The end of this season for the Giants hasn't been fun. But it's at least been about clearing up the issues that have plagued the Giants this year and, perhaps admitting some mistakes.
If you're not clear what I mean: Brian Sabean finally ponied up and dumped Miguel Tejada and Aaron Rowand.
Another mistake that's haunted the Giants this season? Aubrey Huff. Though Huff was indispensable -- from both a statistical, leadership and, um, fashion perspective -- down the stretch in 2010, there was really no reason to reward him with a monster contract.
The Giants did that anyway, for some reason. And Huff has played about as poorly as he possibly could given the deal he received. Don't worry, though. He knows he's helping sink this team.
"If I have anything close to the season I had last year, we probably wouldn't be sitting in this spot," said Huff said earlier in the week, per Andrew Baggarly of the San Jose Mercury-News."So I take a lot of blame for that. But at the same time, it's baseball, man. Guys have bad years. We've had injuries and bad breaks.
"Certainly I could've played better. I just didn't."
So what to make of Huff's future with Brandon "Yo-Yo Giraffe" Belt seemingly prepared to start with the big-league club (again) in 2012? Well, ESPN's Buster Olney doesn't expect any mea culpas from Sabean on this one.
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"The guess here is that San Francisco will not go into next year committed to playing Huff every day, as it did in 2011, while waiting for him to start producing," Olney writes Friday. "Huff is hitting .243 with a .301 on-base percentage with 12 homers and 55 RBIs in 544 at-bats in the first year of a two-year, $22 million deal."
"$11 million for 12 home runs" is always painful reading material. I'm not even sure why I wrote it again.
So it's good news if we don't have to hear it once again in 2012, as Olney suggests.
And while he swatted 26 home runs in 2010 and knocked a shocking 32 out of the park as recently as 2008, this is prime time for a skills decline, as we saw in 2011.
The odds of him justifying an $11 million deal are pretty low, even barring a big bounceback. Unfortunately, he's already locked into that deal, so there's not a whole lot anyone can do to change it, other than hope that Sabean doesn't bank on him being the third-best batter on the roster in 2012.
Again.
