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Mike Yastrzemski tried to carry the load for a bit, but his shoulders have gotten tired.
Evan Longoria hasn’t been back long enough to do the same heavy-lifting he did before his IL trip.
Buster Posey and the Brandons, Crawford and Belt, have looked weary.
With no Alex Dickerson, where are the Giants going to find an offense that resembled the sizzling July instead of the dog days of August?
“Gotta get this offense scoring again,” Bruce Bochy said before the Giants hosted the Nationals on Wednesday, trying to avoid a sweep.
Bochy’s strategy was retooling the lineup against Washington’s Joe Ross, with Steven Duggar leading off, Pablo Sandoval at cleanup and first base, Stephen Vogt catching and Donovan Solano getting a rare start against a righty.
The Giants’ bench will not be the Giants’ typical bench in the coming weeks, Bochy suggested, “Especially in August. Guys have been grinding hard.”
He will try to keep the team fresh and hope runs can be extracted, too.
Dickerson and his 1.222 OPS as a Giant will not immediately come to the rescue, as he and his oblique will need more than the allotted 10 days on the injured list. Everyone around the Giants is trying to find a way to compensate without him, so far to no avail.
Entering play, the Giants were averaging less than three runs per game this month (17 runs in six games — five losses).
“When I was down, you’d watch the games and see the kind of at-bats that everyone’s having,” Duggar told KNBR after seeing the beginning of the season and the modern-day Giants, sandwiched around time at Triple-A Sacramento. “You want guys 1-through-9 that are extremely tough to get out. It puts a lot of stress on the other team.”
He advocates a collective effort to make up for Dickerson’s absence. When the Giants were rolling, it was Longoria who went on a tear with a 1.537 OPS in July before plantar fasciitis sidelined him. For a moment, it was Yastrzemski who grabbed the slack, but he entered play 1-for-14 in his past four games.
Who’s next?
“It’s a team,” said Sandoval, who was 6-for-13 with three doubles in his past four games. “Gotta stay together. Everyone’s gotta give a little extra effort [without Dickerson] to go out there and win.”
Perhaps it’ll be Solano, who is batting .391 in his past eight games, and now will see more time. Maybe Scooter Gennett can wipe away Giants fans’ tears over Joe Panik by getting hot. Perhaps Longoria can rediscover his stroke.
But for a team that entered play 3 1/2 games back of the second NL wild card with a rotation featuring three struggling rookies, it will need to be someone.
“We gotta do whatever we have to do to get rolling,” Sandoval said.