Tom Brady…not so bad after all

We always considered Tm Brady evil. He wins MVPs, Super Bowls, has millions of dollars, endorsement deals and doesn’t exactly struggle with the ladies.

If that’s not the epitome of evil, we don’t know what is.

But then the above photo appeared on The Big Lead Monday and we remembered that Brady is a Bay Area native. He rides BART, witnessed “The Catch” in person and roots for the Giants. Now what could possibly be evil about that?

We believe that lady next to him is his sister, who we would consider after, oh, two Long Islands.

Shawn Estes. Shawn Estes!

It’s always a good thing when you read a Padres-Cubs recap and get all exclamation point-y! Because longtime Giant Shawn Estes is back in the league — and got his 100th career win. Yay!

Estes pitched 5 1/3 innings and the Padres’ bullpen secured the win with 3 2/3 innings of hitless relief.

Estes (1-0), who pitched 1 2/3 innings in relief on Thursday, only made one start in 2006 for the Padres and missed the 2007 season recovering from Tommy John surgery.

Comeback stories are always fun and Estes was one of those good guys in baseball, with little ego, a sense of humor and some charisma.

So welcome back, Shawn Estes. If that is your real name, Aaron!

The Pirates could be World Champions (if they played the Giants more often)

No need to sugarcoat this: The Pittsburgh Pirates are a very bad team and have been for a very long time. They haven’t had a .500+ season since 1992. That was only a year after the fall of the Soviet Union! Yeeesh.

Normally, we’d sympathize for an organization in such shambles. But not the Pirates. We fucking hate the Pirates. If their sunflower seeds tasted like spoiled sour cream that’d be fine. We’d also like it if they never learned to read.

Because, Jesus, they fucking kill our San Francisco Giants.

After the Pirates 5-4 win yesterday, which completed a three-game sweep, they are now 20-8 against the Giants dating back to 2004. That’s a .714 winning percentage. Their winning percentage over that five-year span is .427.

The Giants haven’t exactly been a successful team during that time period, either. But still. They’re the Pirates.

Now please, Pittsburgh, go lose 10 in a row. And may your iPods only play Hannah Montana songs.

Gorgeous park, though.

Moving Zito to the bullpen is the wrong move…

…because the Giants should send him back to the minors. But that’s not the case, unfortunately.

The Giants have a $126 million long reliever. Barry Zito is heading to the bullpen.

Zito was told the news before Monday’s game, one day after he surrendered eight earned runs in three innings to the Reds and fell to 0-6 with a 7.53 ERA.

“Barry is all for doing whatever he can to help the club,” Bochy said. “This is the best for Barry and the ball club right now.”

No. No it’s not. If Giants brass could swallow their egos and accept that they spent nearly twice Kiribati’s GDP on a player good for an average of seven and a half runs per game, they’d send Zito to Fresno.

In Triple-A, Zito would be able to (presumably) work out his kinks at no expense of the Giants. He could keep his same routine — seven runs every five days — against minor-league talent and not fuck up the Giants’ record even more than it already is.

In long relief, Zito could turn a 5-0 deficit into a 10-0 hole in an inning. He also won’t get the consistency of pitching once a week in the bullpen. And yes, he’ll fuck up the game. He’s already done that six times. And at 0-6, he’s made approximately $3 million per loss, which is significantly less than what he’s making per win.

ESPN.com mocks Giants’ offense

We know it’s going to be a long season, but we didn’t know runs would be this hard to come by.

Doing the math on Barry Zito

Just about the only thing more painful than watching Barry Zito give up eight hits and four runs a start is knowing how much money he’s making doing it.

It’s one of the strangest thing in sports: the highly paid starting pitcher. If healthy, he plays once every five days, and while incredibly valuable in the postseason, the best of the best help their team once a week. And rarely more than seven innings of the game.

And then there’s Barry Zito who doesn’t exactly “help” once per week and seems to do it in about five-inning stints. His $126 million, seven-year contract is both unfathomable and brilliant, of course depending from which perspective you look at it.

So let’s breakdown Zito’s salary, based on an average of 35 starts per season, six innings per start and 11 wins.

The numbers are humbling.

-$18 million per year
-About $515,000 per start
-Nearly $86,000 per inning
-About $1.6 million per win
-Almost $29,000 per out

That last number is the most upsetting. Zito makes more money per out than many people make per year.

He better not be getting that $600 tax rebate.

A sign of things to come?

Fuck.

Boston Fans Wuss Out on Bonds

(Hey kids, this is Marco from Just Call Me Juice. I’ll be the first of your guest writers while Zach is off getting drunk in the woods)

Zach isn’t even here, but you are getting a post about the Giants. That’s because since I now live in Boston, I got to see Barry’s “epic” trip to Fenway last weekend. And after almost a week of build up by the Boston media as to how bad the fans would treat Bonds, the Sox fans were actual quite terrible in their heckling of Bonds. Hell, Barry even said he enjoyed his trip to Boston. Yes, the same Boston he said was too racist for him to ever play there. I don’t think you would ever hear that from Barry about Philly, a place that knows how to boo. Very disappointing with zero creativity. Asterisks? Wow, never saw that one coming. Syringes? Very original.

I made my into Fenway for Game 3 of the series, the one where Bonds took Wakefield deep. You could actually hear some cheering after Bonds hit the homer (granted, their was a large number of Giants fans in Fenway….who knew they traveled?) which was eventually turned into boos. I guess with all of the creative taunting of A-Rod and the rest of the Yankees over the years, I expected too from Sox fans. Oh well, I’ll just have to go back to throwing D-Batteries at Bonds from the outfield of Citizens Bank Park in Philly and hating Sox fans. At least Philly fans know how to heckle. And oh yeah, fuck (wouldn’t be a TBP post without fuck, would it?)

The Giants aren’t going to score any runs all year

OK. That headline is blatant lie. The San Francisco Giants will score a run this season. Maybe even two. There are like 8,000 games in the season, so the chance of getting shut out of the entire year would probably be along the lines of historic.

But after a 7-0 Opening Day stinker, who knows if the Giants’ anemic lineup — Ray Durham, ladies and gentleman, is your cleanup hitter — can manufacture a run.

From our favorite SF Giants blog, McCovey Chronicles:

The game in summary: The bullpen wasn’t good, the lineup was awful, the bazillion-dollar ace was okay-not-great, and I don’t like watching Pedro Feliz play baseball. That has the potential to be a season in summary.

Pedro Feliz is still my least favorite player to watch from the past decade. The line between rational dislike and irrational hatred is now completely indistinguishable in my own mind. Is Cla Meredith good enough to get other hitters to chase that 3-2 sinker nine feet off the plate? Or is Feliz just that bad and there is no hope and the team is doomed and I can’t believe this team really plans to give him 600 plate appearances? Feliz is a complete failure of imagination on the part of any general manager who thinks he could be of any use to a starting lineup.

Ditto.

Expectations around the Bay are pretty low, but still. Shut out? We’re aware that Opening Day is just one game — our editor/boss at The Seattle Times just gave us a throat-slash gesture after hearing what sounded like a cliché get written — but that first game seems to dictate the mood for the season.

And that mood is going to be pretty foul. We might piss ourselves if the G-men break through for a run today. Though if they miraculously do, it’ll probably be unearned.