San Francisco Giants: May 2019, A Eulogy

Any hopes of contention that the San Francisco Giants were clinging to when the month of May start have disappeared entering June.

The San Francisco Giants finished April with a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Gerardo Parra and Yangervis Solarte both played and Ty Blach gave up seven runs. They were 12-18. Not good, but still potentially in .500 territory. There was hope.

A lot can change in a month.

Sitting 15 games out of first place in the NL West standings, the Giants look all but done.

The bats are still asleep with a meager .227/.299/.381 batting line in the month of May. The pitching staff, which looked like a strong point, is now a dumpster fire with a 5.69 team ERA in May. Opponents hit a staggering .272/.352/.482 against Giants pitching in May.

Essentially, for an entire month, the Giants as a team hit like Madison Bumgarner and pitched like…not Madison Bumgarner.

Since 2017, the Giants have been mired in a team-wide slump that has now been going strong for three seasons. When is it less a slump and more a case of the players that were once winning championships simply not being good anymore?

The expectations that we have for our stars have not been met for basically three seasons in a row. At this point, we can no longer expect them to regress to the mean.

Buster Posey gets a pass. He had a rough first month coming off hip surgery but has been hitting the ball much better as of late. But what about the rest of the guys?

Brandon Crawford has had some anomalous months but has been a below average hitter for basically his entire career.  Brandon Belt has never figured out how to be consistently good and healthy at the same time. Joe Panik, bless his soul, might just be a role player on most good teams. Madison Bumgarner just does not look as dominant anymore, even when he’s on.

This is the cycle of baseball. Players have a window of prime that needs to be maximized and the Giants of course succeeded in that.

This May has shown us that the players we have grown to love, their numbers littered on the backs of patrons throughout Oracle Park, simply might not be good anymore. It’s tough to come to grips with that.

This past month has proved beyond a doubt that rebuilding is necessary

The revolving door that is the Giants outfield has shown that the players in the minor leagues are not potential Major League talents. Too many prospects coming up are Kevin Frandsen types—players who tear up the minor leagues and can’t quite put it together at the next level.

A new influx of talent from trading our valuable assets, however painful that may be, is paramount to the future success of this organization.

When the final pitch of 2019 is thrown by (insert prospect here), the 20,000 fans at Oracle Park will be ushering in a new day of San Francisco Giants baseball, and we will look back on May 2019 as the start of the teardown.