It’s not just the Giants.This doesn’t make you feel better, but it sure doesn’t make you feel worse. All around baseball, would-be contenders are getting their tongues stuck in the mixer. The Phillies are back to .500, depending on which day you check the standings, but the Astros, Blue Jays, Red Sox, Orioles and Mets are all still there with the Giants, tongue stuck, and saying, “a lnngl hrrp pls*”* “a little help please*”Except no help is coming, for this season is damned. Maybe if you, I don’t know, just put your foot here and pull your tongue a little — I SAID A LITTLE — you know what, never mind. The Giants could absolutely win 15 games in a row and vault right back into contention. They could also lose tomorrow and the day after that, probably because of something stupid. You know which one is more likely. Hey, Occam, bring that razor over here, lemme see if that’s what we need …My working theory is that something has changed in baseball — check out the walk rates and strikeout rates around the league — and the Giants have been slower to adapt. In 2000, the Giants figured out optimal defensive positioning at (then) Pacific Bell Park midway through the season, allowing them to score runs that they were preventing other teams from scoring. They went from a season kind of like the one this team is having to the best record in baseball. That’s the good kind of change. In 2016, the Giants went from the best record in baseball in the first half to one of the worst records in the second half, possibly because of advantages other teams were exploiting in the new batted-ball data that was only recently accessible for every team, in every ballpark. In some ways, they’re still catching up.If the explanation for the Giants’ struggles this season is close — and it’s just a working theory, your mileage may vary — then there’s nothing else they can do with the lineup core. There isn’t a solution other than “adjust to the league’s adjustments,” which several hitters look like they’re capable of doing. They might have made those adjustments already.The impossibly slow start from almost everyone in the Giants’ lineup is just One of Those Baseball Things. The organization thought they knew how baseball was going to work, and the baseball had other plans. Sometimes you plan for rain and the wind tears through your umbrella.It’s probably too late for the Giants to recover, although a reverse-2016 kind of experience would certainly make for a fun season. Let’s assume they’re cooked, even if they’re more than welcome to make us all look silly. In the above telling, it’s hard to get too mad at the players involved. And it’s not the fault of a single hitting coach or a rogue quant named Billy who hasn’t been able to connect to the Oracle Park WiFi for years but is too embarrassed to tell anyone. It was an organizational failure. Everyone shares the blame, from the hitters to the coaches to the suits. The unexpected happened, and it wasn’t pretty.So let’s talk about the expected. The Giants had two or three rotation slots to fill this offseason, and they made a conscious decision to go for quantity over quality. Neither Adrian Houser nor Tyler Mahle were among baseball’s top 50 free agents last offseason, with more than a dozen pitchers ahead of them. There were so many options — that’s before getting to the trade market, too — that it was possible for a team to suffer from analysis paralysis. If they liked a broad swath of free-agent options, they risked losing their fallback options because they were too confident in their fallback-to-the-fallback options.Ranger Suárez looked like a perfect fit for the Giants this offseason, but he signed with Boston and is thriving there instead. (Paul Rutherford / Getty Images)We’ll never know what the Giants’ offseason wishlist really looked like, whether Houser and Mahle were at the top of a short list, or if they were the last couple of chairs available as the music stopped, but the early returns have been dreadful. Houser has gone deeper into games recently, but he’s been completely unable to miss bats, even more so than usual. Mahle was alternating strong starts with iffy starts, but he’s been more focused on the latter recently.