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| Giants need a Frenchy Spark |
Not much has changed in a week.
In an effort to muster some offense out of this lineup, Bochy put Brandon Belt at 3rd in the lineup moving Sandoval and Pence back since Belt is the only guy not named Posey who had been hitting a lick. So naturally Belt has one of the worst recorded games at the plate in history and went 0-8 with 5 strikeouts with 5 batters left on base.
All in all the Giants had 29 batters left on base last night in a 16 inning drag through hell game. If that Fire Sabean website isn't up yet they're just working on the links to the Fire Bochy website. All of this of course is incredibly premature. When did winning 2 championships in 3 years mean that you don't get a free pass the next year? Didn't we all say that these two men were blameless for the rest of their careers?
Yesterday Brian Sabean was destroyed on twitter for his interview where he stated that the Giants were most likely standing pat unless the team as a whole started to improve with the pieces they already had. He can't possibly trade out a whole lineup, or a whole rotation, he will only fill a hole if the team starts playing well and there's ONE hole to fill.
One of those holes is pretty obviously the loss of Angel Pagan. Sabean has realized how important Pagan was to the success of this team. His energy and his steady bat at the top of the order sets the table for the rest of the team. Early on this season Pagan said "Where I go, this team goes." As cocky as that sounded at first, it couldn't be more true. Pagan got injured and the Giants have been limping by ever since. Blanco just has not been able to fill that hole and not been able to get on base at all.
Another hole is a left fielder who can hit from the right side with some power. That hole may have been somewhat filled with the acquisition of Jeff Francoeur today.
With the Kansas City Royals waiving Francoeur and paying nearly all of his salary for this year, the Giants took very little risk and still ended up with a player who might just be able to revive his career playing for a team that many thought would be a championship contender.
Hey it's worked in the past right? Remember Pat Burrell? But for every Pat Burrell, there's a Xavier Nady and Nady did absolutely nothing last year. But what do these two moves have in common? The Giants signed a struggling outfielder who was waived from his team, and the Giants then went on to win the World Series.
Book it.
Jeff Francoeur is the Pat Burrell/Xaiver Nady of 2013.
In 2011 when the Giants went the route of a trade and gave up Zach Wheeler for Carlos Beltran, the team went from first place to missing the playoffs altogether and now are set to face Zach Wheeler in a Mets uniform. Never again!
What Sabean absolutely does not want to do is to give up other top prospects and forsake the future for a team that is not performing well anyway and may very well struggle the rest of the year. But what I do like about the Francoeur signing is that the Giants risk absolutely nothing, and they get SOMEONE to try to spark this team.
And if it doesn't work, the Giants will still have all of their top prospects to add next year. Here's hoping for the second coming of Pat Burrell...
Left Field Laws
If you want to focus on a positive, check out our man Timmy who had 11 strikeouts in 7 innings last night. The last time he had double digit strikeouts in a game was July 14, 2012 and that was his only double digit strikeout game all of last season.
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