OAKLAND, Calif. — Sunday was a great day at the yard for fans of the undeniably obvious. The Giants buried the A's in offense, scoring 11 runs on 13 no-doubt-about-it hits. If you took nothing from the game but that, you had everything you needed to know.

And yet, there is nuance to be found even among the ruins of an 11-1 afterthought. For example, the way Giants starting pitcher Jonathan Sanchez had the A's swinging at shadows. Sanchez gave up one run in seven innings, improving his record to 8-4.

It's to the point that any discussion regarding the Giants' fine young starting pitching is incomplete if Sanchez's name is not included. Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez. A combined 90 starts per season for the next 10 years sounds about right.

"I don't know if (Sanchez) has surpassed our expectations," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. "We know what good stuff he has. He's got a different look about him. He's keeping his focus pitch to pitch, inning to inning right now. He's really grown as a pitcher."

In this case, even the nuance has nuance. Sanchez's line included six strikeouts. Relievers Sergio Romo and Jack Taschner added three more, for a total of nine. That's on top of the 14 (11 by Lincecum) San Francisco pitchers dropped on Oakland on Saturday night.

Bochy would rather not give that conversation any legs, but it's too late. Giants pitchers have rung up 624 strikeouts through 82 games, tied with Arizona for second in the National League. Should they continue on this pace, the Giants will set a franchise record with 1,233 strikeouts. And they will set it by a lot — 144, to be exact.

Not bad for a franchise that opened for business four years after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.

But wait, there's more.

Sanchez's six strikeouts pushed him past 100 for the season. Lincecum leads the league with 114. Cain is at 97, making it a pretty safe bet that, for the first time in their half-century in San Francisco, the Giants will have three pitchers with more than 100 strikeouts before the All-Star break.

It's an important story arc for this team, for a couple reasons. One, coming into the season the Giants seemed without form, with no distinguishing features. Well, they've got one now.

That it's a propensity for making other hitters swing and miss is even more significant. It suggests dominance, pure power, hot gas. Strikeouts are a statement, albeit an inefficient one. They give a staff some swagger.

Suggest this to Bochy and he all but sticks his index fingers in his ears and chants, "La, la, la, la, la!" He has nothing against swagger, but he's a sound baseball man with sound baseball ideas.

"I don't want us to think about strikeouts," he said. "It's a good thing because there's times when you need a strikeout. But it can be detrimental when you get a young pitcher who's thinking strikeout during the course of the game and he works too hard and starts overthrowing. There's a diminishing return on that."

A power pitcher scavenging for strikeouts is like a home run hitter trying to hit one 500 feet. According to Baseball Theory 101, both are better off letting those signature moments occur naturally.

Catcher Bengie Molina could lead that discussion.

"I don't want them going out there and trying to strike out 20 people," Molina said of his pitchers. "First of all, it's going to make you throw a lot of pitches. I'd rather have eight innings, no runs and one strikeout (from a starting pitcher) than have a lot of strikeouts."

For now that doesn't seem a problem, though Bochy thought Kevin Correia might have gone slightly astray Friday night. But even if it was, it would be worth it for this team, this season.

The Giants have almost no hope of reaching the postseason. They probably won't even finish with a winning record. But they can come out of the season with an identity, a point of pride.

They can do something no other Giants staff has ever done. And that's something. Probably nothing Bochy would inscribe on a plaque. But something.