real answer is for the Giants to win every game for the rest of the season and hope they draft the next Matt Cain at #30. But as long as we're wallowing in the mire, let's look for silver linings in case the Giants lose the awful-off.

These are two bad teams, everyone. But if I had the chance to switch places with the Brewers, I wouldn't do it. And that's before 2010 and 2012 are taken into account. People want to slap us upside the head when we whine too much. The Brewers are one of the reasons why.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go whine too much ...

Hitter to watch
Caleb Gindl, everyone.



Caleb Gindl. He's Felipe Crespo with an extra 20 pounds and without the platform shoes. He's also raking and the best. According to the BMI index, Mr. Gindl is obese. That's not accurate, of course. That's his picture at the top of this post. He's just stout. Really, really stout. Really, really, really stout. His offseason home is in Belegost. And I'm fascinated by him.

Pitcher to watch
Tyler Thornburg is one of the few Brewers prospects worth paying attention to, but I can't tell if I'm expecting him to dominate the Giants, or if I'm looking for the 27-year-old minor-league vet, Donovan Hand, to do it.

Why not both? Why not both. Though I don't think we can out-cynic Brewers fans in this awful-off. This is going to be one awful battle.

Prediction
Errors. Runs. Unearned runs. Earned runs. Someone getting their belt caught on second base. Someone from the other team falling into the water. It should be fun.