¡Adiós pelota!

The Giants are dead. Long live the Giants.

Yeah, I don't know what that means either. Maybe an Elizabethan form of "Wait 'til next year!"

With the Giants these days, I don't know what anything means.

Except that they're dead. Of that I'm certain. I'll call time of death 9:43 a.m., July 30, 2013, in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love.

They died long before, of course. I'm just being charitable. What fans see now are the undead, going through the motions, pantomiming hitting the ball and fielding grounders and running bases with regard for rules.

The wake will commence tonight and continue through Sept. 29, the last game in the regular season. Undead but twitching, the Giants will put on as good a show as they can muster until that time.

They are a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a wasted scoring opportunity.

Most mysterious is how the 2012 World Series winners (the very same team, save for some parts and pieces) could be so horrible this year.

It's greedy of us fans to want three World Series titles in four years. But it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the Giants to rattle contenders, to hum along in second or third place, raising hopes of a dynasty.

No chance of that. After many many days of Manager Bruce Bochy telling reporters "These guys are really trying hard," and sports commentators saying, "Maybe now they've reached rock bottom," the Giants have in fact reached rock bottom. They've become the lowly Chicago Cubs.

Worse, they are lower than the lowly Cubs, who swept the Giants in San Francisco over the weekend.

This time it wasn't the pitching. Matt Cain (the workhorse!) threw 115 pitches deep into the game Friday, good enough for the win. Then a ball skipped through the usually sure-handed first baseman Brandon Belt in the ninth. The Cubs won 3-2.

Madison Bumgarner pitched eight shutout innings Saturday! Cubs still won 1-0, on a ninth-inning homer by former Giants Nate Schierholtz.

Tim Lincecum struck out 10 Sunday, 30th 10-strikeout game in his career! And got the Giants' best hit! Cubs won, of course, 2-1. Was it this year Lincecum threw a no-hitter? Good God.

But pitching had faltered before. Also, players got injured; center fielder Angel Pagan is gone for the season, having hurt himself May 25 in the Giants' last truly great moment this year, scrambling for a game-winning inside-the-park home run.

Then hitting failed, then once-solid fielding. Then all these together, for game after harrowing game.

Twice in the last three days, Giants loaded the bases with no outs — and couldn't score. Saturday, after loading the bases with no out in the eighth and failing to score, the Giants loaded the bases again in the ninth with one out — and Tony Abreu grounded into a game-ending home-to-first double play.

None of the Giants' hitters, including the powerful Buster Posey, Pablo Sandoval and Hunter Pence, could hit the ball out of infield. Most Valuable Player Posey hasn't hit in the last six games.

Hunter Pence, trying hardest of all — accounts are widespread of his prodigious pre- and post-game workouts, his paleo diet, his quirky intensity — still has popped up on the first pitch to blow one scoring opportunity against a tired pitcher, then swung at three pitches in the next county to blow another opportunity.

Like commentator and former Giants second baseman Duane Kuiper said, the right guys were up at the right time all weekend and couldn't get anything done.

What's going on? Even the players don't know. More in sorrow than in anger, everyone has a theory.

A San Francisco Examiner writer calls it the curse of The Dawg, when a longtime Giants fan, so nicknamed, was told he could no longer roost along the outfield fence after he interfered with a fly ball that an Atlanta Braves fielder might have caught.

Feelings hurt, The Dawg left and didn't come back and the Giants fell out of first place.

Well, The Dawg finally returned to AT&T Park over the weekend, but he did the Giants no good.

Within the spectrum of possibilities, I'll even accept that the Giants are throwing games for some reason, or that nefarious forces are threatening their families if they win. My guess is as good as yours.

My guess is that if the Giants can somehow play for love of the game, rather than for countless unrealistic expectations, they'll improve. 

Of course, fans are angry. Talk shows tingle with recriminations and simultaneous demands and denunciations of trades. The trade deadline is today; we'll see. I hate baseball as business.

To the old saws of firing Bochy and General Manager Brian Sabean, fans have added calls for bringing in the fences at the Giants' ballpark, because so many of the Giants' long fly balls would have been home runs in just about any other ballpark.

Maintenance crews could have pulled the fences in front of second base and still not helped the Giants this weekend.

The only good news in all this: Such a shockingly impotent performance only elevates the brilliant pitching, hitting and lattice of lucky breaks that enabled the Giants to win the National League in two do-or-die series last year, then sweep the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.

How rare and precious such feats!

As long as fans continue to clad themselves in the gear of their heroes and put their butts in seats, even this malaise is profitable, entertainment so bad it's good.

Thousands of other fans commiserate, some faring better than others. Multiply that by the thousands of fans of at least 20 other miserable teams, and a strange kind of comfort blankets the continent.

While the Giants floundered Sunday, my mother-in-law asked if was praying for them. God has better things to do, I said.

Besides, I understand zombies are popular these days.

My first ballgame

Technicolor could not even do justice to how green
Candlestick Park's carpet was that day. Willie McCovey
launched the world's highest popup that day.

By miracle of the Internets, I know nearly every detail of my first professional baseball game, 40 years ago this summer.

