Dusty Baker can save the Giants’ offense

We keep wondering how the Giants will fix a lineup that has lost the ability to compete in the 21st century, but the team’s recent move to bring Dusty Baker back into the fold suggests that they’re playing twelve dimensional chess while we’re over here blogging.

Maybe you don’t remember that before he was a successful field manager, he was a top flight hitting instructor. Maybe you never even knew that he produced an instructional hitting video that he made available for sale back in the nineties (the 1990s).

He opens his sales pitch with the line, “You know, great hitting has always been a part of Giants Baseball” — ah, those were the days! For a good long while, great hitting was all the organization had. Those days are gone now, but they were replaced by a run of sharp pitching that netted the team three World Championships. I submit to you that this was a worthwhile trade-off.

It’s not about getting back to a pre-pitching era of Giants Baseball, it’s about getting the dudes with the bats to not be so below league average that it calls into question the team’s reason for existing.

The Giants are not fun to watch and haven’t been since the second half of 2016 — that’s a long time for a team that’s put 100% of their effort towards being good at baseball. In fact, that’s catastrophically, unreasonably bad! But maybe Dusty Baker’s hitting instruction video can get them back on track...

In the video, Dusty will teach the Giants:

• The importance of bat selection (maybe they’ve been using the wrong bats all along!)
• Depth and discipline at the plate (this... this can’t possibly mean working the count and drawing walks, can it?)
• Stance and balance (maybe they’ve taken the wrong views on certain issues, like hitting baseballs, and they’ve become biased in their viewpoints — makes sense. We live in a polarized country!)
• Grip on the bat (wow, he’s got them dead to rights here: the Giants do need to get a grip!)
• Box and bat angle (it’s all about the angles, man)
• Inward turn (he who cannot look inward cannot live outward)
• Stride (a solid gum!)
• Swing (it don’t mean a thing without it)

You’ll also learn “easy memory aides” like “squish the bug”, “step on thin ice”, and “Ike to Mike”. These are key phrases that every successful hitter knows but that the Giants have replaced because they think they’re smarter than the system.

You know what I’m talking about. We hear all the time about how the Giants like to “hashtag no filter”, “dab oppression” and “flib the jib”. This video will help them reset, get back to basics, and respect the classics, because the classics work.

There are multiple tapes in this series, but the Giants have plenty of time to watch them since they won’t be participating in the postseason again. Tape One is a systematic approach to hitting, Tape Two corrects ten common hitting mistakes, and Tape Three contains twenty solid hitting drills.

The organization needs to rethink their entire philosophy and I think Dusty Baker’s instructional hitting videos are a better starting point than staring at the back of baseball cards and dreaming of the 1960s.

DustyBaker.com is no longer a functioning website, so hopefully, the Giants know how to get a hold of this hitting guru.