For several weeks in the middle of the regular season, the Giants were in a tailspin and it looked like they would miss the postseason altogether. They went 20-36 from June 9 through Aug. 12, a slump that saw them fall from nine games up in the NL West to only a half-game up on the second wild-card spot.

The Giants turned things around soon thereafter thanks in large part to Buster Posey, who hit .354/.403/.575 (181 OPS+) with 12 home runs and 43 RBI in 61 second-half games. That performance surely earned him plenty of MVP votes after the season and definitely helped San Francisco get to the postseason.

During the team's run to the World Series, Posey has been mostly a spectator rather than a big part of the offense. Oh sure, he is hitting .288 in the team's 12 postseason games, but he hasn't hit for any power. Zero power. He has 15 hits and all 15 are singles. He has walked only three times and once was intentionally.

Posey has driven in five runs in those 12 games; three came in one game, Game 4 of the NLCS. He drove in the tying run in the first with a sacrifice fly, singled in another run to cut the Cardinals' lead to 4-2 in the third, then singled in the go-ahead run in the sixth. That game was vintage Posey.

It is also the only game so far this postseason in which Posey has had a real impact. Win probably added, or WPA, which measures how much a player improves his team's chances of winning based on historical data, says Posey has been the Giants' second-worst position player this postseason, better than only No. 8 hitter Brandon Crawford.

Outside of that grand slam in the NL wild-card win over the Pirates, Crawford has been pretty terrible this postseason. Sandoval's gaudy batting line comes with an ugly WPA mostly because of NLCS Game 2, when he grounded out to end the top of the ninth with the bases loaded and the score tied at 4. That one groundout was worth minus-0.163 WPA all by itself. Kolten Wong led of the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off home run.

Posey, on the other hand, has registered a negative-WPA in 10 of his 12 postseason games this year. So, unlike Sandoval, he has been a consistent drain on the offense. Posey's only two positive-WPA games were Game 4 of the NLCS (+0.213) and Game 1 of the World Series (+0.018), when he went 1 for 4 with a first-inning single. No other Giants player has more than eight negative-WPA games this postseason and only Panik (eight) and Crawford (seven) have more than six.

This isn't to say Posey is a bad player. He's obviously excellent. One of the five best in the world, in my opinion. He's just having a low-impact postseason for whatever reason. Fatigue, poorly timed slump, who knows. It's not the first time it has happened either -- Posey had 12 negative-WPA postseason games in 2010, the all-time franchise record, and the Giants won anyway. It's just one of those things.

San Francisco can certainly win the World Series with Posey hitting an empty .288 from the No. 3 spot in the lineup, but their chances of winning would be much greater if he started hitting like, well, Buster Posey. Power, average, on-base ability, the complete package. This singles-hitting version hasn't been of much help so far.