Dieter Kurtenbach: The Giants are pioneers of baseball ineptitude, and rock bottom is still ahead

The San Francisco Giants aren’t just bad; they’re pioneers.

Day in and day out, they actively explore uncharted frontiers of baseball ineptitude, finding bold, avant-garde ways to hand games to their opponents. They can’t hit, they can’t run, their fundamentals belong in a blooper reel, their starting rotation is untrustworthy and their bullpen is a daily hazardous materials spill.

Yet, the most terrifying part of this entirely predictable spiral? It doesn’t even feel like rock bottom. I can feel it in my bones that this 22-34 team has so much more incompetence to offer, and they might just be saving their masterpiece for the weekend.

Let’s survey the wreckage of another miserable day at the ballpark.

The Giants lost again, falling 3-2 to the Arizona Diamondbacks to cap a sweep and finish their homestand with a 2-4 record. That sentence alone is depressing, but it doesn’t quite capture the suffocating nature of this team’s current misery. Wednesday marked the first time since 2007 that Arizona has swept San Francisco twice in a single season, and it all happened in just a week and a half.

It’s only May. Summer hasn’t even officially started, and a division rival has already claimed total ownership.

“It’s disappointing,” manager Tony Vitello said after the loss. “(We were) determined as all hell to squeeze one out today.”

They certainly squeezed something out.

I’ll let you in on a little behind-the-scenes secret: I spent a good chunk of my Wednesday drafting a column about how the Giants should start being more aggressive on the basepaths. It was tongue-in-cheek, sure, but the logic held up. If you can’t hit a baseball to save your life, you might as well try stealing a few bags. Cause some chaos. Force the issue. Generate a pulse by applying pressure to the defense.

Then the eighth inning happened, and the Giants showed me — and the world — exactly why they should not, in fact, be doing any of that.

To call their eighth-frame baserunning “rough” is a dramatic understatement. These blunders were a tragicomedy — a circus act entirely devoid of peanuts or joy.

First, we were treated to our weekly Hector Borg Special. You know the drill by now: The Giants’ third base coach — operating with the strategic vision of a blindfolded traffic cop casually directing pedestrians into the path of an oncoming semi-truck — sent another runner into a guaranteed out at the plate. This time, it was Willy Adames getting gunned down while trying to score the tying run on a pedestrian cut-off play from left-center field.

Only superfans should know their base coaches’ names (I still have to look up first-base coach Shane Robinson’s name once a series). But Borg is becoming a main character in the Giants’ season. I’ve gone as far as turning his last name into a verb: The Giants were Borged again Wednesday.

When asked after the game about the play, Adames said he was “just following Borg’s decision. Unfortunate we had that result at the plate …”

As for whether he expected to get the “go” sign in that situation, Adames answered, “Yeah, I guess …”

Ace stuff!

And yet there was more.

Moments after that coaching blunder, Luis Arraez — who had stolen a base earlier in the game — was picked off second base. It wasn’t just a physical mistake; it was a mental collapse. Vitello claimed postgame there wasn’t a play on in that situation, and that Arraez was just being too “filled with passion.”

Sure, let’s go with that.

Oh, and both basepath outs — the Giants’ 18th and 19th of the season — took the bat out of the hands of Casey Schmitt, the only guy in orange actually hitting the baseball right now.

Inning over. Threat neutralized. Game functionally sealed.

If you’re going to be a bad baseball team, the least you can do is be boring. But these Giants have a special way of dragging you in with a sliver of hope, only to slam the door on your fingers.

That’s not to say it’s all a high-wire act — there are plenty of boring stretches, too. This team’s offense remains a total flatline. The Giants collected just two hits and a walk over the last six innings on Wednesday, serving as the human manifestation of “simulating to the end” in a video game. San Francisco can make every opposing starter look like Sandy Koufax in his prime, turning average pitchers like Mike Soroka into instant All-Stars.

But it truly is the hope that makes this season so painful.

So, I have to ask the same question I asked last week: What is this team actually good at?

The answer is still nothing. The cupboard is entirely bare.

Now, they pack their bags and head to the mountains.

Over the last three seasons, the Giants have built their .500 records on the backs of the bottom-feeding Rockies, posting a dominant 30-9 record. But with the Rockies looking a bit feisty (not to be mistaken with competent), what happens if the Giants can’t beat up on the division weaklings this year?

If the Giants roll into Coors Field and lose this series, they could fall below the Rockies in the standings.

Rock bottom at the rockpile.

If it comes to that, the Giants need to start selling everything that isn’t bolted down or too toxic to trade. There is no coming back, and these Giants look plenty capable of slipping, stumbling or falling that low.

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