And just like that, the inning is over

Artist's rendering of banners to be displayed along the Embarcadero near AT&T™© Park.

Memo to the San Francisco Giants' marketing folks: You're fired.

No, keep your jobs, I don't mean it. Just take the winter off, will ya? The point is, we won't need your services next year.

You do good work, no doubt. This year's slogan, "Together We're Giant"? Brilliant. Soaring and poetic, the loftiest of the soaring, poetic slogans over the years, going all the way back to "Humm Baby!" and including the guerrilla slogan for the 2010 World Series season, "Giants Baseball: Torture!"

Your slogans make us feel we're all in this together, and I almost wanted to climb onto the Internet  and buy the six-pack of season tickets, so I could quaff $8.75 Anchor Steams at the ballpark to help pay for, say, Hunter Pence's $90 million contract extension. Almost.

But we fans are done with soaring poetry for a while. We've become a pragmatic people. That which did not kill us — namely the 2013 season that ended Sunday in a glorious, hopeful fit — only made us stronger.

Thus the new slogan (above), free of charge, down to earth, plainly stated. What the Giants radio and TV broadcasters were wont to say multiple times per game, for many, many games: The Giants need baserunners.

Alternate slogans for the 2014 season will include:

• See the ball, hit the ball
• Get 'em on, get 'em over, get 'em in
• Take a pitch, why doncha?!
• Hit the cutoff!
• That ball bounced a foot in front of the plate! Why're you swingin', for gawdsake!

We're smart, we Giants fans. We recognize a class organization, all the good the Giants do for various communities. You're wonderful with the ceremonies (the anthems are always over the top, but we love that it's fatuous and excessive, the whole "eat, drink and be merry" ethic) and the small careful touches you make to honor fallen fans or bygone players. The players all seem to say how well you treat them.

We don't have to be told that in high-minded mantras. We're focused entirely on the game itself, and we know the rest will follow.

Most of us fans — me included! — followed right along with the managerial strategy of keeping the 2012 team intact. It won once, we agreed, and most of the players were in a position to stick around: Let's watch 'em do it again.

We even blanched at the horror of losing key players. Tim Lincecum?! He can't go! He rose from the ashes of his terrible starts the middle of last season to emerge from the bullpen a dastardly magician. Marco Scutaro?! Where did this guy come from? He hits everything, whacking his way into the playoffs with the rest of the team on his back. Gotta keep him! Swing-at-anything Pablo Sandoval?! More like hit-everything Pablo, including three homers in a World Series Game 1. He's the essence of the free-wheeling love Giants fans shared.

The Giants, fortified with fan favorite Andres Torres taken back from the New York Mets, opened the season with abandon, giving credence to the keep-'em-all strategy. Then centerfielder Angel Pagan damaged his hamstring on a walkoff inside-the-park home run in late June, and the team seemed to feel the pain.

The Giants showed how difficult it is to repeat success.

(Though not impossible: The St. Louis Cardinals, who lost to the Giants last year in San Francisco's come-from-behind National League Pennant win, are back again. They've won their division seven times in the last 14 years. The Oakland A's are back, to take on the Detroit Tigers this week in the playoffs. The Tigers picked off the A's last year before losing four straight to the Giants in the World Series. Atlanta's in again, and the Boston Red Sox recovered from a horrible 2012 to take the American League East. The Rangers, in the playoffs the last three years, lost to Tampa Bay in a one-game wild card playoff last night.) 

Suddenly the Giants couldn't hold a lead for more than a half inning. Suddenly the Giants couldn't answer the other teams' offense. For the longest stretch of the season, when champions are made, Giants players got hurt, hitters couldn't hit and pitchers couldn't pitch.

San Francisco beat writer Henry Schulman said it best in late August after the Red Sox trounced the Giants:

"The difference in basic fundamentals was startling. The Red Sox can execute while the Giants continue to embarrass themselves with lapses that no team, least of all the defending World Series champs, should make."

In a typical Giants game this season:

• The Giants scored early, often even in the first inning. Then that'd be it for the rest of the game, giving opponents most the game to win eventually.
• Rallies started only after the team got two quick outs, then burned out on easy grounders to the infield.
• A Giants hitter, when he did hit, would loft a long line drive that bounced on the warning track over the outfield fence, resulting in a rally-killing ground-rule double. Some fans have been clamoring to bring in AT&T™© Park's fences, and I'm inclined to support them now.
• The starter pitched beautifully, but his team gave him no runs. The reliever would come in and ruin the fragile hold the Giants had on the otherguys. Or the starter just flat-out sucked.
• An otherwise sure-handed Giant infielder bobbled the ball to let a run score.
• Some Giants slugger, with rhythm in his favor, a rally in motion, a new pitcher in relief and the crowd shaking the rivets loose, swung at the first pitch for a popup to second base to end the rally/inning/game.
• (And in the last month or so) even stoic, noncommittal MVP Buster Posey gave away through subtle body language that he wanted the season to be over.

"And just like that, the inning is over," said Giants broadcaster Jon Miller, way too many times.

