Torres, Posey, and Bumgarner lead Giants to victory

 GIANTS 5 - ROCKIES 2

So the Giants continued two of their trends last night.

First, they kept pace with last season and won to bring their record to 73-60 which matches lastseason's record after 133 games.  Although they were 5.5 games back as opposed to 4 back like they are now!

Second they continued their trend of making bad pitchers, last night it was Esmil Rogers who was sporting an ERA of 5.66 coming in, look like Cy Young.

Things were looking grim.  The Giants managed 4 frickin hits and 2 runs off of Rogers over 6 innings.  Melvin Mora tied the game in the 8th with an opposite field homerun to right field off of Jeremy Affeldt, who continued his streak of allowing a run every time he makes an appearance, spoiling a great effort from Madison Bumgarner.

As I was sitting in my nutrition class and learning about how Lipids contribute to heart disease, I was checking my phone and wondering how much the 2010 San Francisco Giants have contributed to heart disease in the Bay Area.  I was seriously getting angry and I wasn't even watching the game!

Then Andres Torres hit his 310 foot homerun into the rightfield stands and the Giants were on their way to victory!  Buster Posey capped off the scoring with a 2 run opposite field double later in the inning to make sure that no broken bat triples coupled with a throwing error would send the Giants fans home with frowns on their faces.

Tonight's game features Ubaldo Jimenez throwing for the Rockies against our Timmy boy.  It would seem that the schedule from last year is a scary thing to go by since the Giants dropped game 134 with Timmy on the mound.  But don't fret Giants faithful because the Rockies have failed to win a series on the road since June 28-30!

Belt watch:

Brandon Belt was 1 for 2 last night with a 3 run homer and 3 walks for Fresno in their 7-6 loss to Salt Lake City.

Since a quick check of the calender reveals that it is September 1st, please allow me to be the first to welcome Mr. Belt to the Big Leagues!

Giants literally throw the game away

Is it possible to hate the team that you love?

I guess it is because I hate the Giants right now.  After doing all that they could to give the game away to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Sunday, the Giants found a way to give a game to the Colorado Rockies.

Not every Giant was trying to give the game away.  Jonathan Sanchez threw 8 innings of shutout ball, I'm not counting the run in the 9th as earned even though the official scorer did, walked Dexter Fowler to lead off the 9th and was replaced by Brian Wilson.

Let's analyze this right here.  Johnny No-No had thrown 108 pitches and, after getting ahead 0-2 to Fowler, he suddenly lost his command throwing 4 wide ones.  Bochy was absolutely right in pulling Sanchez at this point and bringing in Wilson.  Sure Wilson threw 30 pitches yesterday but Wilson was good for an inning tonight.

Wilson got Carlos Gonzalez to line out to Cody Ross....At least, that's what everyone thought.  Ross played Gonzalez's liner into a triple and to make matters worse, Freddy Sanchez sent the relay throw into the Giants' dugout allowing Gonzalez to score.

Game over.

I have 2 complaints about this game.

First:

Why wasn't Nate Schierholtz manning rightfield?  The only reason, that I can see, that he is even on the roster is as a late inning defensive replacement.  Isn't that what you want in a late inning game?  Boch, in his infinite wisdom, put Travis Ishikawa in at first base as a defensive replacement, which was absolutely the right move. Why not put in Nate?  He would have thrown the ball all the way to third on the fly and we probably would be watching extra innings right now.

Second:

The Giants bats.  It doesn't matter who they throw out there, how many runs they scored against the Reds, or how many runs they scored against the D-backs yesterday.  This team has a tendency to just go in a top to bottom funk when it comes to hitting and it happens a LOT.  Especially when Sanchez is on the mound and pitching well, look at the two 1-0 losses to the Padres that he took earlier this year.  I'm not saying that they need to score 10 runs every night, I am just saying they need to score more than 1 or 2 runs a lot more.

