Article:SF Giants: Home Woes Continue

The Giants now sit alone as the team with the worst home record in baseball as their early June surge has died out here in the middle of the month. If they were just a .500 home team, they would be within a game or two of the first place D-Backs. After their last road trip, the team looked like it was making some progress, but they got home to AT&T Park and got swept by their cross-bay rival, Oakland Athletics. They have now lost their last 5 series' at home The bats once again went into hibernation for the three game set against Oakland as they couldn't come up with any clutch hits and only scored 4 runs in the series. They now site at 13-22 at home for the year and after getting within 5 games of the first place D-Backs, the Giants are once again 7 back and 10 games below .500. One positive was getting Kevin Corriea back into the rotation. Although he didn't pitch particularly well in his first start since returning from the disabled list, I am expecting good things from KC from here on out. He gave up 5 runs over 5 1/3 innings, but was pitching brilliantly until giving up some runs in 6th inning. Getting Corriea back also pushed Misch down to Fresno which is good thing. Misch has looked a little out of his element since he was called up back in May and hopefully he gets' right back down in Fresno.

Contrary to Misch, Emmanuel Burris has not looked out of his element in the bigs so far and he's getting more and more playing time. The speedy shortstop continues to be an offensive force as he's reached base in all but 2 of the games he's started this year. He's hitting .296 with 13 runs and 6 stolen bags. Him and Omar Vizquel have had roughly the same number of at-bats and Burris production has blown Omar's out of the water so far. I like Omar as much as anyone, and even when he's not hitting, he's still fun to watch master the shortstop position but he's 41 years-old and he's starting to show his age. He hasn't had a multi-hit game since May 21st and he just isn't much of a factor at the plate anymore. Burris is earning at least a 50-50 share in PT, if not more, with the way he's played in part time duty. I'm not sure that Burris is the answer at shortstop going forward into the future with this club, but right now, he's their best option. I would really like to see Bochy start fielding a lineup that features the younger players playing together, something like this:

LF Fred Lewis SS Manny Burris CF Aaron Rowand C Bengie Molina 1B Jon Bowker RF Brian Horwitz 2B Travis Denker 3B Jose Castillo

The Giants Baseball Blog-http://giantsbaseballblog.blogspot.com/