Empty seats began revealing their dark green sheen on the telecasts. TV watchers could hear individual cheers and jeers now, not the solid wall of sound from the undying faithful. We showed our limits.

Now we're not nearly as romantic about keeping the team together. It didn't work this season. We fans can accept change.

Starter Barry Zito is likely to go. Though miraculously crafty in the playoffs and World Series last year, the former Cy Young winner, criticized for his huge contract during his Giants tenure, struggled this year. Manager Bruce Bochy had him pitch in the final game Sunday; he struck out the Padres' Mark Kotsay, who had announced his retirement and took his last at-bat as a Major Leaguer. The crowd roared for Barry as he returned to the dugout.

(I'd make a terrible general manager, trying to field a team out of good guys and locally-grown players. Zito's one of the good guys, giving up a great deal of time and money to Strikeouts for Troops aiding wounded warriors.)

No one's sure if Lincecum, the two-time Cy Young winner who threw his first no-hitter this year, will return. The sports gossip holds that the Giants want to keep him. They already secured rightfielder Hunter Pence in a long-term contract that he allegedly negotiated with the team president in front of his locker the night he was given the Willie Mac award as the team's most inspirational player.

As for the rest, who knows? Giants fans have a shopping list ready. The team needs:

• A left fielder who can hit for power. During the last week of the season, streaky Gregor Blanco and rookie Juan Perez matched hit for big hit indicating they'd like to get that consideration. Blanco shared left field with streaky Andres Torres for a large chunk of the season. But the Giants' minor-league rosters are largely thin or unready for the Major League.
• At least one more starter. Journeymen Yusmeiro Petit got within one pitch of a perfect game this season against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Maybe he's got a chance in the starting rotation if Lincecum goes.
• Different pitchers in middle relief. Usually reliable bullpen operators blew up too many fragile leads this year.

The last game gave hope. Down 6-3 after Padres' Jedd Gyorko hit a grand slam, the Giants looked like they'd limp off along the dreary arc of the season. But Pence, who had just announced his new contract, singled in two runs in the seventh to make the game 6-5.

Then in the ninth, rookie Francisco Peguero, unlikely to hit a home run, did just that to tie the game. Padres closer Huston Street came apart, loading the bases with no outs and Pence up at the plate. He worked Street to a 3-2 count. The Padres line up six players along the infield and just two outfielders, daring Pence to hit the ball between them. The next moments could have gone many ways:

• Pence could have walked and forced in the winning run, which would have been nice but unsatisfying.
• He could have struck out or flied out, which would have symbolized the season, especially if the next Giants got out or hit into a double play to end the inning.

Instead, Pence swung at a very high pitch, clearly ball four, for a line drive to centerfield, over and between everyone, to drive in the winning run before a crowd renewed in number and spirit.

The Giants finished in third place, sharing it with the Padres, 16 games out of first place behind the hated Los Angeles Dodgers. They finish much closer to last place (the Colorado Rockies, 18 games out of first) than to first. But they didn't go from first to worst, at least. At least.

I may catch a few innings of postseason baseball, but not many. I'm a Giants fan, not a baseball fan. I'll stew during these bleak months, hoping for next year, hoping the Giants keep their eye on the ball and play the game right, at once sustained and deflated by former Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti's true and timeless words:

"(Baseball) breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

¡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.

Now is the summer of my discontent …

… made bleak midwinter by this four-day break from baseball.

Fie! you say. 'Tis the great American game's greatest night: The All-Star Game®©™, vainglorious showcase of the best and brightest.

To quote my wise daughter once again: Meh.

The All-Star Game©™® is like a dress rehearsal, a walk-through for some big event that never takes place.

It's a cream puff, enticing at first look and lick, but souring the stomach and melting the mind with regret.

It's all way, way too much talk and half-speed action. It's a popularity contest, comprising some players who deserve All-Star®© honors, and most who don't. Oh yeah!? Who says?!! Says me!

And that's the point: Countless worthless arguments about who should be an All-Star®©™, which generates hot air, which lofts the hype, which inevitably leads to someone somehow taking your money.

I'm not watching, in other words. I'm stewing instead, waiting for baseball to resume Friday.

(Stew stew stew stew.)

Better the All-Stars©™® get a nice banquet in their honor, a free suit, a trip to Disneyland™©, and let's get on with the season already.

I'll make it, though. Don't worry about me. Friday will come eventually. Meh.

I'll survive on the memory of how the San Francisco Giants retrieved their championship play right before the All-Star®© break, including a no-hitter by the fans' favorite Freak, Tim Lincecum.

Nearly two years of flabbergasting performance by the little ace vanished in one gutsy game, the two-time Cy Young award winner with the 812-step pitching motion somehow putting all 812 steps in perfect synch to pitch a nearly perfect game.

So many games Tim Lincecum has looked lost on the mound, his eyebrows upturned in supplication, his little mouth opening and closing like an aquarium fish, throwing right into batters' swings with fastballs that have become less and less fast in a blindingly brief time.

