How sucky are the Giants this year? Our ongoing occasional series, “San Francisco SuckWatch 2008,” keeps you up to date! So with out further ado, let’s dive right in and see what is sucky about the Giants this week…

- Someone named Brian Bocock has played every inning at shortstop except one so far this season for the Giants. His batting line so far? .179 / .303 / .196. And as ugly as that line is, it is unlikely to get much better. Last season Bocock did not play a single game above A-ball, and in 345 at-bats at high-A San Jose, he posted a batting line of .220 / .293 / .328. Even if those stats from last year were directly transferred to the major leagues, they would instantly make Brian Bocock the worst-hitting shortstop in baseball, yet those were the stats he compiled last year, in A-ball.

- Bocock has been so bad that the Giants are calling up his double-play partner from A-ball last year, Emmanuel Burriss. This has become necessary because Omar Vizquel, the 41-year old shortstop the Giants resigned after he batted .240 last season, is not healing as fast as was hoped from his knee surgery. If the Giants’ fallback plans at shortstop are two guys from A-Ball, and Bocock is the best of those two, you really have to wonder just how truly terrible the other guys they have playing short in the Giants system must be.

- Bizarrely, in calling up Emmanuel Burriss the Giants DFA’d Rajai Davis, one of their few major-league ready outfield prospects, and the prize they swiped from the Pirates for Matt Morris. Although in the long run Davis projects as a fourth outfielder type, he is highly regarded as a defender in the outfield, and is not entirely incompetent with the bat, so you have to wonder why the Giants are risking losing him to a waiver claim.

- As of this writing, the Giants remain last in the entire Major Leagues in runs scored with 61 runs in 19 games, an average of 3.21 runs per game.

- According to the USS Mariner, the average velocity of Barry Zito’s fastball in 2008 is 82.7 miles per hour. Yes, that is the average, not the lowest. And according to calculations by The Big Picture, Barry Zito will make an estimated $86,000 per inning over the life of his contract, and that is assuming an extremely generous 35 starts per season and 6 innings per start!

- Putative staff ace Matt Cain had the worst outing of his career this week, getting hammered for 9 earned runs in 3.2 innings of work.

- As noted by Baseball Digest Daily, the Giants presently have the third longest championship drought in baseball, at 54 years and counting, behind only the Cubs and the Indians.

- Also via The Big Picture, piling on the Giants has become so fun that even the automated computer feed that updates the scores of ESPN’s game tracker has joined the fun.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now might have noticed that some of us harbor a faint disdain for the defensive abilities of a certain Derek Sanderson Jeter.

So it was with some interest that we read Lee Panas’s recent blog post evaluating the defensive contributions made by major league shortstops in 2007.

Panas looked at six well-known systems for evaluating a player’s defense and averaged the number of runs a player prevented last season according to each system, normalizing the results for 150 games.

In first place was John McDonald of the Toronto Blue Jays, who would have prevented an amazing 26 runs last season had he played in 150 games. In close second was Troy Tulowitzki, who saved 25 runs. From there the drop off was pretty huge, with the seemingly ageless Omar Vizquel taking third place with 16 runs prevented.

And in DEAD LAST PLACE out of the 30 shortstops evaluated, averaged across 6 different systems?

Yep, it was Derek Jeter of the Yankees, with an average result of 27 extra runs allowed above a shortstop of average range, over the course of 150 games.

Man, how did this guy ever win a gold glove?

Of course, we here at UmpBump believe in moderation, and we understand that any player can have an off year, so we took this news in stride, and refrained from any unnecessary, self-satisfied glee:

From: Nick

To: UmpBump Staff

Check out this list of the best and worst defensive shortstops last season… Any guesses as to who was dead last?

From: Sarah

To: UmpBump Staff

BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Someone please blog this!