PART ONE

One week ago, the Giants appeared to be on the verge of being the first team eliminated from playoff contention.

Barry Zito and Matt Cain were both winless, the Giants were floundering at the bottom of a weak division at 3-7, and the team appeared headed nowhere fast.

Fast forward to today.

While Cain is still winless, Zito has picked up his second win, Barry Bonds is crushing homers at a regular pace, and most importantly, the Giants are riding a five game win steak, and have pushed above the .500 mark.

I'm more than happy to see the Gigantes coming around. Most experts predicted the Giants to have a poor season, but I was more optimistic. Hopefully this turnaround is a sign of better things to come for the boys by the bay.

I would certainly liked to have seen more of the Giants, however. Due to a screw up at my cable company, the games were not available on Extra Innings until Wednesday. Seems they had already allotted the channels to...get this...hockey playoffs. Hockey??? There are few things I'd rather see than a hockey game. Okay, maybe a soccer game. Or Nascar. But beyond that, there isn't much. Saturday, I cringed when I saw the start time...1:00 p.m. Pacific. I knew that the Fox Channel would only be showing the Yankees/Red Sox game, because, after all, those are the only baseball teams that exist. (more about the Red Sox later). For some unkown reason, the Sunday game wasn't carried on Extra Innings, either. That being said...I STILL am glad to have the Extra Innings option...because MLB.TV, quite frankly, bites the big one.

PART TWO

A week ago, even though they hadn't played many games due to weather, the Seattle Mariners looked, surprisingly to me at least, respectable.

One week later...oh my lord, what has happened?

Well, let's start with the starting pitching.

My apologies for the above formatting issues, but the gist is this: Mariner starting pitching sucks. The injury to Hernandez is indeed unfortunate, and Washburn was at least semi-respectable, but the newcomers? Well, they're just not getting the job done. And I can't say I'm surprised, in spite of what the illustrious Mr. Bavasi wanted us to believe before the season started.

In our latest "Meet the Mariners" segment, we asked Mr. Bavasi, "what did you do before you went into baseball?"

Okay...that explains a lot.

In the series against the Angels, Richie Sexson is 0-11. But in all fairness...will SOMEONE please explain to the umpires that when you are 6' 8", your knees are higher than most other players, and what is above the knees to David Eckstein may not be a strike to Richie? It gets old watching him get called out on strikes that are clearly out of HIS strike zone.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I fully expected to see Santa Claus throw out the first pitch in this game.

I guess what it does show is that Dan "Action Dan" Harrington has been ahead of his time all these years:

One final thought: My wife verbalized something yesterday that I had been thinking. She said, "What is with A-Rod and all these homers? Is he on something?" She said it tongue in cheek, but it was a valid point. If Barry Bonds was on a tear like A-Rods (which I will grudgingly agree is nothing short of phenomenal), everyone would be pointing fingers and blaming 'roids, even though testing would have busted him long ago. But with A-Rod, everything is clean right???

Have a great and wonderful week, all!