On Saturday his mouth was still going but his eyes were hard and unmoving, and three innings after he had lost his best stuff, he kept baffling San Diego Padres hitters. No no-hitter happens without a lot of help, and after third baseman Pablo Sandoval speared a bullet deep up the line and threw out the batter with a laser throw to first in the seventh inning, right fielder Hunter Pence dove to catch a line drive off the grass to end the Padres' eighth.

Pence looked like he was going to cry running back into the dugout, so grateful to have preserved Lincecum's big night.

Now, of course, the people who ruin baseball for me — the money people — talk about how the no-hitter raised Lincecum's value for the possibility of a trade.

I hate those people. Let baseball be baseball.

After weeks and weeks of horrible baseball, the Giants walloped the Padres over two games.

Sure, the Padres walloped back in the third game, the last one before the loooooooooong All-Star™© break. Sure, the Giants broadcasters resorted to their horrid habit of  wishful broadcasting:

(As the Padres' rookie call-up Colt Hynes comes in at the top of the ninth to close down the 10-1 drubbing Sunday:)

Broadcaster Mike Krukow: He's gonna have a rough debut …

Kuiper: You mean a 10-run comeback?

Krukow: That's what I'm talking about.

Sheesh.

Friday is so far away …

Oh me of little faith!

The Giants' first two losses in the National League Division series put me in such a funk that I'm ashamed to say I made an illustration encapsulating their quick and hard downfall (which you'll find far below).

I shoulda been working on this illustration instead:

My first drawing was their Kryptonite, I'm sure, which was enervated only by the inspiring speech of Giants' rightfielder Hunter Pence, who exhorted his new team (he came over from the Phillies in August) to play up to their capabilities:

Before Game 3, with the Giants down to a must-win scenario in the five-game series, Pence gathered the team and reportedly said this:

"Get in here, everyone get in here … look into each other eyes … now! Look into each others eyes. I want one more day with you. It's the most fun, the best team I have ever been on, said the Reverend Hunter Pence.

"And no matter what happens, we must not give in, we owe it to each other, play for each other, I need one more day with you guys, I need to see what (reserve second baseman Ryan) Theriot will wear tomorrow, I want to play defense behind (pitcher Ryan) Vogelsong (who started Game 3) because he's never been to the playoffs. Play for each other, not yourself. Win each moment. Win each inning. It's all we have left!"

I'd have gone 3-for-4 after that speech, and I can't hit a lick! Not that the Giants stomped on the Reds that day, squeaking out a win 2-1 on Reds' miscues. But subsequent Pence speeches and big hitting and pitching (in other words, the fury of which the Giants are capable) helped them overcome the odds and win the series.

How unlikely was this win? John Fay, Reds beat writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer, but it this way:
  
"They (the Reds) became the first National League team to fail to advance to the NL Championship Series after winning the first two games of the Division Series.

"They are only the fifth team out of 43 overall that went up 2-0 not to advance.And they did it by losing at home in three straight games. They had not lost three in a row at home until Thursday."

I'm not doubting the Giants again; even if somehow the next round doesn't go the team's way, they have inspired me to remember what a committed group of people can accomplish together.

Yeah, schmaltzy.

After all, it's not just entertainment …

Whew!

The Giants, or a dim facsimile, stay alive in the National League Division Series.

They beat the Cincinnati Reds 2-1 in extra innings Tuesday, and will play Game 4 today, the Reds leading the series 2-1.

It was do or die, and the Giants did and didn't.

(Likewise for the Oakland A's, down two games, beating the Detroit Tigers Tuesday.)

I'm forming the theory that police are searching for the real Giants, tethered and drugged in some self-search storage closet in Teaneck, New Jersey (I watch too many iterations of Law & Order). It's the only explanation, because these are not the Giants we have watched all season.

Maybe Benson and Stabler (yeah, another Law & Order reference) will soon find the kidnappers' hellhole and release the Giants. We'll know tomorrow, if the Giants start hitting and pitching and playing scary rather than scared.

Even this was not so much a Giants win as a Reds loss. The Giants struck out 10 times to starter Homer Bailey, who had thrown a no-hitter in the late weeks of the regular season. That tells you how well the Giants, one of the best hitting teams during the season, did this game and this series.

The Reds hit a bit better, not much. They made mistakes, the most glaring of which came in the top of the 10th with a passed ball that moved the Giants' two slowest runners (catcher Buster Posey and a hobbled right fielder Hunter Pence) to second and third, and a bobbled infield grounder that allowed Posey to give the Giants the lead.

Whew! Another win. One more day to ask: Why do TBS and Fox baseball broadcasts ramp up the volume every time a pitch reaches home plate? Does anyone else find that excruciatingly annoying? It's some attempt to amplify the sound of the bat on the ball, to make the game more "exciting!" but it sounds like a jet flyover with each pitch.

I miss the Giants' broadcasters on TV … even when color commentator and former Giants pitcher Mike Krukow says, every time, that the catcher is in "the SQUAA-AAT, putting down the signs." Even when he does that.