The game recap on SFGiants.com is titled:  Chance to gain ground slips by Giants.  This is actually incorrect because the Giants have had 5 chances in a row to gain ground on the Padres and they are just 1-4 in those games.

Do these Giants really want to play in the postseason?

Following up on yesterday's post about the 2009 Giants and the 2010 team.   It looks as if the 2010 Giants are trying to keep their record identical to last year's squad.  Both teams own 72-60 records after 132 games.  good thing is the 2009 Giants won game 133!

Down on the farm:

Brandon Belt 4-6, 2B, HR, 4 RBI

See you on Wednesday Mr. Belt.  you can take that seat right next to Nate Schierholtz on the bench.

Are the Giants really any better than they were last season?

Here we are 131 games into the season.  They have a record of  72-59. There are another 31 games left and to the casual observer the Giants this season would be a better team than the team we had last season right?

That's extremely debatable.

But Aaron Rowand and Edgar Renteria are on the bench!  We have Aubrey Huff and Pat Burrell!  Buster Posey instead of Bengie Molina!  Hell, even Jose Guillen is hitting .372 since coming over from the Royals!

Sure those names sound better than Fred Lewis, Randy Winn, and Rich Aurillia.  But does the result on the field look any different?

Exhibit A:

Through 131 games last season the Giants had a record of ............. 72-59.  they were 6 games back in the standings to the LA Dodgers.  Well I guess since they are only 5 back of the Padres they must be doing something right!

Exhibit B:

Last season the Giants team Batting Average was .257.  This season it's .263.  or about the difference that Jose Guillen's .372 has been making over the last week or 2

Exhibit C:

The pitching has been much more dominant!  Last season's ERA 3.55 to this season's 3.70!  Yes the pitching this season, this includes the starting pitching and the bullpen, has a HIGHER ERA  than the Giants pitchers put up last season.

The Giants need to go 16-15 the rest of the season to match last season's 88-74 record.  After losing 2 out of 3 to the Diamondbacks that looks like a tall order.  The hitting is prone to go into deep sleep and the pitchers just look worn out.  From Tim Lincecum's struggles to Jonathan Sanhez's inconsistency.  The only thing that is saving this season right now is the fact that the padres may finally be fading having lost 4 in a row and the Giants still have 7 games left with them.

At this point, the Giants are what they are.

They are a mediocre team in a mediocre division.  The fact that the entire National League seems to be mediocre helps their situation tremendously in the wild-card hunt.  There is no team that looks capable of running off 10 wins in a row right now.  So the Giants should remain in the postseason picture until the very end of the season.

I want to say it will be a fun ride.  But based on the season so far, I think it is going to be more like a torturous one.

Is Tim Lincecum tipping his pitches?

DIAMONDBACKS 6 - GIANTS 0 

In the few game recaps I read about last night's game I only saw it mentioned once.  I'm sure it's not something that the Giants really want to have get around the league, but judging from Lincecum's horrible August it already has., but in Chris Haft's game recap on SFgiants.com the 11th paragraph reads:

"Giants manager Bruce Bochy downplayed any edge the D-backs might have received by saying, "All teams do that." But Bochy acknowledged that Lincecum made an adjustment. And Lincecum himself admitted that he started setting his hands closer to his body so nobody could detect the wiggling of his fingers as he prepared to grip the ball."


Apparently, Boch's remarks were in response to the fact that some  were saying that Stephen Drew was signalling pitch location to Adam LaRoche when he hit his 3 run homerun in the first inning.  I didn't see the game and the replay they had on MLB.com didn't show Drew and it was really hard to see Lincecum's glove but tipping pitches is a huge problem for a guy like Lincecum who relies more on his deception than anything to get hitters out.


It also explains Lincecum's constant fiddling with his mechanics.  One thing that has really seemed odd to me is that after just about every start Timmy is changing the positioning of his hands, swinging his glove over his head, or holding them "closer to his body son nobody could detect the wiggling of his fingers as he prepared to grip the ball"  


All this has gotten into Lincecum's head.  It helps explain his lack of control and velocity as well.  If you know the other team knows what's coming do you really want to throw that pitch in the strike zone?


