I have been pondering with some of my close friends about ways for the Giants to continue building our franchise.  Within one year we have went from a laughing stock of the west to a team with some serious pitching in the rotation and now in the bullpen.

  So how do we score runs?  Obviously we don't have the money, attraction or will to get a big bat like TEX MEX or Vlad back  in the day.  Hitters are afraid of coming here, Carlos Lee didn't even consider our offer when he was a free agent.  Our prospects aren't looking good enough to make an instant impact. 

  One common way is to trade pitching, we all know about the Rios-Lincecum deal that almost went down last year.  Now we have the Sanchez dilemma, we almost traded him for Cantu (Out of the bigs two years ago) or Edwin ( who hits in a great ballpark.)  3rd baseman that hit 25 home runs in a fluke year happens all the time, please don't trade a young left handed power pitcher for either of them. 

  Our next way is through lower tier free agents, ala Aaron Rowand who we had to overpay for.  I don't want to spend money on a mediocre hitter like Pat Burrell, he's similar to the injury prone Rafael Furcal.  Don't just spend money because you feel you need some names to fill seats, lets build towards a ring. 

I do see one player that would not cost a ton and solve our power needs.  ADAM DUNN,  he has hit 40 home runs in the past 5 seasons, people complain about his batting average (.250) although take a look at his OBP (.387 the past couple years), he is very exciting to watch and takes pitchers deep into counts.  He is still young and has as much power as anybody else in baseball.  Lets compare him to TEX MEX who is the prized free agent, over the past 5 years TEX MEX had 177 home runs while Dunn had 206.  The career OBP for TEX MEX is.378 while Dunn's has been .381.  I rest my case. 

PS: people with negative views don't bring up his defense, yeah it sucks although your not paying 180 million for him, I imagine we could get him for 5 years and 70 million maybe less.