Monday BP, 8/6/18

Late last night, I posted a McCovey Chronicles Caption McContest which closes next Thursday, August 16th at 11:59pm Pacific Time. Just wanted to make sure everybody saw it.

Also, in addition to $6 tickets for tonight’s home game against the Astros, StubHub has t$6 tickets for Thursday and Friday’s night games against the Pirates and $36 tickets for Saturday’s game which will feature the jersey number retirement ceremony for Barry Lamar Bonds. And then, $14 tickets for Sunday’s afternoon finale. That’s a pretty ridiculous run of pricing for a team that’s still in playoff contention and with a lot of goodies still to see before the season runs out, so consider grabbing some low price tickets through our SB Nation sponsor.

In the meantime, Evan Longoria is 15-for-46 with 2 home runs, 3 doubles, and a triple since returning from the disabled list and —

— which, hey, look, that’s not nothing. And, to my larger point, 107 of Evan Longoria’s 273 career home runs (39.2%) have come in August and September, which makes me wonder: if Longoria sniffs a run late in the season, will he simply come to life like some sort of preternatural beast that’s remarkably good at Baseball? After all those years on the Rays is Evan Longoria conditioned to rage against the dying of the light?

And, if so, does that actually give the .500 Giants an advantage against the 8 teams (LA, AZ, MIL, ATL, COL, STL, WAS, PIT) they’re competing against for a playoff spot? The Giants have been huffing nostalgia all offseason and all of 2018. At some point, they’re gonna get delusional and go on a run here. Sure, they might give away a 10-game winning streak with an 8-game losing streak, but we still might get that 10-gamer and it might have a lot to do with Evan Longoria. Maybe?

Plotting out the rest of August (23 games) and figuring in Belt’s return in a couple of weeks, I can see the Giants losing both games to Houston, splitting against Pittsburgh, getting 1 of 3 against the Dodgers, winning the series against the Reds (as tough as that will be), winning the series against the Mets in New York, taking 2 out of 3 against Texas, taking 2 out of 3 against Arizona or splitting that 4-game stretch in the last week (3 against AZ, 1 at AT&T against the Mets). That puts them at 69-67, setting up the make or break final month of September and its 26 games.

If the Giants are going to stay in the race and at the very least make the other teams — particularly their division rivals — sweat it out a little bit, then they’ll need to put together back-to-back winning months for the first time since May & June of 2016 (21-8 and 17-10, respectively), which is the only other time since August & September of 2014 (16-12 and 13-12, respectively) that they’ve accomplished that, record-wise.

This seems like an emotionally harmful and psychologically de-motivating long shot, but that’s the wagon the Giants have hitched themselves to and as a site devoted to covering them like LA news covers a police chase, we’ve got to watch until this wagon rides into a ravine.