SMALL PRINT UPDATE: Merkin Valdez went on the DL with an elbow strain, and lefty Alex Hinshaw, who’s been closing games with extreme prejudice in Fresno, is now up. In fact, he just made his major league debut after Tyler Walker pissed kerosene all over the embers of the Astros’ campfire.

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Uh-oh. Hank Schulman tells us in this morning’s Chronnie that Brian Sabean thinks the 2008 Giants can be contenders. No one-way ticket to Palookaville for these guys. This by itself is not a bad thing. Optimism is nice. It motivates players, and it encourages fans to come out and scream for their hometown boys. Nothing wrong with that.

But when optimism gets in the way of the rebuilding process, which has gotten off to a good start, it can be foolish. Let’s run through some of Sabean’s comments and interpret them.

"I think we've come a long way. When you consider some of our challenges in spring training and some of the question marks, we've got to be considered one of the most improved teams in baseball. With the exception of two series, the Milwaukee series and Pittsburgh series, we've held our own no matter who've we've played.”

True, but much of the perceived improvement — ie, the Giants aren’t in last place — comes at the expense of the Padres and Rockies, who are even worse than the Giants. With a healthy Vizquel and an improving Bowker, the offense could improve marginally (that’s if Rowand and Lewis keep on their current pace), but let’s face it, this team can’t hit very well.

"You're seven games under .500. That's where you don't want to be, but I really feel good about the energy around the club and I feel good about some of our choices.”

What’s an interview with Sabean without horribly mangled syntax? (His words are everywhere you don’t want to be.) But I feel good about the energy, too, and yes, Brian, some of your choices — namely not trading Tim Lincecum for Alex Rios or Jonathan Sanchez for Joe Crede, and picking up Jose Castillo as a placeholder at third — have been wise.

“We've now got a solution at first base. We've got a solution at third. We've gotten Omar (Vizquel) back. Freddie Lewis has come into his own and (Emmanuel) Burriss has been a real factor lately.”

John Bowker + Rich Aurilia = Solution at 1B? Not quite. I’m glad Bowker is getting an extended look, but I’m not quite ready to call him a solution. Perhaps Sabean is using a different definition of the word. Yes, he must be, because Jose Castillo is not a solution at third, either. He’s a stopgap.

I agree 100% about Lewis, and Burriss, well, he’s better than Bocock.

Sabean said he does not contemplate moving his most marketable experienced players before the trade deadline, as many rebuilding teams do. Catcher Bengie Molina and outfielder Randy Winn, both signed through 2009, might yield the most in return. But as of now, Sabean plans to keep them.

Here comes the backslide. With the Giants’ most promising catching prospect in high-A ball, Molina is a keeper for now, I agree, but why not trade Randy Winn in the face of a good offer? I like Randy Winn, Steve Nash likes Randy Winn, most Giant fans like Randy Winn. But he’s not a cornerstone of this team and he’s blocking the development of Nate Schierholtz, who, if he continues to hit this way in Fresno, has little reason to stay in the minors beyond 2008.

Besides, what the hell to do with Dave Roberts when he comes off the DL? Lewis better not go back to AAA or the bench, so either Roberts or Winn must go. What’s Sabean thinking? Here’s a clue:

“In Randy's case it's the same thing, somebody who is so versatile, a switch-hitter who can play all three outfield positions. [His] relative value is going to be consistent no matter what year it is or who you have around [him].”

That sounds an awful lot like a good reason to trade Winn, not keep him. I’m inclined to consider Sabean’s description a not-so-subtle sales pitch to 29 other GMs, but his track record of late — keeping veterans at the deadline when he thinks there’s a chance to contend — is not promising.

We can assume that Cain and Lincecum are still off the table, but Jonathan Sanchez is an interesting case. The Giants need to assess which Sanchez is the future Sanchez: the one who went eight strong with 10 Ks against Cincy, or the one who has walked 13 in the 14 innings since then? If another team is willing to pony up serious young offensive talent for him, the Giants should at least mull it over.

One good sign: there was no mention in Schulman’s article of Ray Durham. Perhaps he was edited out of the final copy, but for now I’ll take the omission as a sign he’s not a key part of the veteran savvy that will lead the Giants to a stunning turnaround.

Oh, and re. last night’s game: Walking the pitiful Jose Cruz Jr. should be a felony punishable with a minimum of two years’ imprisonment. Shame on the Special Agent. Boo.

Is Sabean sending coded messages? Are you worried that the rebuild will get derailed? Discuss.  

