NL West

The baseball season is 162 games long, so some losses just have to be written off and filed away in a folder tagged "Stuff Happens."

The San Francisco Giants' 6-5 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates on Tuesday wasn't one of those games. Manager Bruce Bochy and his willingness to go by the book cost the Giants the game.

Being that I live in Los Angeles now, I've only been able to catch the highlights of the Giants' wins on MLB.com the day after the game or catch the game on MLB.com's virtual game thingy.

Imagine my thrill last night when I dropped into a sushi restaurant that actually had the game on in the bottom of the third.

It immediately made me remember there's a God who loves me and wants me to be happy.  ;-)

Then Mark DeRosa hits into a double play.

The Giants of the last two or three years would have been deflated.

It seems that San Diego Padres RHP Chris Young can never stay healthy. Over the last four years, Young’s starts have gone down every year.

He made 31 starts in 2006, 30 starts in 2007, 18 starts in 2008, and just 14 starts in 2009. Now after one start in 2010, the 6′10″ Young is hurt again.

The Padres placed Young on the 15-day DL because of right shoulder tightness. The move is retroactive to April 7th.

There is almost nothing like the start of the regular season for baseball fans.

Enthusiasm abounds. At the start of the season, every team is even (yes, the Yankees and Red Sox are always favored, but all teams begin together).

The Arizona Diamondbacks have started 4-2 and are second in runs scored in the National League with 42.

Their run total was helped by a 13-run outburst in the fourth inning of Sunday’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The 13 runs in that inning were a Diamondbacks team record.

Let’s see what is going on with the team from the Valley of the Sun.

Kelly Johnson is back!

Every single year we are amazed at how fast the first week goes, but that's part of the beauty of baseball.

It’s way too early to care about league leaders and standout performances, but there's no shame in looking, is there?

Here are the top story lines from each team during the first week of the 2010 season. 

The Giants are six games into the regular season and look good at 5-1 (compounded by Tim Lincecum being 2-0, with another brilliant, seven-inning, 10-strikeout performance in a 6-3 win tonight ).

However, while the Giants' pitching has been solid so far, it has been a very different story offensively after the first two series of the year against the Astros and Braves.

The San Francisco Giants sent Buster Posey to the minor leagues insisting that the youngster needed to be behind the plate every day in order to continue his growth as a catcher.

After a nice spring training with the bat, few who know the hitting-deprived big league club questioned the wisdom of Posey being ready to hit the big leagues.

Still, with the talk about him needing to catch every day combined with a bunch of malarkey about his arbitration clock starting (or making sure it doesn't start), most seemed fine with Posey catching for the Class AAA Fresno Grizzlies.

Anyone who has suffered through the downturn in the San Francisco Giants fortunes, then survived a surprise playoff run in 2009, isn't about to start picking at nits after the club's 4-0 start this week.

Well, almost nobody would point out tiny flaws in a team that is on pace to finish 162-0.