Tuesday BP, 5/8/18

Every team loses 11-0! Nothing’s wrong with that! Baseball seasons are long and winding! Blowouts just a part of the deal! It doesn’t matter that it felt like a portent of things to come! The Phillies will have to prove they can stomp on the Giants four straight games! Which is not an easy thing to do to any major league team! The Giants will be fine! But maybe Jeff Samardzija won’t be! But he probably will be! You can’t take anything from just one game! Nothing!

Anyway, it is a long season, and this won’t be the last blowout loss for the Giants. Even a sweep leaves them at 19-19, which is still far better off than we figured them to be at this point in the season after losing Bumgarner and Samardzija at the end of Spring Training.

In the meantime, in a desperate, futile attempt yesterday to scrape data from Giants history to funnel into the site’s content initiative, I took a look at the 1998 Giants’ offense through the first 34 games and compared those numbers to those from the 2018 Giants. Era adjustment is probably important here, but look at these anyway:

1998

2018

Way more strikeouts in this year’s edition (3 strikeouts for every walk! My god, that’s completely, inexcusably awful!), but more home runs somehow. The only reason why I bring this up is because this year’s team does not have Barry Bonds or any quality starting pitching at the moment, but the baseball season is long, and if the 1998 Giants could make some noise with a scattershot roster, then maybe Sabean really can do it again. And as I stated on this week’s Chroncast, Sabean is back, baby. The difference between that team and this team, of course — okay, other than 2018 not having Barry Bonds on the roster — is Bruce Bochy. Get Bruce Bochy to the playoffs and it won’t be like you have Dusty Baker managing your team in the playoffs.