That's what one of us would say to the other, usually at Candlestick Park while waiting for a game to start. It's an invitation to "Name That Tweak," a form of Twenty Questions in which one of us is asked to identify the bad Giants ballplayer the other has in mind. There really are no rules, except that you can ask only 20 questions, and the player has to have been a Giant during or after the 1977 season, which is when Dave and I became friends.

One of the challenges is that in the last 20 years there have been a multitude of Giants Tweaks, from Skip James to Roger Samuels to the just-now-departed Mark Leiter. Occasionally one of us can stump the other -- but we're now so well practiced in the game that we've pretty much shelved it for at least the next five years.

What makes a player a tweak? A number of criteria come to mind:

• He has to be, or have been, a pretty bad player.
• Ideally, he should have been around long enough, or played enough, to establish himself as a bad player. For instance, if Jay Canizaro had never resurfaced as a Giant, he wouldn't have qualified on the basis of his one at-bat (a strikeout) earlier this year; Dax Jones (before his second tour with the big clug: four games, 0-for-6) might, but only in that his performance is no real surprise. Randy Kutcher, however, is firmly ensconced in Tweakdom; after his first three weeks, during which he was a world-beater while subbing for the injured Dan Gladden, he got bashed with the No-Talent Stick and was simply bad for the rest of his career.

  But we said "ideally." That's not a carved-in-stone rule. That's why a guy like Greg Booker (2 IP, 7 H, 13.50 ERA) can make the list. His time with the Giants was brief (and career-ending), but it was legitimately awful and useless. It wasn't just a case of a guy giving up three earned runs in two innings; that could happen to anybody. It was that he gave up those runs when it mattered, when he was brought in specifically to face someone. He's a tweak. Case closed. Angel Escobar went 1-for-3 for the Giants in 1988. How can he rate as a tweak? Hell, he's a .333 hitter. On paper, this is true. In fact, in his first game, he made a pinch-running appearance and committed some silly baserunning mistake. He was looked upon as the Giants' shortstop of the future, but was passed up by Royce Clayton and even Mike Benjamin. He ended up being traded to the Expos, who, if possible, thought even less of the guy before canning him. The guy we got in return: Wil Tejada. Right.

  Steve Carlton even makes the list. The news of the acquisition by the Giants of this marvelous Hall-of-Famer made us both cry out in joy when it was announced, but it was all downhill from there.

  Mark Davis makes the list, too -- despite being an eventual Cy Young Award winner; clearly this was an aberration. Davis was the kind of pitcher whose ERA might be around 3.5, and maybe he'd have a good strikeout-to-walk ratio, but since he had this habit of entering games where we were down by a run or two, giving up a vital insurance run, then striking out four batters in the next two innings, it's no wonder that he managed to keep his ERA relatively low: 4.17 as a Giant. He was just one of our vintage head cases.

• Even if a player's not so bad, he should be a "what's the point?" kind of player, like Fran Mullins (.218, 2 HR in 1984) or Roger Samuels (1-2, 3.47 in 1988, but really, what's the point?). They may be very nice guys, but so what?
• Being highly touted and utterly failing to live up to expectations lands you on this list. How about Rich Murray (.216, 4 HR lifetime), who was called a phenom, if you can believe that -- most notably by Willie McCovey during his retirement announcement. Or Bill Bordley (2-3, 4.70 ERA in his only year), once the No. 1 pick of the Reds. And let's not even talk about Mike Remlinger (2-1, 4.37 as a Giant), who was supposed to be our next savior; after a four-hit shutout in his debut, he gave up 17 earned runs in his next 26 innings (5.88) before heading to Seattle in the Kevin Mitchell trade. He's since been given up on by at least four other organizations.
• Being Enos Cabell certainly lands you on this list. When Dave and I were first rooming together at San Diego State University in 1980, we used to pass time making up player trades. We don't know which of us came up with this one, but it went like this: Bob Knepper to the Astros for Enos Cabell. How we laughed! How absurd! No team could be that stupid, not even our team. And a few weeks later, it happened. This tells me that a Dodger spy lived among us in the dorm.

  The season before the trade, Cabell hit .276 with two home runs and 55 RBIs, playing third base every day. He had spent a career up to that point proving equal ineptness at first and third -- not that this is a terrific fielding criterion, but his fielding average was .927, which we can reasonably call abysmal. He had a strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly 3-to-1. He did, however, steal 21 bases somehow. For the Giants the next year he hit .255 with two home runs and 36 RBIs, playing most of the time. His fielding average increased to .978, but only because he played three-quarters of his games at first. His strikeout-to-walk ratio was nearly 5-to-1. He stole six bases. In short, he was a tweak supreme -- which should be the name of a sandwich in his honor. This was Cabell's only season as a Giant (thankfully). He ended up going to Detroit for first baseman-outfielder Champ Summers. Ultimately he went back to Houston, where he and Knepper were teammates.

  Knepper had just had his second straight bad year: 9-16, a 4.10 ERA. He allowed approximately 13 baserunners per nine innings. With the Astros in 1981 he went 9-5 with an ERA of 2.18. He allowed approximately 9.5 baserunners per nine innings. He won over 90 games as an Astro and found himself in postseason play twice.

• And if you really want to place a player in the category of "and let's not even talk about...," look no further than (INSERT SARCASTIC FANFARE HERE) Salomon Torres (5-14, 5.19 as a Giant), who was supposed to be the next Marichal, no less, but whose horrific (and ill-advised) season-ending start against the Dodgers in 1993 evidently turned him into a Head Case Supreme.

The whole tweak thing climaxed, if you must, in two songs (by me), which we hope to furnish for your lack of listening enjoyment. They consist solely of badly sung Giants' names to the tune of "Singalong Junk" by Paul McCartney and "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles -- an early instrumental take before the vocals were added. At one point you can hear near-laughter when the singer realizes how horrid the harmony is sounding.

If you want to hear the songs (and these are pretty hefty sound files, so download (and listen) at your own risk), here they are:

• Giants Tweaks Song No. 1 -- You will no doubt notice the inclusion of John Burkett in this one; well, that's because the song was written in 1989, and we had no idea that Burkett was ever going to resurface after pitching six innings in 1987. Nor did we (or anyone but Burkett and his family) know the correct pronunciation of his name.
• Giants Tweaks Song No. 2 -- This was by far the most ambitious of the two. Listening to either song will provide the distinct impression that most songs are written out of the singer's vocal range.

For more about Giants' Tweaks, please read "On the Way to Gooperstown," David Beck's essay on the soon-to-be-opened San Francisco Giants Tweaks Hall of Fame.

And don't forget the Top Ten Giants Tweaks of All Time.

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