The Giants Baseball Blog

We talked a lot a couple weeks back when Evan Longoria went down, Jeff Samardzija rejoined the DL, then Brandon Belt hit the the shelf that the Giants would need more and more players to continue to step up and keep them afloat It seems like the theme of the season for the club has been a game of musical chairs of the Disabled list variety. Just as one guy comes off the DL, it seems like another one takes his place almost immediately. After getting Mark Melancon back earlier in the month, closer Hunter Strickland promptly broke his throwing hand by punching a clubhouse wall in anger after blowing a save, taking away one of the teams most potent bullpen arm until at least sometime in August and that's really how it's been going all season long. Madison Bumgarner missed 2 months, Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija each have missed about the same amount of time and still have yet to return for good. We then started to see the positional players go down as Brandon Belt missed 3 w

The Giants have played over 1/3 of their season now without Madison Bumgarner as well as Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija for most part. They've also been without projected closer Mark Melancon and have gotten very little production out of the outfield trio they trotted out on opening day. Not to mention, Buster Posey hasn't come close to providing the run production the Giants are accustomed to from their all-star catcher. Now after taking all that into consideration, and without looking at the standings, you'd probably assume the team would be one of the worst in baseball. However, that hasn't quite been the case, and the team has found a way to keep themselves in the mix and right around .500 despite all the hurdles they've had to overcome so far. After Wednesday's victory over the D-Backs in San Francisco, the Giants improved their record to 31-31 and are just 1.5 games out of first place in a deep NL West. The Giants are technically in 4th place, howeve