Any day now, Huff

It always sucks to have a black hole in your lineup.

Get it? Suck? Black hole? Ah, never mind.

In any case, for NL teams, there's pretty much always at least one of those in the #9 hole, as the pitcher must come to the plate and lay down a sacrifice bunt or flail away at 90mph fastballs.

What sucks is when you have more black holes than the one you'll already have, doing what it does best -- suck.

To this point in the season, the Giants have the obligatory one, and two more on top of that in Miguel Tejada and Aubrey Huff. For obvious reasons, we're going to be more patient with Huff than we are with Tejada -- reasons like: 1) Huff was very good last year, whereas Tejada was not, 2) Huff, while not a spring chicken, is a younger feller than Tejada, 3) we like Huff-Daddy, while we tolerate Miggy, 4) trusting Huff over Miggy can save us 15% or more on car insurance.

But the simple fact is, they're both hurting the team badly right now, and they've done it by being anemic at the plate and, at times, shaky defensively. There isn't much to be done about it -- Huff is an everyday player, and was the Giants best hitter and very useful defensively with his ability to play both 1B and corner OF spots. With Tejada, there just isn't anything behind him that would be appreciably better.

But as we're about to finish the first month of the season, these two are currently a large part of why the Giants aren't doing well right now. The offense ranks near the bottom of the NL, and that's not only much too reminiscent of the first part of last season, but it also stands to cripple the Giants chances of making the postseason this year.

While it is still early, 1/6th of the season is still a good barometer of how good teams might be. And if teams like Colorado, Philadelphia, and Florida are anywhere close to as good as their records currently are, the Giants can't afford to lose games in April if they want to sniff the division title or wildcard.

(actually, if those teams are as good as their records, the Giants can forget about 2011, because they aren't winning 67% of their games this year)

On top of this, the Giants are right in the midst of an opportunity -- while playing on the road, they are playing against beatable competition, and have to take advantage of this.

They're not out of it, or even on the brink just yet, but there definitely should be a sense of urgency about the Giants hitters, because right now they're the main reason that any run they could make at contending for a division title or wildcard will be much, much harder to pull off.