Giants lose sixth straight, make Americans not watching World Cup feel shame

The Giants will never win again. You will be 20 years older, on vacation, wearing a ratty, sad Giants hat, and a random dude will walk up and make fun of you for wearing the hat. He will be too young to remember 2010, 2012, or 2014. He will treat you like a carnival attraction, a complete freak.

Dude, what's with the hat? You know the Giants haven't won a game in 20 years, right? Ha ha, hey, check out this hat, everyone. This person is wearing it on purpose.

And you won't be able to explain why you still wear the hat, not in an easily understandable way. It won't matter in 20 years what the Giants did back here, back when they were good. All they'll be known for is for not winning another game since June, 2015. They'll be the greatest anomaly in the history of professional sports, and you'll just have to take it and wait for better times.

You'll sit down on the sand and sulk. And, again, you'll be 20 years older, so it will seem a lot sadder when you sit on the sand and sulk.

You'll want them to win just one game, just one. End the 3,158-game losing streak, please, you'll beg. They will not.

The Giants will never win another baseball game again.

★★★

Unless this is just one of those weird stretches that makes it far too easy to overreact to. Ha ha, boy, we'll sure have egg on our faces when the Giants sweep the Nationals in the NLCS, ha ha.

★★★

Ha ha.

★★★

Haaaa.

★★★

So the Nationals are clearly the better baseball team, and we should talk about that.

Think back to two or three weeks ago, when the Giants were winning and hitting the ball all over the place. Brandon Crawford was a legitimate middle-of-the-order slugger. Joe Panik and Matt Duffy were mirror images of the same contact-happy hitter. Brandon Belt wasn't dizzy. This was a team that could hit and win games by hitting more than the other team.

Then they faced a pair of solid pitching staffs, including one that should be in the postseason, and they looked like the 2009 Giants, unable to score more than a run at a time unless Jonathan Sanchez helped out with a drag bunt, or something.

Maybe this Giants team doesn't have an elite lineup that can make up for a lot of flaws. Maybe Crawford is the player we already figured he was, homer aside. Maybe Panik is the player we already figured he was. Duffy and Belt, too. Maybe Angel Pagan will never get his strength back. Maybe Norichika Aoki and Hunter Pence aren't going to come back soon, and maybe the Giants will go into every game with five or six spots in the lineup that don't fill you with confidence.

Maybe. I'll still take the over on the doom and gloom, not the under, but a streak like this makes me question everything like a sullen teenager and use the term "sheeple" unironically. Open your eyes, man. This team isn't that good. You're just eating the lies that the CSN Bay Area machine is feeding you, man.

Forget the streak, though. Forget the winless road trip. Think, instead, what it was like to watch when Ryan Vogelsong walked the first two hitters of the second inning. I know what I thought: Oh, they're going to lose. Usually in a spot like that, I'm thinking about double play permutations, about match-ups and who's coming up. Instead, I'm just thinking, "Well, there goes that game" even before a run has scored. Part of that feeling comes from the losing streak, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another part of that feeling comes from the moving images on the teevee, as if the players know it too.

The Giants will probably win again. It will be a fun game, with dingers or doubles or what have you. Heck, I'll take the other team making four errors. Not picky at this point. But it takes a start like this, when you accidentally drop the rose-colored glasses in the toilet, when you think, wait, that's Ryan Vogelsong pitching. He's not as good as Jordan Zimmermann anymore. He's not as good as any of these pitchers. What are the Giants doing, pretending they belong? What are the Giants doing?

The pendulum will swing back, and we'll realize the 2015 Giants aren't the worst team in franchise history, and, in fact, they might be pretty okay. But we just watched the Giants lose six games in a row and look disinterested doing it. It's hard to be chipper right now.

★★★

Phil Cuzzi is a better umpire than you would be. It's like how we make fun of Buster Posey for being slow, but if most of us lined up against him in a race, he'd decimate us. It's like how Joaquin Arias would make us look like toddlers in a Home Run Derby. We're used to a certain level of skill and ability, and when we don't see it, it's so very easy to rage. But Cuzzi is probably one of the 200 best umpires in the world, a professional with a skill level we'll never comprehend from a personal perspective.

Phil Cuzzi is still a very, very bad umpire. Johnnie LeMaster was booed so mercilessly once, he wore a jersey with the word "BOO" stitched on the back where his name should have been. He was still much better than most of the baseball players in the minors, in college, in Japan. He was just the worst player for that team, at that moment.

Cuzzi's like that, then. We've seen this before.

That was not a force play. It was the winning run, and it wasn't an especially close play. It was called an out, and the Giants lost the game in extra innings. Cuzzi is just the LeMaster of umpires. Tries so very hard, so very hard. Is also very bad.

Ryan Vogelsong probably shouldn't have come down off the mound and expressed his displeasure, but haven't you ever wanted to rage at a co-worker? That's what Cuzzi is, you know. He's not an adversary. He's not someone in a rival corporation. He's a co-worker. He's someone from internal affairs or HR, and he's just the worst. The Giants see him once every two months or something, but every time they see him, he's babbling about something irrelevant and asking for more forms. Finally, after Cuzzi said, "I think your important email got sent to my spam folder for some reason, idk," Vogelsong started yelling at him.

Man, I wish I could yell at Phil Cuzzi. For charity or something. Just call him a fuzzy banana and all the Jake Peavy curses I can think of.

That's what happened with Vogelsong. After the fourth time in 20 minutes that Cuzzi loaded the copier with the wrong paper, Vogelsong had enough.

Can't blame him.

★★★

Andrew Susac's mustache?

No.

★★★

There was a minor Twitter/TV controversy about Angel Pagan's lackadaisical approach to the ball on Bryce Harper's double in the eighth.

On one side: John Kruk, who posited that Pagan lollygagged the ball, allowing Harper to speed into second, unchecked. Kruk didn't shut up about it for the entire inning, even making comments about it in the top of the ninth.

On the other side: Henry Schulman, who claims that Harper busted it out of the box, which made Pagan's effort irrelevant. It was going to be a double.

It was almost certainly going to be a double. The ball hung up, fell in the perfect spot, and there was a freakish athlete running like fire tarantulas were chasing him. I can buy that. On the other hand, Pagan was clearly surprised on the ball. He did lollygag.

That's the issue, really, that Pagan was surprised. It's not an issue of if he could have thrown him out. It was the look of whoa-wait on his face as he got the ball into second. I want to see a Giants player turn a single into a double. I want to watch a Giants fielder throw out an overly aggressive, arrogant runner. It's been a week or two. I know there are players on the Giants who can do that. I know they will again. It might happen on Monday.

When it's the middle of a dull, feckless losing streak, though, and the contrast is right in front of you, it's impossible not to get annoyed and/or livid. The Nationals played like they wanted it and the Giants played like they just didn't want it, and now you're analyzing games like you're Hawk Harrelson, and that makes you even more annoyed.

The Giants have lost six games in a row, and they're just a game over .500. When they started this road trip, they were a game out of first place, and now they're four games back. It's been a week of very, very bad baseball. Come back, May. We miss you.