Another rough day in Giantsville. Didn’t go to the game, but not surprised by the result:

No offense.

And Pablo Sandoval – the guy who was supposed to provide the offensive spark this year -went 0-for-3. He wasn’t the only one. The Giants were bewitched by Padres pitcher Mat Latos, who only gave up one hit – to Eli Whiteside in the sixth.

But the Panda Problem continues to grow.

According to hitting coach Hensley Meulens, Sandoval is “fighting fatigue…He’s played every game.”

Gosh, it’s only mid-May. He’s only 23.  Is it already time for fatigue?

Perhaps. Maybe  we can all agree, that Sandoval needs a day off. But I think he needs to take something else off. The guy is carrying around 30 extra pounds.  You try carrying the equivalent of a three-year old around 24 hours a day and you’d be fighting fatigue, too.

Meulens said the weight i battles part of the exhaustion: Sandoval is still doing extra cardio after games to try to trim down.

Basically, Operation Panda – which got a lot of publicity in the offseason – was a bust. The 23-year old didn’t lose enough weight to sustain the grind of playing. He’s still trying to lose it, though the season is started, and now seems to be caught in a vicious cycle.  He probably has a lot of anxiety about it too – the hitting slump, the cardio workouts, the expecctations.

That doesn’t bode well for the Giants who – a week ago – had the best record in the NL. This week they look like last year’s team: fatigued, impotent at the plate and injury prone.  Mid-May is when we can usually start to take the true measure of a baseball team.

Afraid we may be seeing the real Giants right now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.