San Francisco Giants

The New York Giants were established in 1883. In 1958 the club moved out west, becoming who they are today - the San Francisco Giants.

Along the way, there have been many fun players, many great players. Some players we hated, and loved to boo and heckle. Many players stuck around for a season or two at best, while others played their entire career for the Giants.

Who is your favorite Giants player?

Giants' fans everywhere have their own opinion about how they would rank their favorite players.

The San Francisco Giants will rely on strong starting pitching, a struggling Padres team, and an easy September schedule to overtake the San Diego Padres and win the 2010 National League West.

The Schedule:

The Giants are currently three games back of the Padres with 28 games to play. 12 of the remaining games are against teams with sub .500 records, and another seven of those games are against the division leading Padres. The other games are against the struggling Cubs and the hated Dodgers.

The Giants won 2-1 on Wednesday and after a disastrous month of August, Tim Lincecum has rebounded. It took several starts to rediscover his rhythm, but he did his job on Wednesday night. His line: 8.0 IP, 1 ER, 5 H, 1 BB, 9 K. The nine strikeouts are certainly a promising sign, as well as the one walk. The lone run came on an opposite-field solo shot by Carlos Gonzalez. With a Cy Young Lincecum on the mound, the Giants are a force to be reckoned with.

The San Francisco Giants did everything most fans insist that they never do and came away with an important win on Thursday night, beating the Colorado Rockies 2-1, to gain a game on the NL West-leading San Diego Padres.

If the San Francisco Giants do make the 2010 postseason, it will be the result of an honest-to-baseball good team effort.

There have been (and will be) major and minor players in the drama, but the days of Barry Bonds clubbing the opposition into retreat with only minimal contribution from his lilliputian mates have been dead so long, there's almost nothing left to decompose. We're well into a new era of ball at AT&T Park and smacks of classical Marxism on cleats.

It was only a matter of time.

We knew it was coming.

How could a team being led by Juan Uribe, Andres Torres, and Aubrey Huff be in the thick of a playoff race?

The team is made up of streaky hitters, inconsistent pitchers, and Major League scraps ready to be hauled to the dumpster.

Freddy Sanchez is either red hot or ice cold.

Barry Zito is either unhittable or like hitting off a batting tee.

Uribe, Huff, Torres, Pat Burrell, Jose Guillen, Cody Ross, Santiago Casilla, Guillermo Mota.

The San Francisco Giants are still in the playoff chase, even after Monday’s mind-bending loss.

Really, could the gem that Jonathan Sanchez pitched have been wasted any more painfully that it was against Colorado in the series opener?

Could an apparently inspiring win have been lost any more quickly?

For the past few weeks or so, the Giants starting pitching has been the subject of much criticism. The blame for the Giants' dismal 12-15 August record has been placed upon this quintet.

The hitting was doing fine: Sanchez, Sandoval, and Torres were heating up, and Guillen, Burrell, Huff, and Uribe were providing jolts of offense here and there. But on Monday, the hitting fell silent. The Giants managed to get just four hits, and nine different Giants struck out at least once.

With the calendar down to the last day of August, Major League Baseball is about to fire the starting gun on its stretch run.

Fans haven't been hesitant to point to the player or the plan that keeps the San Francisco Giants from soaring to the top of the NL West and well past the field in the wild-card race.

As it turns out, though, most things that fans insisted the Giants do to get things going have been done and things haven't gone very well at all in the last month. The club is on the verge of falling out of the division race and has to keep pace with the Philadelphia Phillies, a tall order, to win the Wild Card.