Thanks to the continuing exploits of their 28–year-old rookie backup catcher, the Giants take two of three to win the weekend series from the Phillies, leaving Bruce Bochy to grumble again about the blown chance to win the previous weekend’s series in Philly — or even to sweep it.

Bruce, let it go. You’re not exactly nailed to a cross, but it never hurts to whistle a few bars of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” as in, hey pal, your 2008 San Francisco Giants are a couple players away from being a decent team, especially if those players can play infield defense, get on base frequently AND hit the ball out of the yard.

Easier said than done, of course, and time has a funny way of turning promise into illusion. But we’re two or three games short of the quarter post, and the whole Gamer/Bonds Who?/Young Guys/Great Pitching motif is making sense, however clumsily executed. Even though a portion of the unwashed masses isn’t convinced and threatens to send mid-weeknight attendance below 30,000, people paying attention are having more fun than any other fans of a 16–22 team in the history of baseball. (Proprietary formulae to calculate the ratio of fun-having to bitching/moaning among various segments of a fan base available upon request.) 

A few notes as we head into an intriguing four-game series against the suddenly hot Astros:

* Aaron Rowand, Mr. Gamerlicious, is actually doing everything the Giants promised and more. He’s on pace for nearly 50 doubles and slugging .557 despite only four homers.

* Fred Lewis is in a 3–for-31 funk. Bochy sat him against some of the lefty starters in the past six games, but not all of them. Should Boch have let him play through the whole time? Will Freddie right himself against the Astros’ string of righties?  

* Matt Cain has only three quality starts out of eight this year. His main problem has been the walks, driving up pitch counts and taking him out of games early when he’s otherwise pitching well. His last two starts were a good trend: one walk per start, although the one walk against Pittsburgh was the opposing pitcher, and it started a two-run rally.

SMALL PRINT UPDATE: Welcome Orange, Black and Blue to the Giants-related blogroll, and welcome Omar Vizquel back to the active roster. Brian Bocock is now in AAA, which is still a shocking promotion over last year.

Rumors abound that Peter Magowan wants to wave his frozen peas over the express lane check-out scanner and step down as the Giants president and managing partner. Former Giant beat writer Mark Gonzales, now covering baseball for the Chicago Trib, slipped the whispers into the public record at the back end of a tiny blog post Wednesday night. (Ain’t bloggin grand?) San Fran scribblers have dutifully followed suit and noted they’ve heard similar stuff for some time; Ray Ratto gives his take here.

(And for a refresher course on how Magowan came to be the face of Giants ownership, read this.)

Everyone retires sooner or later. If indeed he’s leaving, here’s what to watch for:

* Is it because of the Mitchell Report fallout? Is there pressure from MLB and/or legal entities?

* Who steps up to make the big decisions? Other owners? Sue Burns, the widow of Harmon Burns, is the largest shareholder. Chief operating officer Larry Baer? Does he even have an ownership stake? Or will the group look for someone outside to buy Magowan’s stake, which Ratto estimates at 15%?

* Is it time to sell the team? Without Magowan, it’s possible that other owners will want to cash out and move on. You can betcha we’ll soon see stories about who might want to buy the team. Eddie D! Willie Brown! Robin Williams! Joe Montana! George Lucas! I vote for Fritz Maytag. C’mon, Fritz, live the dream: Mays Field at Anchor Park.

* If Magowan goes, does Sabean go with him? We’ve debated many times in this space who really pulls the strings on the roster decisions, i.e., who’s to blame for the Zito contract. A lot of the facts are speculation, but we do know that Magowan has rarely wavered in his support for Sabean, save for a few comments at the beginning of 2007. Are they tied at the hip?

If P-Mags is really double-bagging his black-and-orange groceries for the last time, it’s quite a legacy he’s left behind. The dramatic revival of a storied sports franchise, a successful but ultimately disappointing run with the best and most controversial player in history, a dysfunctional, co-dependent decline, a reputation for tolerating pharmaceutical, um, leniency, and a better-late-than-never stab at the difficult task of rebuilding.

You’re not gone yet, P-Mags, but I have to hand it to you, pen pal: It’s been fun, and when it hasn’t been fun, it’s been weird.

But not weird enough? Give us your most outlandish suggestions for who should take over as the new managing partner/top dog of the Giants.

Pirates 5, Giants 4: Our fair team’s dastardly run against the Pirates continues. Matt Cain gave up just enough to lose, with two sequences doing him in. In the third, he walked the pitcher to lead off. Two runs followed. In the decisive seventh, Cain threw one too many curves to Jason Bay, and Bay drilled it into the corner for a double and the tying run. He had Bay down two strikes, threw him two curves, and on the radio Dave Flemming, astute lad that he is, said Bay might be looking for the curve after seeing it twice. “I’d be shocked if Cain threw another right here,” Flemm said. Bam.

