Isiah Thomas may not be the most reflective or self-aware of men; he may in fact be the least. Still, at some point soon he will, presumably, have a great deal of spare time to think about how he’s spent the last several years, and it may occur to him that given unlimited resources and full control of the most renowned and best loved team in basketball, he managed to do nothing other than destroy both it and his own reputation. This may bother him; it may not. If it does, he should head west, and enjoy an evening at San Francisco’s beautiful AT&T Park. A Giants game will make him feel good about himself again.

Entering last night’s game against San Diego, the Giants, on the strength of a .221 AVG/.277 OBA/.324 SLG batting line and a 5.20 ERA, had won two of their first eight games. Normally, a .250 winning percentage could be dismissed; this may, however, just be how bad the Giants are. They don’t hit for average or power, they aren’t especially quick on the bases or in the field, and with the exceptions of young starters Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, they can’t pitch at all. They’re just flat-out lousy, and they’re only going to get worse.

This year, the Giants are paying a combined $37 million to catcher Bengie Molina, first baseman Rich Aurilia, outfielders Randy Winn and Dave Roberts, and infielders Ray Durham and Omar Vizquel. These six men are, collectively, 216 years old, an average of 36. Not one of them, save Winn, is much better than a good minor league veteran, and even Winn would be a fourth outfielder on a strong team such as the Yankees or the Cubs.

Many teams have old, weak players, but several things set the Giants’ collection apart. The first is that theirs were acquired as part of a concerted effort to get the most out of Barry Bonds’s last few seasons as a viable major leaguer, which is something like trying to get the most out of your aging Aston Martin by filling its tank with canola oil and running it on broken roller skate wheels. The second is the effort the team expended on locking down this core of undesirable players for the long term. Roberts, Molina, and Winn are signed through next year, at a cost north of $20 million, and Vizquel, 41, has a vesting option for next year.

(Even Thomas, who never saw a washed-up backup point guard or swingman he didn’t want to sign to the maximum salary, would no doubt snicker at the Giants’ concerted effort to pay as much as possible, in money and years, to a collection of players that matches up badly to the Mets’ bench, which isn’t really all that good.)

What truly distinguishes the Giants’ old-timers, though, is that they’re vastly better than the team’s relative youths. First baseman Dan Ortmeier and outfielder Fred Lewis, each 27, would struggle for playing time on a decent Triple-A team. They’re both better than regular third baseman Jose Castillo, whose lineage well tells the comic tale of San Francisco’s efforts to get younger. (He was picked up on waivers from Florida this spring after being released by Pittsburgh last December.) Shortstop Brian Bocock is, at 23, the only really young player getting any at bats, due to an injury to Vizquel, but he’s never played above A-ball, and his career minor league line stands at .239/.310/.333. It’s one thing to have old players who aren’t better than freely available minor leaguers; it’s another not even to have those at hand. Even Thomas could point and laugh, if he wished.

As to the Giants’ pitching, there’s little to say. Nominal ace Barry Zito is in the second year of a $126 million contract, has trouble breaking 83 mph with his fastball, and averaged 1.9 base runners per inning in his first two starts. The bullpen is made up almost entirely of the pitching equivalents of the team’s young(er) hitters. Cain and especially Lincecum are real talents, but one has no idea what to think about their future prospects. In the third game of the year, on a chilly, windy evening, manager Bruce Bochy let Lincecum pitch one inning, sit through a 74-minute rain delay, and then pitch four more innings. One wonders if Bochy is aware that Lincecum is 23 and pitching for a team that has a much better chance of losing 110 than of winning 75.

You can’t help but feel badly for San Francisco’s players, and especially their fans, who no more deserve what’s being inflicted on them than Knicks fans do. But just as Thomas did no more than reflect the uselessness of the infinitely useless Dolan family, so has Giants general manager Brian Sabean done no more than reflect on his employer, Peter Magowan, who aside from once signing Bonds and building AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Pac Bell) Park seems never to have done much right at all, and who is content to let his man ride on, just as the Dolans were until very recently.

tmarchman@nysun.com