Brandon Belt

The Giants are hoping to clinch a series victory in San Diego on Sunday, but they’ll be without the services of first baseman Brandon Belt.

This season, though, Giants’ general manager Bobby Evans’ phone line will buzz for entirely different reasons, as San Francisco carries the second-worst record in Major League Baseball out of the All-Star break. At the outset of the year, Evans and the Giants had visions of competing with the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League West division crown. When the second half of the season begins on Friday evening in San Diego, the Giants will attempt to work their way up from a 27.0 game deficit.

On a night in which the Los Angeles Dodgers won their 60th contest of the regular season, the team that was expected to provide their greatest foil in the race for the National League West crown played another meaningless game. Since starting the year with a 9-17 mark in the month of April, the San Francisco Giants have actually found a way to regress, as the club dropped its 55th game of the season on Saturday evening, a 5-4 defeat at the hands of the lowly Miami Marlins.

With one series standing in between the San Francisco Giants and the All-Star break, casual observers have every reason to believe the organization is on the verge of a fire sale. After dropping two out of three games in Detroit against the Tigers, Bruce Bochy’s ballclub returns home for a three-game set against the Marlins sitting 19 games under .500, 23.5 games back of the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers and with a farm system that needs replenishing.

There was a growing sense entering his start on Wednesday evening that Ty Blach could be pitching to keep his spot in the San Francisco Giants’ rotation. If that’s the case, Blach put a lock on his spot, and then did his best to hide the key.

Grant Brisbee joined Sportsphone 680 Thursday discussing possible trade scenarios involving first baseman Brandon Belt.

Johnny Cueto called it sad. Brandon Belt said nobody expected it to be this way. Bruce Bochy said it can be embarrassing. The Giants are still two weeks shy of the All-Star break, and on Saturday, San Francisco lost its 50th game of the season.

If it worked for Klay Thompson, why not Bruce Bochy? More than four months after the Golden State Warriors’ guard penned his signature on a toaster –yes a toaster– the Giants manager figured signing a popular kitchen appliance before Sunday’s game couldn’t hurt San Francisco’s chances of reversing their recent struggles.

The San Francisco Giants have been shut out in eight different games this season. If not for first baseman Brandon Belt, Sunday could have been the ninth occasion. Though the Giants did push a run across in the ninth inning, it was Belt’s seventh inning solo shot that ended New York Mets’ right-hander Jacob deGrom’s shutout bid and took starter Johnny Cueto off the hook for a loss.

The night before Ryder Jones made his Major League debut against New York Mets’ starter Jacob deGrom, Jones and his roommate, Giants prospect Christian Arroyo, popped in “MLB: The Show” on their PlayStation to see what the new third baseman would contend with upon arriving at AT&T Park. According to Jones, he singled and popped out against the former National League Rookie of the Year late on Friday night, and it turns out, that’s almost as much damage than the Giants were able to do against deGrom in person.