Beautiful Ballpark does not make up for mediocre baseball team...

Giants fans have been spoiled no doubt, 3 titles 2010-2014.

Sunday afternoon, beautiful sunshine, a great day for baseball.

Then Wil Myers hits a bomb on an 0-2 pitch and the Padres take the lead in the top of the 1st and its downhill from there. The Giants are one of the feeblest hitting teams now.

The essence of the game, down 5-2, runner on 1st, 2 outs, the Giants get a gift when flyball to shallow left, guy drops it, but lead runner is thrown out at 3rd. Get a gift and that's what you do with it? Very disappointing.

One extra base hit, about 3 hard hit balls all game, against a starter with an ERA of over 6!!

The kind of baseball that really dissuades me from going to to the ballpark. Have any of you had the same experiences/thoughts?

 

The best part of baseball is that the ballpark always makes up for a shitty game.

 

What's starting to piss me off is all the talk that the fences need to be brought in. The problem is that only accounts for one small aspect of the overall issue. Great now a team that is hitting like crap can continue to hit like crap while you've given a shorter porch to opposing hitters who don't seem to have a problem hitting the ball out of the yard.

It ignores that the bullpen was shit last year. It ignores that the Giants were trotting out Jake Peavy every fifth day. It ignores that the Giants are not hitting on the road either. But idiots like Larry Krueger want something done. Forget which outfielder you bring in, or what right handed bat you bring or who on the team gets traded or which team is open to trading a piece that valuable to a bad team, the solution is to do something. It's that kind of thinking that brought Pablo Sandoval back.

The park is great, but there's only so much absolute suckage that you can take. Heard the Giants' six-year sellout streak finally ended. The bad team is finally coming back to bite it.

 

I agree. Changing the dimensions affects both home and visiting team. Yeah, that bullpen last year was horrendous, Derek Law, Gearrin, Osich, Strickland, Casilla (ugh). So blessed with the Lopez/Affeldt/Romo headed monster. Funny how Melancon blowing the opener is a harbinger of what followed.

Somehow, the Giants need to get Belt/Panik/Crawford/Pence to bust out. They've been in a slump collectively all year, 100 games now. Its not an import, its improvement within.

Spent most of the day talking to my buddy about how close Belt and Crawford were to the Mendoza line, then debating how it started and what the line was (I said .200, he said .180)

 

Bringing in the fences is a dumb solution.
Championed by Bob Fitzgerald, who is very dumb.

I object to the thread title. SF Giants are not mediocre. They aspire to mediocrity.
They stink on ice.

 

His latest argument is "shouldn't a 400-foot fly ball be a home run?" And you had better agree with him or else he shouts you down. I wanted to call in and ask "shouldn't a 315-foot fly ball that clears a two-foot wall be an out?"

Someone had the audacity to ask him if you bring the fences in and you make home runs easier, what do you do when the pitchers start complaining? He of course ignored the question and just reiterated, loudly, that a 400-foot fly ball should be a home run. Never mind that if a ball flies 400 feet against a fence 400 feet from home plate it will land at the base of the wall. It wasn't a problem for the 16 previous years of the park but now there's a new fad (which isn't a new fad at all) in baseball called hit a home run so now every team needs to hit 500 homers a season or else it's a failure. Nevermind the home runs are on a record pace but less than half the teams have winning records.

 

dimensions of the Polo Grounds when Giants played there

• Left Field Line: 279 ft. (not posted—sometimes listed as 280)
• Left Field Upper Deck Overhang: about 250 ft.
• Shallow Left Center: 315 ft.
• Left Center 1: 360 ft.
• Left Center 2: 414 ft.
• Deep Left Center: 447 ft. left of bullpen curve
• Deep Left Center: 455 ft. right of bullpen curve
• Center Field: approx. 425 ft. (unposted) corners of runways
• Center Field: 483 ft. posted on front of clubhouse balcony, sometimes 475 ft.
• Center Field: 505 ft. (unposted) sometimes given as total C.F. distance
• Deep Right Center: 455 ft. left of bullpen curve
• Deep Right Center: 449 ft. right of bullpen curve
• Right Center 2: 395 ft.
• Right Center 1: 338 ft.
• Shallow Right Center: 294 ft.
• Right Field Line: 257 ft. 3  3⁄8 in. (not posted—sometimes listed as 258)
• Backstop: 65 ft. (sometimes also given as 74 ft.)

 

Fitzgerald never lets facts get in the way of his opinion.

He's a braying jackass.

 

I heard stories from when PacBell Park was about to open they were thinking that balls were going to fly out of right field and we were going to have dozens of splash landings every year. I feel like the Giants were thinking the air patterns in China Basin were going to be conducive to home runs so the dimensions were set to fix that problem that never emerged. Bringing in the fence is a short-sighted solution to a problem that was a mistake that didn't turn out to be that bad ... for 16 years.

 

They seem to patch together an outfield every year that doesn't hit. Haven't produced a solid outfielder from their organization since.......Chili Davis? He was the last All-Star. Before that it was Jack Clark. and then Willie Mays.

 

But something's wrong.

 

Park opened in 2000. In the time until today, seven playoff runs, four world series appearances and three titles. Obviously the number of playoff appearances could have been better but the down teams weren't down because a wall was to far out and too high up.