Posted By Jeff Fletcher on September 11, 2009 10:52 pm

Since I had to stick around after Friday night’s game to wait out the traffic, I went into the Giants clubhouse just to see what the mood was in there. Just after the Giants 10-3 loss to the Dodgers ended, the Rockies scored four runs in the ninth to beat the Padres.

Couldn’t possibly have had a worse series of events.

Yet, the Giants seemed to be ready to put this one behind them. (That’s the good thing about getting “waffle-stomped,” to use one of my favorite Aaron Rowand phrases. Those games are a little easier to just dismiss than the tough one-run losses.)

Matt Cain said the Giants can’t stew about this loss “or it will carry over.” Bruce Bochy said the Giants “have been resilient all year. We’ll bounce back.”

Those are all nice thoughts, but the reality is the Giants are now 5 1/2 games behind the Rockies with 21 games to play. They have a 5.2 percent chance to make the playoffs, according the standings on ESPN.com.

Know what, though, and I’ll be saying this a lot as the final three weeks tick away and the coutdown to 2010 starts, don’t feel bad.

The Giants have gotten just about every possible victory out of their roster, as I see it. I don’t think they have a single player who has performed too far below reasonable expectations (of course, you all know what I thought the reasonable expectations were of Fred Lewis). The Giants were, on paper, a team that had pretty good pitching and not much offense. The pitching has been even better than expected, and the offense has been, well, just as bad as last year. In case you forgot, the Giants had one of the worst offenses in the league last year, and to that they added four months of Pablo Sandoval and … Edgar Renteria.

In other words, third place and a winning record is not so bad.