A dark day for Giants fans

If you stayed up Wednesday night to watch the Giants' heroic comeback fall short in 12 innings, you saw it.

It was gut-wrenching. Enough to make a grown man sick and a grown woman cry.

Our boy... our GOLDEN BOY Buster Posey suffered an ugly injury at the hands of a desperate young player trying to score a winning run.

As much as I'd like to rip Cousins as being a complete dickhead, we all root for our players to run into home plate at the same brutal velocity. Anything for a run... especially a winning run in extra innings.

No, it's not Cousins' fault. It's not even baseball's fault for not treating catchers like they coddle Peyton Manning in the NFL.

What happened to Buster Posey is for lack of a better term... baseball.

That's baseball.

Early reports put Buster's prognosis as a broken ankle and a possibly damaged knee. As someone who's personally undergone two serious knee surgeries and a broken ankle surgery, I know that if both of those things are true, he's out for 3 months... MINIMUM.

A broken ankle, depending on the bone, calls for a 2 month recovery for normal people, probably about 6 weeks for athletes. If his knee is only an MCL strain, it's 3-6 weeks.

But if we're talking ACL damage, multiple ankle fractures... I mean worst case scenario. We'll see him next year... as sickening as that thought is.

There is a small, yet growing minority in the Bay Area sports community that has been questioning how long or how often Buster Posey should play catcher. After all, he's a pure hitter with a great arm, and can LITERALLY play every position on the field. Why not move him to 3B or 1B? Maybe give him a shot at SS?

Well, the answer is simple:

BECAUSE HE'S A CATCHER.


He's not JUST a catcher though. No, he's one of the best catchers in baseball. And this is his second season... and his first full one.

The list of elite catchers in this league is a short one. The first one is Joe Mauer, then it goes to Brian McCann.

Then it's probably Posey.

Sure, Yadi Molina is up there, but he's not on the same map offensively. Victor Martinez is there offensively, but nowhere close defensively.

Buster Posey is an elite player, and he's a CATCHER.

It's his best position, and he makes us better in all ways by playing such a difficult, demanding, and offensively talentless position. Unfortunately, the wear and tear of a position like this is going to make us all cringe.

I'm a proponent of day games off after night games, putting Buster at 1B on Sundays regularly, but that's about it. He belongs behind the dish.

That being said, Posey's depressing absence means Eli Whiteside will catch indefinitely. Not a very sexy option... unless of course you're writing a William Faulkner-esque novel about a guy from the Mississippi Delta ironically named Whiteside, who also has white hair before age 30.

The guy who really gets an opportunity to step up again is Brandon Belt. He's been recalled, and will probably see a lot of time out there.

I don't know what Bochy will do with this mess on our hands... whether Huff will see a couple more days off, whether Belt will see some time in the OF, or whether a better offensive solution than Whiteside is sought.

It's a mess.

It's not the end of the season. It's not the end of the world. It's just a mess.

There's very little positivity around this situation, but at least Whiteside is solid defensively and handles the pitching staff well. Plus, we're coming back and winning games even while Posey and Huff have been average.

He's a big bat, and a great player, but this is not the end of days. We get Pablo back fairly soon, and maybe Huff will get hot.

As we know from our magical 2010, you can never count out this team, and they come back from adversity all the time.

For now, we'll just hope Posey will be back by July, and keep our heads up. We have a great team, we're champions, and our group of goofballs will step up in a big way... they can't help it.