Dodgers 5, Giants 0. It's important to avoid pegging a season to Opening Day. It's what non-fans do. You show up at work the next morning, and the non-fans, having glanced at the newspaper headlines over some guy's shoulder on the bus, say to you, because they know you're a big fan, "Wow, looks like they're going to be bad this year!" Non-fans don't quite understand that baseball takes 162 games, not 16.
Having said that: Yuck. In the post-game show, Mike Krukow said it's too bad the game went according to the script that lots of people have already written for the Giants, and to those people, Game 1 proves the script right. I have no illusions, either, but what am I going to do every time the hitting sucks, the defense is a bit leaky, and the $126 million starting pitcher throws like Josh Fogg? Write a post that basically says, "We all told you so" and drop a picnic basket full of all-caps f-bombs? Booooooooooooring.
Side note: Chris Haft at mlb.com reports that Zito lacked zip on his fastball; Zito himself made post-game comments on the need for more speed. Um, hello? Has the Bonds Eraser also worked on your memory of Zito's 2007? The radar gun hasn't changed a whit. This is not a new problem.
But again: this we all know. What I'd like to do instead is talk about the upside of each loss. In his pregame comments earlier today, Grant put it nicely: "A good season will be measured by achievable goals." In other words, now that we all agree that being a Giants fan in 2008 is the equivalent of cheering for your spastic 7-year-old when he hits the ball forward instead of backward in T-Ball, let's find something in each crap-ass game we can view through rose-colored glasses.
Today's upside: Brian Bocock. Bless his naive single-A soul, but didn't he know he was supposed to swing at anything and everything against big bad Brad Penny? Instead he walked twice, and for good measure made a sparkling play in the field (I hope they post the video clip). Yeah, he got picked off by one of the sneakiest leftiest malos in the game, but that's still a major-league strap-it-on how-do-you-do welcome-to-the-bigs-rook kinda day.
