Its a bitter-sweet sight here in the last weeks of the baseball season for Giants fans. Sweet because fans get to see the Giants play well, they are 7-3 in their last ten games. Bitter because despite their good play they are still two games back from the Rockies for the wild-card. For Giants fans it is starting to feel, and look, like their chances at a playoff spot is more up to how the Rockies play than how they play.

Right now the Giants look like they are doing whatever they can to make sure that if the Rockies falter at the finish line they will be right there to snatch that wild-card spot. The veterans have started to step up, at least Molina, Uribe, and Renteria have, hitting clutch home runs and RBIs to power the Giants to a few Ws. The pitching has gotten a shot in the arm with the addition of Brad Penny, giving the Giants 5 starters who match up favorably against any starting 5 in the league. The pitching might get yet another shot in the arm if Randy Johnson comes back to pitch relief for the last few weeks of the season. The Giants even got Freddy Sanchez back for this series against the Padres, but it all is still not adding up to gaining games on the Rockies.

After today’s game against the Padres the Giants have 22 games left, assuming Zito and the Giants beat the Padres in the final game of the series they will most likely need to go 14-8 (.636) to make the playoffs, and this home stretch includes 6 games against the Dodgers and 3 more against the Rockies so it wont be easy. Even with that kind of record the Giants fans would have to hope to not only sweep the Rockies but that the Rockies play much closer to .500 ball than they have been these last couple months.

Team/Player Photos: San Diego Padres v San Francisco Giants on May 13, 2010

If the Giants make the playoffs this year they are going to be a team that will be scary to face. The Giants have the best home record in the league and the best starting pitching in the league, and in the playoffs that equals a tough team to beat. On the flip side if the Rockies make the the playoffs there wont be many people picking them to go past the first round. But that is one of the more interesting differences between baseball and most other sports, but in baseball the playoffs just play that much different than the regular season, and the fact that scoring goes down across the board in the MLB playoffs would only help a team with great pitching and hurt a team that leans on its bats.

In this way Bruce Bochy has built a team to make a playoff run and not just a run at the playoffs. As a Giants fan I would much rather a team be built that way opposed to a team that is built to win in the regular season but gets knocked out of the playoffs in the first round every year they make it. That being said I believe this team is headed in the right direction and is in place to go no where but up after this season, not that I am ruling this season out just yet.