SF Giants prove to us yet again that this is already a lost season

One would love to say they were surprised, but they’d probably be lying. Any SF Giants fan who has followed the team closely this season knew there was a pretty decent chance the bullpen would blow Saturday’s game against the Chicago Cubs and blow it they did.

They almost had us fooled for a second, though. Manager Tony Vitello went with his three best arms in the bullpen, Caleb Kilian, Erik Miller, and Keaton Winn, to try to secure the victory. They got oh so close, but from my seat up in the nosebleeds of section 425 when I saw Pete Crow-Armstrong was due up in the bottom of the ninth I knew it was going to perilous.

The Giants needed just one more out but Winn, who has been San Francisco’s best reliever this season, grooved the first pitch right down the middle and Crow-Armstrong ripped over the right field wall for a homer to tie the game. It’s easy to second guess, but that’s an at-bat where you just have to attack the corners. 

Obviously you don’t want to walk a guy with speed who represents the tying run and bring the winning run to the plate, but Crow-Armstrong was hot and already had a homer on the day. They shouldn’t have given him anything good there and if they get him out, great, but if not they live to see another batter that would have been a better matchup for Winn.

Instead, it went to extra innings and, predictably, the Giants were unable to score the automatic runner in the top of the tenth and Chicago walked it off in the bottom half of the inning.

Giants' bullpen struggles are no shock after lack of offseason investment

This is nothing new. We all knew the bullpen was going to be pretty bad this season and it has lived up to our expectations. Even the best options in San Francisco’s bullpen would probably be considered the third or fourth best options in a good big league bullpen. 

But the Giants chose not to invest any money into the bullpen, a decision that Buster Posey has been very defensive about when questioned on it, and it is coming back to bite them. As Josh Dubow of the Associated Press noted on social media after the loss: "Giants have 5 losses this season in games they led in the 9th inning or later. Only the Royals have more with 7."

While the Giants wowed us with offense on Thursday and Friday, no team is going to be able to keep up that level of run-scoring. Sometimes the pitching staff has to step up and they simply haven’t for a good chunk of the year.

A major league team can still be good and even make the playoffs with either a streaky offense, below average rotation, or below-average bullpen. The Giants won their World Series championships with an unremarkable offense. But the Giants have all three of those components this season which is why it shouldn’t be a shock they are 13 games under .500 with no real hope of digging out of that hole.

This is just a poorly constructed roster and the Giants have been burned again and again. They have no closer, no setup man, just middling arms who they are moving around as they try to piece together wins. That’s not a recipe for success and it’s why this Giants team is already cooked even though it’s only early June. The offense can’t stay hot forever and the pitching staff is nowhere near strong enough to pick the bats up when they go cold as they did on Saturday.

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