These Giants are why Bochy is here

Ray Ratto - San Francisco Chronicle

Every doubt you have about the Giants in 2008, every pessimistic thought, every snide (yet accurate) remark about their unworthiness to contend this year is why Bruce Bochy is the manager.

Because you're right to have doubts, you're right to be pessimistic, and you can almost not be snide enough. Nothing about the Giants suggests anything but competitive torpor.

But Bochy has done this walk before. Twice, in fact. The Padres fell off the wagon twice after succeeding under his stewardship, either because ownership felt the need to slash payroll or because the team was ravaged by injury.

Neither of those things seems to be happening with the Giants, but their rebuild is clear and easy to analyze. They want to throw the ball and catch the ball immediately, and eventually hit the ball as well.

The third, though, will come after the first two, and that's if all goes well. Indeed, the best-case scenario for these Giants seems to be one which they allow, say, 705 runs and score, say, 662. Bochy's Padres did that - just not in the same year.

"I've had teams like this one, and I knew this year was coming," he said Saturday morning. "I've been with teams that went from the World Series to rebuilding in one winter, so I'm used to this."

That was the 1999 Padres team that won 98 games before losing to the Yankees in the Series. The next year, the ownership group purged Kevin Brown, Ken Caminiti, Steve Finley and Greg Vaughn (he had hit 50 homers that year) as part of a 20 percent slashing of the payroll. The team won 74 games the next season and eventually bottomed out in 2002 by going 66-96 on merit, a decision made of penury that didn't change until the owners reinvested in the team when Petco Park opened the following year.

Yes, Petco Park, the most extreme pitchers park in the game. In other words, you see where this is going.

"I've always come into spring training feeling like we can compete," Bochy said. "I've never thought, 'Oh, this is going to be a tough year.' And honestly, on those teams we were rebuilding with in San Diego, we never had this much pitching."
Yes, Matt Cain is preferable to Joey Hamilton in his prime, and Tim Lincecum to Brian Lawrence. That much is clear.

"And I think this is a deeper bullpen than the ones we had in those years," Bochy said.

Well, after the Trevor Hoffman-Brian Wilson comparison, you can see that as a possibility.

But more than anything else, Bochy knows the entire NL West is a pitching-and-defense division with a defending champion, Arizona, that scored fewer runs than it allowed a year ago. The Diamondbacks then went out and improved their pitching by getting Dan Haren for half a farm team. In other words, the Giants (a) may not be as bad as they seem, and (b) aren't as many years from contention as the common wisdom says.

Well, that's Bochy's theory anyway and having done two other rebuilds (one more than most managers get), he is more than merely a partisan source.

"I don't know how long it will take, but I know we're not planning to take three or four years," he said, referring to the grisly interregnum in San Diego from 1999 to 2003. "It will take time, and we're hoping that by the end of the season we'll have built a club that plays a different brand of baseball. Very few clubs that go through what we're going through have the kind of pitchers we have."

And ...

"This isn't like if we were in the American League, where you have some teams that can go out and win the 10-9 game when their pitching isn't right," he said. "That's why we have the sense of optimism that this can happen in a year. You just see what Arizona did, and you realize that maybe we're not that far away."

Yeah, maybe. But probably not. Rebuilds are painful, especially ones that have been deferred as long as this one. The Giants are probably closer to what you think of them than what Bochy thinks of them, but as much as he was hired for a year like this, there is one other thing to consider.

He was also hired for the year after a year like this one. Bruce Bochy won't be the reason the Giants get better, when they do, or even if, and he doesn't pretend that he is. Bochy can, however, say that having done this before, he is as suited to easing the transition from Barry Bonds' backup band to a contender as any manager in baseball.

It remains to be seen how long that transition will take, but at least in this one area, the Giants can say they looked through the windshield rather than the rearview mirror.