No sugar coating; Giants embarrassed themselves

Let's keep this simple. Wednesday's 7-1 Giants loss at Oakland was an abomination.

Jake Peavy got killed, the defense was an accessory to the homicide, and the Giants on this night looked like they had no business calling themselves a Major League team; which in some ways they aren't. 

We could swear there were clowns, too.

It wasn't one of those "them's the breaks" or even a "just one of those nights" affairs. This was bury-your-head-under-a-pillow-after-chugging-a-12-pack time. If the Giants were your girl you'd dump her and either sleep with her sister or swear off women altogether.

Peavy stayed in the windup through seven hitters, and moving to the stretch wasn't his fault. Marcus Semien's third-inning pop-up into short right should have been an easy out, but Mac Williamson and Ramiro Pena collided for a three-base error. The A's cashed it in with a Billy Burns squeeze bunt for a 1-0 lead without benefit of a hit. 

It got worse. The circus had definitely rolled into town, appropriate against a team with an elephant mascot. The defense would fail in every way possible short of impaling themselves on a broken bat; which upon further review might have been less painful to watch.

Coco Crisp followed with drive to left and Angel Pagan failed to cut it off, playing a single into a triple. The additional bases hardly mattered when Williamson knocked Jed Lowrie's drive over the right field wall for a two-run homer and a 3-0 lead. 

Tejada was NOT charged with an error. Explanation please. (CSN Bay Area via Twitter)

The multiple foul-ups were decried by the masses on Twitter as a "Little League mistakes" and there's validity to that claim; these are things you expect on the T-ball field but not in a venue where adults are being paid for their supposed talents. It's also a result of having too many players in roles for which they simply are not prepared; a direct result of the growing number of Giants on the DL.

You could put "Rivercats" on the front of the jerseys and be assured of a fair amount of accuracy. The current 25-man roster includes eight men who weren't Giants on April 4.

San Francisco's latest addition to the injury list is second baseman Joe Panik, out for at least a week with concussion-like symptoms that resulted in Pena and Tejada being in the lineup. Based on Wednesday's performance, some other players should be checked for a similar ailment.

The victim (aside from those doomed to watch this dreck) was Peavy, whom we are now out in the uncomfortable position of defending. He seemed in control before all Hell broke loose. The botch-fest required him to throw 40 pitches in the third inning after needing just 15 over the first two, and he was never the same.

This also wasn't an error. Also, water is not wet. (CSN Bay Area via Twitter)

The Giants tried to answer against Sean Manaea in the fourth. Singles by Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford  and Trevor Brown loaded the bases with one out for ... Williamson. Did Wes Craven write this script? Williamson grounded into a 6-4-3 double play. This seems more like a Rob Zombie flic.

If he'd kept running all the way back to Sacramento it's likely no one would have stopped him.

Earlier in the night Williamson had also been called for an illegal slide at the pivot of what became an inning-ending double play. What a guy.

Oakland added on in the fourth. Billy Butler drew a one-out walk and Yonder Alonso took Peavy deep on a ball of undetermined distance. We assume MLB StatCast will post that number when and if it lands. Then, more hijinks. 

Semien enjoyed his second gift of the night as Pagan chased his drive to the wall, extended his glove, and caught nothing but air as Semien motored to third. Because it fell untouched it was scored a triple. At least that was the apparent reasoning, which was about as flawed as the play itself.

Billy Burns added a soft liner to make it 6-0, and Burns took an extra base when Pagan kicked it. Was that ruled an error? No. The raffle winner keeping score should receive a nice fruit basket for helping pad Oakland's stats.

We know the look, and we agree. (CSN Bay Area via Twitter)

The 90 feet hurt when Crisp added an RBI single. It was 7-0 and Peavy was gone after 3 1/3. He needed to take a few guys with him. He was victimized by bad defense, bad situational hitting, even bad scoring; not to mention his own mistakes. 

Peavy should have gone directly to the locker room, walking under a ladder across the path of  a black cat en route to some serious mirror smashing. He couldn't have made it any worse.

The Giants bullpen, which one night earlier couldn't find an out with GPS and a flashlight, kept the Athletics quiet the rest of the night. Nothing like pulling the rip cord after hitting the ground.

The Orange and Black finally erased the goose egg in the seventh on Crawford's sacrifice fly off John Axford that chased home Belt. It did little to quell the early rush at the Coliseum BART station.

The Giants outhit their hosts 8-7, if you can believe that one. Posey had a three-hit night and Brown hit safely twice to lead the pack. What the Giants didn't get was two errors and assorted other mental defects that allowed the value of hits to expand the impact of said hits geometrically.

At 49-31, the Giants have dropped three straight. Their lead over Los Angeles in the NL West remained six games thanks to the Dodgers' 7-0 thrashing at Milwaukee. Silver lining. Back away from the ledge.

The G-Men hope to salvage the final game of the cross-bay match-up tomorrow, and normally having Madison Bumgarner on the bump would bring hope for salvation. But Bumgarner (8-4, 1.99 ERA) has been the hard luck hurler of late. With the Giants having given up 28 runs over the past three nights, to be more unlucky is gonna cost someone a limb. Dillon Overton (1-0, 4.76) goes for Oakland. 

God help us.

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