Originally posted by SacRock14:
All we can do with Renteria is hope he contributes. The contract is a given, just like Zito and Rowand. IMO, it does no good to keep going over how bad the deal is. With Renteria, I'm just hoping his struggles last year were because of him being injured, which is a fact. His elbow wasn't right.
I'm not as optimistic on Rowand. He has shown me nothing. He's a bad hitter with very little plate discipline. I don't know what to expect from him, except that he'll be on the team in all likelihood.
And I agree on the point about smallball. Bochy seems unwilling to play to what little strengths this team has on offense. Last year, I felt like everyone outside of Pablo and Bengie should have been bunting with a guy on first. We're a team that can win games with 3-4 runs because of our pitching staff. Yet we pass on those opportunities in hopes of what? The long ball? Not likely. Hopefully Bochy is a little more flexible next season.
It's gonna be interesting to see what we do. I've posed this question on the other board and nobody seems to have an answer. If the fans are not interested in spending for the big names (Holliday, Bay) and not interested in some of the fringe FA's (N.Johnson, Dye), then who should we target?
I don't know who we should target. I'm a big fan of going for Jermaine Dye because he could give us 20 home runs probably, and a bunch of RBIs, even though he's not good defensively. But atleast it's some offensive output. I remember someone on the webzone compared him to Fred Lewis defensively, the only difference is Dye actually hits and Freddy Lewis doesn't. I'm not crazy about Johnson because his health has been iffy and he's only been above 20 HRs once in his career.
I agree with you about Rowand man. I remember for the first month or 2 he was pretty hot, and then every game after that he was awful. Unfortunately like you said he's on the team. He's a pretty good defender though, atleast I thought he was, so that's nice, but when you're as awful as he was during the second half that doesn't really make up for it IMO.
On one hand I think that our offense should get better with addition by subtraction of guys like Winn, but then when you lose Bengie and Uribe you lose like 36 home runs and 100 RBIs or something like that. We're going to be a whole lot worse IMO without having those guys. Because you look at it and Renteria isn't a good hitter, Rowands even worse, Whiteside or whoever the catcher will be(since supposedly they say Posey probably won't be ready to play) won't make up for what we lose in Bengie, and Ishi at first base doesn't do anything either. I'm interested to see how Velez and Schierholtz do all year, especially Velez I became a big fan of his.
I really think if we just keep Uribe, and make him an every day player, that could really help our offense. I remember he replaced Renteria after his health declined, and he really produced. And he had a stretch of 4 seasons where he had atleast 16 HRs and 68 RBIs before 2 years ago, and he had 16 HRs in limited playing time this year. But since we gave out these crappy contracts to Renteria and Rowand(I don't mind the one to Zito anymore because he's solid now), now we can't afford to keep guys like Uribe or spend on anyone that'd actually deserve the money they're making. I really don't think a line up with Uribe, F. Sanchez, Velez, Schierholtz, Pablo, would really be that bad. Then if we can pick up a solid hitter we'd probably be fine. But I dunno if Velez will get to play enough and we probably aren't keeping Uribe, Rowand sucks, Renteria sucks, Ishi can't hit, and we're probably going to downgrade our production from the catcher spot, so our offense will probably be even worse.
