GIANT problem- The Downfall of the reigning World Champs.

     A huge disappointment throughout the league has been the collapse of the 2012 World Series winners, the San Francisco Giants.  The winners of two of the last three championships have crumbled to a disappointing 52-65 and are at the bottom of the NL West trailing by 14.5 games. Often, we do not see this kind of fall out from defending champions, so why this year?

      The first problem to this team starts at the rotation and the poor quality of the pitching.  Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum are exactly who I am pointing fingers at.  Tim Linecum has been declining ever since his back to back Cy Young campaigns in 2008 and 2009.  So what happened to this dominate young pitcher?  Number one problem, is his velocity.  His fastball use to average 93-94 but now, in 2013 is down 4 mph to 90.1.  The slight variation may not seem like much, but his pitches do not have that electrifying stuff.  All his pitches now are smoothening out and there is not nearly as much bite that is needed to fool the hitter.  He was a young kid with a fresh arm who might have had too heavy a workload.  Like every good pitcher though, Tim needs to sustain that velocity and keep his arm fresh throughout the offseason.  The final, most frightening statistic, is his loss in strikeout percentage.  In his 08-09 seasons he averaged a 23 percent strikeout looking rate and had 66 and 54 strikeouts coming to the backwards K.  The last two seasons it has been a dismal 19 percent and only 41 and 37 strikeouts looking.  If that is not a sign of the fallout of once a dominate pitcher then I don't know what is.  It seems to me that Tim needs to get to work and train a little harder if he wants to get his ace like stuff back and carry these Giants to another World Series.

      Now, for Matt Cain.  Cain was able to step up and take over for the declining Lincecum and make himself the clear ace for the staff.  As the old number 1 broke down, Matt Cain only got better and shined as the head of the Giants pitching staff.  He was an absolute bull-dog on the mound and he went out there on a mission and shut teams down as he posted 3 sub 3.00 ERA's in the past 5 seasons.  It seems that Cain, a pitcher who has lived and relied on his fly ball outs, is just having a season where too many of those balls are going out of the park.  His home run to fly ball ratio has increased 1.4% which is leading to his dramatic increase in ERA.  I believe Matt Cain will make a turnaround and is just having one of those down seasons, where his team as a whole has not been completely there.  I'm looking for a big turn around next year for Cain, who I believe will work on not leaving his pitches up in the zone and will decrease his HR/FB rate.

      Bruce Bochy and the Giants are sure to figure out their problems and will find a way to be back in the pennant race.  The pitching is not all too blame for Pablo Sandoval has been battling injuries through the middle of the season and former MVP Buster Posey is not having quite the campaign he did last year where he hit .385 through the second half of the season.  There is a bright future for this team and  look for them to be a main contender throughout the upcoming seasons.