Giants: A Broken Team

Right now, at this moment, the San Francisco Giants have nine players on the Disabled List.

Those players are Barry Zito (LHP), Buster Posey (C), Mike Fontenot (INF.), Mark DeRosa (INF/OF), Brandon Belt (1B/LF), Freddy Sanchez (2B), Darren Ford (OF), and Pablo Sandoval (although he is playing tonight against Arizona).

To fill in these spaces, the Giants have brought in Ryan Vogelsong at pitcher #4, Chris Stewart at backup catcher, Manny Burriss, Brandon Crawford and Bill Hall for the infeild, and for some reason, Miguel Tejada is still playing baseball...

Tejada is a whole other debate right now, so anyways...

With these five guys on the roster, the team looks like it has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.  With our ideal broken starting lineup being:
                              1-Andres Torres
                              2-Miguel Tejada (ugh..)
                              3-Nate Schierholtz
                              4-Aubrey Huff
                              5-Cody Ross
                              6-Brandon Crawford
                              7-Manny Burriss
                              8-Eli Whiteside
                              9-Tim Lincecum

That's a rough lineup, especially if you compare the Giants ideal starters:

                              1-Andres Torres
                              2-Freddy Sanchez
                              3-Pablo Sandoval
                              4-Buster Posey
                              5-Aubrey Huff
                              6-Brandon Belt
                              7-Cody Ross
                              8-Brandon Crawford
                              9-Tim Lincecum

Boom, but thanks to the recent plague of injuries, we probably won't see this lineup until October.

Okay so it's settled, the Giants lineup can't hit. But they are still in 1st place through 66 games, so how are they winning?

Ryan Vogelsong.

He has been a big reason the Giants are doing so well with such a horrific offense. In the 11 games he has pitched in this season (9 games started), the Giants have won eight of them. Eight.

In those eight games, the Giants pitching staff as a whole has averaged 1.63 runs against per game. Out of the 72 innings in that span, Vogelsong pitched 43.1 of them (or roughly 60%). His average game score in those starts have been 60 (above average) and he did pitch a stretch of 6 starts without allowing over 1 run.

He's been good, and thank the baseball gods that Barry Zito's injury turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Vogelsong has been lights out and he is a good reason the Giants are 10-10 since May 24th (Posey injury).

Another indicator of how good he has been is that his run support has been Matt Cain-low. I mean really low. Like 3.2 runs per game low. That means if he allows three to four runs per game, he would never win a game.

Luckily for him, he has only given up over two once this year (five on May 3rd) and he owns a 4-1 record.

Let's hope Pablo can return to pump up the Giants offense tonight, Ryan Vogelsong and his fellow pitchers will need it.

Go Giants.