The Panda in the Room

Before we talk about any off-season free-agent acquisitions, we need to talk about the giant Panda in the room.

The Giants have hinted that their priorities right now are keeping Huff and Uribe. If those two are retained, and I think they should be (The SS free agent class is pretty meh right now, and they need Huff's bat next year), the only thing standing in the way of the Giants having a solid infield defensively and a solid lineup appears to be 40 lbs. of flesh off of Pablo Sandoval's body.

Seriously. I can't remember another time in baseball when the future of the team so heavily depended on whether or not one guy could successfully go on a diet.

Of course, this is assuming that the weight gain was the key to his sophomore slump. There were other problems, of course, like his inability to square up on a ball, plate discipline, the off-field distractions in Venezuela, and general motivation.

But I'm betting that the Giants are banking on the theory that Pablo's weight was the initial nudge that caused his momentum into those other problems. The first thing I heard about Pablo after the World Series ended was that he was going straight to off-season conditioning in San Diego, so it looks like the Giants moving forward with this theory.

This seems to me a bit like putting Panda on NBC's The Biggest Loser. Everything is heading toward one dramatic moment where he steps on the scale sometime during spring training. And if he can't hit that magic number, he returns his chocolate sundae martini into his favorite food case, wipes a tear from his eye, and hops on a bus to Fresno. It's putting too much stock in one part of the problem.

We all love Pablo Sandoval, and based on his 2009, know that can be great. If the Giants turn out to be right about what can make him great again, we will have the infield of Huff, Sanchez, Uribe and the non-2010 Pablo to work with, with phenom Brandon Belt in line to inherit the 1B job and Brandon Crawford waiting in the wings at short. And this is an arrangement I'd be okay with.