For Pablo Sandoval, The Panda Express Is Still Moving..For Now

A year ago Giants fans for the first time started to forget about Barry Bonds.  They finally stopped lamenting the loss of a superstar that had made baseball watchable in San Francisco for twelve years. The number 25 jerseys that were once so popular around Candlestick and then Pac Bell Park had vanished and been replaced with sweatshirts that had horrendous looking Pandas sewn on the front.  

At long last there was someone that got fans excited whenever he stepped into the batter’s box. Someone who could actually hit the ball out of the infield and cause pitchers to think about what to throw instead of routinely firing a fastball down the middle of the plate to a guy they never heard of.

When Pablo Sandoval hit his 25^th home-run last year, a game winning shot against the Padres in the final game of the season, Bay Area sports fans finally had a reason to feel positive about the future. They had an outrageously talented pitching rotation (the average age of all four starters was only 27), their first closure since Rob Nen to only crap himself on the mound six times during the ninth inning of ballgames, and best of all a legitimate power threat in the middle of the line-up. All they were missing was a lead-off hitter, a first basemen, a set up man, and a completely new outfield. Other than that, there really wasn’t a need for any upgrade.   

I honestly thought with a straight face that 2010 would be the year the Giants would end their seven year playoff drought because the situation could only improve for them during the offseason. Well no, let me rephrase that, things couldn’t get too much better because the guys in the front office are cheap and never sign superstars until they start collecting social security. But the window of opportunity that snapped shut every time the Giants gave Brian Sabean another contract extension was slowly opening again after a scrappy team somehow managed to win 88 games with one descent hitter.

With Buster Posey poised to become the starting catcher and Pablo Sandoval aiming to get on the December cover of Men's Fitness, the Giants started to look more like the real deal. Or at the very least, less lousy on offense. 

Last year, Pablo weighed 240 lbs and batted.330 (second in the National League) with an impressive OPS of .943. Though his discipline at the plate remained a concern (83 strikeouts against 52 walks) it wasn’t unusual for a second year player to take cuts at balls out of the strike zone. Occasionally he’d get a hold of a pitch around his ankles and send it flying into the right field stands, so that part of his game wasn’t a headache for Bruce Bochy. On the contrary, it got fans revved up and the Giants won a few extra games as a result.

Coming off a torrid season, Pablo for some naïve reason seemed to think that his numbers would improve if he got into better shape. He stayed in San Francisco and joined a local 24 Hour Fitness. He worked his ass off and his physique showed. His clothes bagged out and he stopped buying XXXL t-shirts at Foot Locker. I even saw him at Marie Callender’s ordering a sugar free Apple Pie.

Maybe that was Prince Fielder, but I digress.  

After going home to Venezuela to play winter baseball, he came back to camp so rotund that people thought Bengie Molina had switched over from catcher to third base. Scary times.

It didn’t seem to matter in the first month of the regular season with the way Pablo’s numbers looked:  .368/.433/.575/1.008. But since April he’s been well there’s no other way to say it...abysmal. He’s already grounded into twenty double plays (take that and compare it to the 6 he hit into in 2008). His batting average is .60 below what it was last year. The leadoff man has two...no wait, three (guh) more home-runs than he does.  It’s been four months and Giants fans are still waiting for him to come out of it. Maybe there is no “it.”Maybe last year was just an illusion and it took a full season of mediocrity for us to see through it.

How we hoped it wasn’t so.   

Pablo Sandoval was the anti Barry Bonds in the way that there wasn’t anything not to like about him.   He covered third base like he was a 100 lb shortstop, had a cute nickname, never took any crap from anyone about his weight (until people started giving him crap about it) and Giants fans loved rooting for a talented player who wasn’t at the center of a world famous drug doping scandal.   

Bruce Bochy’s tried everything from batting him eighth in the line-up to threatening him with jogging exercises before games. None of it’s worked. Pablo’s still swinging like a windmill at the plate (he’s batting an atrocious .198 with runners in scoring position), gets lost between the base paths from time to time, and occasionally reacts to routine grounders by throwing the ball into the seats.

Sandoval's steady decline in production compounded with his wobbly defense at third base has raised some important questions about whether he'll be traded in the offseason. This won’t happen for two reasons. He’s the third best hitter on the team behind Huff and Posey (which just shows how deeply flawed the Giants remain on offense), and second, his age. He’s only 24, and even a boneheaded gm like Brian Sabean won’t throw away a potentially good player this early in his career (though the Phillies might try to tempt him with Jamie Moyer).  

So what to do? Pablo’s only making four hundred thousand dollars this year (eleven million and a half million less than Aaron Rowand gets to take helicopter swings in the batter’s box) and really, there’s not much to lose keeping him in as an everyday player than there is paying a crappy overrated outfielder 12 million a year to sit on the bench and strike out in the pitcher’s spot.

At worst Pablo will lose the weight again, put most of it back on during the winter, and still be better than most of the forty year olds Brian signs during the offseason.

I don’t know about you, but that’s more discouraging than it is reassuring.