The good news is: it's fixable.  It will take someone a whole lot smarter than me to tell Licecum what he is doing and how to fix it but it can be done.


All that said, the Giants still could have won this game.  4 runs in 6 innings is not a disastrous start by any stretch of the imagination.  But it is when your team scores 0 runs!


Now I could go on and on about how the Giants wasted all of those runs in the Reds series on the Reds but I think it has more to do with the guy on the mound for the Dbacks tonight than anything like that.


Barry Enright is a rookie this season.  He has pitched pretty well considering he was 4-2 with a 2.75 ERA for this horrible Arizona team coming into tonight's game.  In addition to stranding a whopping 86% of the runners he allows to reach base.  He has gone 10 consecutive starts in which he has allowed 3 earned runs or less.


Make that 11.


None of this excuses the Giants lack of support for Lincecum however, the Snakes did throw out two mediocre relievers that the Giants couldn't manage to get anything going against either.  I would just chalk it up to a letdown from Wednesday's epic game but the off-day yesterday should have erased any of those letdown tendencies.


The Giants also received a scare when Buster Posey came out of the game in the 8th inning with a mild forearm strain, but it doesn't sound serious.  However with news of Stephen Strasburg having season ending and career threatening Tommy John surgery dropping earlier in the day the Giants I am sure were just a little jumpy.

Giants score 11 runs again! It's still not enough,,

REDS 12 - GIANTS 11

At least the game was exciting.

The score was 10-1 going into the bottom of the 5th.  I was at work at the time and was pretty glad I wasn't watching the game.  I got home and decided to check out what the carnage was only to see that the Giants had pulled to 10-8 in the 8th inning.  Andres Torres tied the game and I couldn't believe my eyes!  Next thing you know Aubrey Huff is hitting a sacrifice fly to put the Giants ahead 11-10 in the 9th inning!

Then Pablo Sandoval showed some of that lackluster defense that he has been showing a little too much this season.

Pablo threw away the second out of the 9th inning allowing the tying run to get to second.  That run scored on the double by the next batter and tied the game.  Some guy named Nick Massett came in and struck out 4 G-men in 2 innings and Francisco Cordero shut them down for 2 more innings and then the Reds scored off of Barry Zito in the 12th and the game was over.  Reds win.

There are a lot of positives to take from this game.

The 1933 New York Giants 

The Giants scored 11 runs in their third consecutive game(the first time they have done that since 1953 and the first time ever in San Francisco), they pounded out at least 17 hits for the 3rd straight game (first time since 1933!), they came back from 9 runs down!  Pablo Sandoval, Jose Guillen, Juan Uribe, Mike Fontenot, Jose Guillen, and Andres Torres each had multi-hit games.

There were some alarming stats too.

The 8 runs, 7 earned,  that Madison Bumgarner gave up.  It could just be a result of the rookie facing the highest scoring team in the league or a result of a guy who has passed his career number of innings pitched and is running on fumes.

The Giants also committed 5 errors.  Yes 5 errors! sure 3 of those were committed by pitchers and 2 of them were committed by Ramon Ramirez in his 2 innings of work and of course the most costly error of all was Pablo Sandoval's error in the 9th.

So you take some good and you take some bad.  Ultimately this game will be filed in the "L" column and that's what will count at the end of the season.  Hopefully the Giants can keep scoring runs with the D-backs coming to town tonight.

I almost forgot to mention that Brandon Belt made his AAA debut last night.  What does the kid do?  He hits his 20th homer of the season and steals his 12th base.  Look out for this guy in September.  Head on over to 22Gigantes to see some pictures and a video from the game.  It's worth it to hear Gigantes' son screaming "DADDY I JUST GOT HIS AUTOGRAPH!" After Belt "Belted" his homerun.