On the other side of the ball, the Pirate D could well have saved the game. Giants were up 4–2 in the top of the seventh, Cain on second with one out, and Eugenio Velez creamed one to deep center. A sure RBI triple, but McLouth ran it down. Instead of a 5–2 game with Velez on third, it was two outs, then quickly three as Castillo was retired. Play of the game right there.

PLODAG: Aaron Rowand, two walks and a hit, and some spectacular D of his own.

The Upside: Dan Ortmeier, two days in a row! Two more hits, both to right field, plus a ball to the warning track in right-center. He’s hitting the ball hard the opposite way. I like Ortmeier in the lineup against lefties, but dammit, Boch, not at Fred Lewis’s expense. How about Ort in right tomorrow night against Cole Hamels instead of Winn? Or at first, with Aurilia moving to third?  

For those who don’t follow San Francisco politics, Sunset District supervisor Ed Jew had to step down recently amid a world of legal trouble, including accusations of shakedowns, an FBI investigation, and questions whether he was actually an S.F. resident. Read this for the background info.

Jew is no longer mixing it up with Chris Daly and the rest of the nutjobs on the board, our version of a city council. But apparently he can’t stay away from rough-and-tumble crowds: Ed, or someone pretending to be Ed, is now a regular commenter on McCovey Chronicles. He likes to post pictures with funny captions and offer obscure analogies.

Ed, anytime you want to sit in the 1–3–8 with El Lefty, let me know. I promise not to alert those pesky Matier and Ross guys. 

Billy Sadler is up from Fresno to replace Brad Hennessey. As noted on this very blog of record, Hennessey had a minor-league option, and oh boy, did the Giants just use it. Sadler was a teammate of Brian Wilson at L.S.U. Two Ragin’ Cajuns in one bullpen. Rowr!

For those of you who weren’t paying attention when Sadler had his brief major-league debut in 2006, he throws very hard and doesn’t control it very well. Last year in triple-A he walked nearly a batter an inning (35 BB in 42 1/3 IP). 

It turns out Zito didn’t suffer an extended banishment in the bullpen or take a few weeks off to surf. He’s back in the starting rotation tonight. It’s not a reversal, exactly, as the Giants were careful to avoid setting a specific timetable.

But when he was demoted after his lousy start at home against the Reds, it sounded like the team brass had been thinking about the move for a while. Reading the tea leaves — or the schedule, which indicated the Giants wouldn’t need a fifth starter until this weekend — it seemed Zito would skip more than one start.

Perhaps tonight, against a small-market team in front of a small-market crowd, is Zito’s audition, with a longer exile in store if he flunks. You have to wonder: What if the Pirates knock him around? Will the Giants start Zito five days later, on Monday at home against Houston? If he flops tonight, the boo-birds will be out in full force at home, and his confidence will be at an all-time low.

What to look for tonight: Zito says his time off helped him re-focus on being aggressive. Bruce Bochy says his biggest problem has been location (duh). Bochy and Righetti say Zito hasn’t learned new pitches or added more movement to his pitches during his time off. He’s just going to throw more strikes. If I were the Pirates, I’d take this quote from Zito —

“For me, it's about being aggressive. You can definitely get away with pitches early in the count that you can't late in the count. Late in the count, you've got to be fine.”

— and look for a lot of first-pitch 84–MPH fastballs. Let’s hope the new mindset helps him hit the corners.

Is Zito back too soon? Discuss.

Or, if you’re had enough negatrosity for now, send Barry a little encouragement in today’s comments. To do my part, and to honor the new aggressive, strike-throwing, good-location mindset, I’m busting out a rally rag, of sorts, courtesy of BigO. Go get them Buccos, Barry!

No, not that Omar, though you could say Vizquel’s rehab is coming down to the wire. He’s played a couple games in triple-A, and the Giants probably won’t keep him down much longer barring setbacks.

When he returns, it won’t shake up the lineup too much. He’ll either bat second or eighth. The past couple weeks Bruce Bochy has mostly settled on a Fred Lewis-Eugenio Velez combo at the top of the order, but with Velez’s struggles as noted yesterday, we might see Omar batting second and Velez dropping to eighth.

The short-term question: Will Vizquel make the Giants better? On offense, it won’t be hard. S.F. shortstops are hitting a combined .176 / .275 / .196, thanks mostly to Brian Bocock. (The bright spot: he and Burriss have combined for 8 steals in 10 attempts.) If Omar only matches his feeble output from 2007 (.246 / .305 / .316), it will still be a healthy leap.

