Giants pummelled, lose 10-2

The Giants have allowed 20 hits or more in just three games over the last five seasons. In each of those seasons, they won the World Series.

Not sayin'. Just sayin'. When life gives you lemons, you have to ferment them and drink the moldy lemon wine until you throw up and see through time. You can't argue with history, no sir or ma'am.

★★★

I'm not sure when you got a chance to reflect on exactly what happened with the Giants last year. It was absurd and then it was more absurd, and we should have been a lot more confused while the whole thing was going on. When I reflected back on the season to write the Giants chapter in the Baseball Prospectus annual -- won't you buy three today? -- the explanation was simple. Madison Bumgarner pitched in almost half of the games in the postseason. He was magic, and he pitched a plurality of the games. Seems simple.

: Except, it's been five years now. We've seen Bumgarner have games that weren't magic. We've seen a lot of them, oddly enough. Remember that Twins game? I remember that Twins game. He'll have starts where his control is solid but his command is a mess -- that is, he's throwing strikes, but they're not quality strikes. Like FDR said, it's a fine line between clever and stupid.

This was one of those starts. He had velocity. He did not have command. Happens. It stinks. But it happens.

Do you want to read more about Bumgarner's start? Well, let me just show you 37 GIFs that explain exactly what went wrong. Here is the first warmup pitch he took in the majors back in 2009, where you'll see his arm come across at a 49º angle instead of a 50º angle, which he showed tonig

★★★

No, I do have GIFs for you. I found this on my computer.

★★★

I also found this on my computer.

★★★

I was just talking to family today about Casey McGehee. My cousin asked, "Hey, I just noticed Pablo Sandoval is on the Red Sox. What's up with that?" And I told him that Sandoval was a bad person with bad opinions who made bad decisions. Then he asked who replaced Sandoval. After he got the answer, he asked, "Well, is he any good?"

Eh, I responded. He's fine.

That's why the Giants have McGehee. He's fine. He's better than most of the things the team could unearth in the minors. He's better than a bad six-year contract in the open market, and he's not that much worse than whatever the Giants could get by packaging Andrew Susac and assorted prospects. He's functional, the Giants needed functional. He's fine.

And one one swing, McGehee wasn't fine.

The early reports are a left knee strain, which is a touch ominous, so here's where you'll learn about the genius of Casey McGehee. Sometimes fine is more than fine. Sometimes it's great. When the alternative is Joaquin Arias or "other," it's easy to appreciate the kinda-sorta-okay of McGehee. Now he's broken in some capacity.

Now we have no belt, no pence, and no ... case ... y ... this joke needs some work, come back in a week.

The Giants are down three starters from what we were looking forward to after an underwhelming offseason, and that's just in the lineup. There are pitchers who are DL'd and gimpy and uncertain. This is about as bad as it can get, though, so don't dwell too much on it.

Susac came out of Sacramento’s game. Twitter folk say he was slammed in finger by a foul ball. Didn’t look good. #SFGiants

— Henry Schulman (@hankschulman) April 12, 2015

Things can get a lot worse, so please, dwell on this. Dwell on it until you fix it on your own.

★★★

Bruce Bochy had a quick double-switch for Brandon Crawford in a hopeless game. Crawford's replacement made a costly error.

Good. Not good that there was an error, but good that Crawford and his stealthily sketchy shoulder can get some rest here and there. I like the strategy of "don't give up ... but this is probably a dooky game, so I'll play the odds and take some rest where I can find it." He did it with Angel Pagan later, too.

★★★

Ryan Vogelsong didn't look good, but no one did. At least it wasn't Yusmerio Petit wasting his talents again.

★★★

Maybe the slappy scrappy Padres were doing us a favor when they won 1-0. Maybe they were our greatest allies.