San Francisco Giants Roundtable: First Half Surprises and Disappointments

DANNY PENZA

In a season where the team's success is one of the biggest surprises of them all and so many good stories have come about, it's hard to pick one single player to focus on as the biggest surprise of the first half.

However, if I had to narrow it down to just one person, which isn't easy at all, it would probably be Pablo Sandoval.

You may be thinking to yourself that a guy who was supposed to be a big part of the offense and has come through is not exactly a surprise.

Well I tell you this—Sandoval hitting for average isn’t a surprise, the way he has done it is one hell of a surprise.

The Sandovalian theory of hitting is to swing the bat early and often. It doesn't matter if the pitch is at his eyebrows or about to bounce in the dirt, the Panda likes to swing the bat.

It hasn't prevented him from hitting for power, however, something that has been he biggest improvement over his 2008 debut.

In his cameo last season, he hit for a serious average (.345), but he didn't hit for much power at all. He only smacked two homers and drove in 24 in 41 games.

Now in 2009, Sandoval has played exactly twice as many games as a year ago and the offensive output is a little more than doubled.

Let's try a .333 average, 15 bombs, 55 RBI, and one huge All-Star Game snub on for size. Doesn't matter if there are runners on base, nobody on, bases chucked full—Sandoval comes through.

Is it safe to say the Kung Fu Panda has arrived?

And the most impressive thing of it all—he's done most of his damage at pitcher friendly AT&T.

Little Money has replaced Big Money as the Giants' No. 1 choice to come to the plate in the clutch.

Amongst the crowd, Sandoval stands alone.

That being said, the biggest disappointment of the season isn’t as hard to figure out.

Fred Lewis' debut wasn't insanely spectacular by any means, but it wasn't terrible either. When you think about whom he was replacing and that he was a regular starter for the first time in his career, hitting .282 with nine homers and 40 RBI. 

We all thought that the second year being a everyday player and knowing that he was going to hit in the middle of the order, meaning more chances to drive in runs, would help improve his stats a whole heck of a lot.

The problem is that it didn't.

Lewis started out the first couple of weeks of the season scorching hot. It seemed that he had found his place hitting in the middle of the lineup and that left field wasn’t a position to worry about.

Then the strikeouts starting piling up, the average went into a freefall, and the defensive adventures in the outfield became almost as frequent as games with multiple strikeouts.

Manager Bruce Bochy gave him some days off and those days off turned into weeks off as Nate Schierholtz caught fire and established himself as the better option in the outfield.

Giants announcer Dave Flemming said it best around the time Lewis was demoted to the bench—left field wasn’t a position the Giants were worried about coming out of Spring Training.

Now his career is certainly at a crossroads and nobody really knows if he will be anything more than a pinch hitter and fourth outfielder while he is still with the Giants.

Is it any surprise that the F-Dot-Lew blog on the Comcast Sportsnet Bay Area website hasn’t been updated much at all since he was sent to the bench?

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