Let’s predict Omar is better than last year but not as good as his career averages, split the difference and assign him a .322 OBP and .336 SLG. Sub those numbers for the current SS numbers, and the Giants lineup (according to this fun Web-based time-suck) scores about a quarter-run more per game. That’s one extra run every four games. Given the team’s tendencies toward close shaves, that one run could make a difference now and again.

On defense, Vizquel last year was still above average, according to BP’s “rate2” metric, with a 106. (100 is average.) But the same measurement gives Bocock an outstanding 121 for his brief work this year. 

Defensive stats are suspicious things, so let’s try another metric. The Hardball Times calculates how many balls a player reaches in his fielding zone. Last year Vizquel got to 88.6%; Bocock this year has reached 87.7%. If you think Bocock’s range is plenty good, then Vizquel last year was even better.

Arm strength is another matter, as is the state of Vizquel’s range after knee surgery, but I think it’s fair to say that unless Omar really hits the wall, his overall game will be an improvement over Bocock. But over Burriss? We just haven’t seen enough of him to say. I suspect the Giants will keep Manny as the back-up.

And what of Omar’s intangibles? Aside from teaching the rookies how to dress, being on the field every day with Eugenio Velez might speed up Velez’s on-the-job training. We can only hope.

All in all, it’ll be good to have him back. Bitch all you want about old farts on the roster, but the Giants won’t lose any energy or enthusiasm with Vizquel in the lineup. Give us one more shot of Omar Fu before you go, my friend, that’s all we ask.

The Eugenio Velez Experience rolls on, and it ain’t pretty. His two gaffes yesterday (the first was officially Castillo’s error, on a low throw that Velez should have caught) cost the Giants the game, and his O isn’t making up for his shoddy D. He’s not walking; he’s not having good at-bats. I’m not sharpening my pitchfork, but it’s fair to ask if Velez — and the Giants — would be better served if he started every day as the Fresno second baseman. He needs reps in the field, and he needs to learn to get on base by any means necessary.

He could learn on the big stage, but we’ll have to suffer through more games like yesterday’s.

Speaking of learning curves, the Giants have six straight games, including yesterday’s, against lefty starters. Pittsburgh has three lined up, then Philadelphia’s Hamels again followed by Jamie Moyer. Fred Lewis sat against Hamels yesterday, but Bochy told the press Lewis will play during the all-lefty run. He’s only had 6 ABs this year against lefties, and this is the perfect opportunity for a long string. Pittsburgh’s three aren’t blue-chippers, so he should play all three games. It’s the rarity of exposure to a lefty — the breaking pitch tailing away, the fastball and sinker cutting in — that makes it difficult for left-handed batters to succeed against them.

If their rarity alone is enough to make them harder to hit, why don’t LHPs get RHBs out all the time, too? Good question. Think of a batter’s field of vision as he faces the pitcher. For a RHB, a lefty’s curve or slider starts high and away, easier to see and gauge earlier than a breaking pitch out of a RHP’s hand, which starts high and in, i.e., visible over the batter’s shoulder.

The field of vision, plus the movement of the breaking ball away, gives RHPs an advantage against RHBs, too, but the familiarity — the sheer amount of right-handed stuff that RHBs face over their careers — mitigates the difference somewhat.  

Other tidbits:

* Chase Utley’s home run off Cain was a masterpiece of hitting. Great pitch, a curveball down and away, and Utley put his short sweet swing on it and sent it out to the deepest part of the yard, left-center field. Wind or no wind, it was studly. And it makes Lincecum’s work the next day against Utley, the league’s hottest hitter, that much more impressive: 1^st inning, man on second and one out, strikeout looking; 3^rd inning, first and second with no out, fly to center; 5^th inning, first and third with no out, pop to second.

* Keep an eye on Saturday’s pitching matchups. It’s when the Giants next need a fifth starter, unless Jonathan Sanchez goes on three days rest. (This page lists Sanchez as the starter, but it’s not going to happen.)

* Erick Threets is rehabbing in Fresno. He’s already thrown a couple innings. How long can he rehab before the Giants have to make a decision? It’s going to be tough, as there’s no room for him right now. Hennessey apparently has an option and could trade places with Threets, but his ability to throw multiple innings, no matter how gruesome’s he been so far, is an asset while the rotation gets sorted out.

Today’s question: Can you abide by Velez’s defense, even in a rebuilding year? If you were the GM, how much of his current performance — crummy D, a sub-.300 OBP, sketchy baserunning — do you tolerate before sending him down? Another month? Til the All-Star Break? A full year?