The only factors not recorded for posterity (at least not online) are how vividly green the grass glowed at first sight (I've heard this many times from others recalling their first Major League game, even when the grass is fake, as it was in 1972 at Candlestick Park); and how bored I was by the third inning of the doubleheader. That's the inalienable truth we ignore about baseball; it can drag on, until our own lives slow to its pace around adulthood, when we can finally withstand weaving it into our daily lives over the radio.

Without the computer as crutch, I can remember:

• I went with my dad (and we went with some other people, but I can't remember who; since my aunt was the only reason we'd visit the Bay Area, maybe it was some of my cousins and her second husband)

(We took our kids to their first game, also at Candlestick, a story that merits its own post; our son's birthday is today.)

• The San Francisco Giants hosted the Chicago Cubs for a doubleheader (which seemed like a good idea at the time; if one game is good, how much better should two games be? Ask any 10-year old.)

• Juan Marichal started for the Giants against Bill Hands in the first game. I had heard of Marichal before I got to the park, either because my dad told me or he was one of those players whose names transcended baseball, like Willie Mays.

• Game 2 was a blur of nothing.

• Ron Santo played third for the Cubs. I had his baseball card. I also had cards for Bobby Bonds, the Giants' rightfielder (and Barry Bonds' dad) and catcher Dave Rader.

• Willie Mays was gone by 1972, traded to the New York Mets by Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who supposedly traded Mays for cash and then gave the money to Mays, because Stoneham couldn't afford to give the great Mays the money he deserved. I had come in hopes of seeing Mays, and didn't realize until that he reached the ballpark that he was no longer a Giant. Though I liked baseball, I wasn't paying careful attention.

• Willie McCovey, the first baseman and eventual Hall of Famer whom people called Stretch, hit a ball so high into the air, twice as high as the lip of the stadium, I felt the adrenaline rollercoaster ride of being one of the few fans who would see this man hit a ball clear out of vast Candlestick Park. The headlines the next day of this amazing feat: Imagine! It became a routine popup instead (to the shortstop in the bottom of the seventh in the first game, exacting detail courtesy of www.baseball-reference.com). Nothing new under the sun.

• Giants Manager Charlie Fox got mad at an umpire's call (not sure which call; the exhaustive statistics fail my curiosity here) and told the umpire so, body shaking, arms wheeling, prompting his rejection from the game. In revenge Fox took advantage of the artificial turf, smooth as a billiard table, and threw several buckets of baseballs onto the field, where they rolled wherever the field was green, and then a couple of armfuls of bats, which arced this way and that as if free of gravity. I cheered with the crowd: A grown man having a child's tantrum! Who'da thought?

• The $1 program held me transfixed, especially the pencil drawings of selected players. They helped inspire me to draw, in the same way that Bernie Fuchs and Leroy Neiman and Mort Drucker did. It kills me I can't find the program, which I know I kept. It's somewhere in my series of godawful messes or (better) I gave it to my son. I'll post some of the work if I find it soon.

• One of the drawings was of the Giants' young infielder, Chris Speier, a wiry spider of a player who with second baseman Tito Fuentes were known as the Keystone Kids, turning double plays. I became an instant fan of Speier.

Here's what the comprehensive stats tell me:

• It was Sunday, June 11, 1972 (I missed the 40th anniversary by almost a month); the first game started at 1 p.m. under sunny skies, 70 degrees at Candlestick Point. In addition to me, 21,728 other people also paid to sit in the stands. The summary doesn't indicate whether the stiff wind was blowing, but it probably was. Almost always did.

• A legend, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, was the Cubs' manager.

• The Giants were not good, not like the year before, when they had won the National League West division. Two months into the season and they were already 16 1/2 games behind first place, with 18 wins and 38 losses. They weren't contenders like today, when they're leading the division. They had lost seven straight and would lose that game too, getting shut out 4-0. They rallied to win the second game 3-1. I didn't really care about any of this.

• It was not the great Juan Marichal's day. The Hall of Famer would lose, and would also commit two throwing errors in the same inning trying to pick off runners at first.

• Catcher Fran Healy and a sometime shortstop named Damaso Blanco drove in the go-ahead runs for the Giants in the second game. Ron Bryant got the win for the Giants. Burt Hooton started for the Cubs; Hooton threw a no-hitter his first year in baseball, but was really more known later as a solid Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.

Forty years later, Hooton is still in baseball, a pitching coach for the Houston Astros' Triple-A ballclub. Chris Speier is bench coach for the Cincinnati Reds; he and his team were just in San Francisco to split a four-game series with the Giants, and I got to hear a lengthy radio interview with him over the weekend. Tito Fuentes is a Spanish-language radio broadcaster for the Giants. Willie McCovey is an almost daily presence at AT&T Park, where he sponsors Junior Giants youth baseball. Willie Mays is also a constant, long since returned to baseball's good graces after he and Mickey Mantle were shunned for being greeters at Las Vegas casinos. Marichal is still revered in these parts.

And each and every day this time of year, kids' hearts thump extra hard when they first catch sight of the glowing green grass of a Major League ballpark.