The Giants lost tonight by playing some of the stupidest baseball I have seen this year. It wasn't easy though, it took a complete effort by players and coaches. Madison Bumgarner faced off against Cole Hamels for the Phillies. Madison pitched pretty well, although not efficiently, using 110 pitches to get through 7 innings. He struck out 9 and gave up only 4 hits, although 1 of them was a home run, resulting in the only run while he was on the mound. Jeremy Affeldt relieved Madison in the 8th, but gave up a 2 run home run, and the game went into extra innings. The Giants got a big knock from Michael Morse off of Hamels in the 4th for 3 runs.
The thing is, the Giants should have been up at least 5 - 3 by the time the 9th rolled around. However, in the 6th, Bruce Bochy stupidly decided to replace Morse with the speedy Gregor Blanco after Morse hit the ball twice better than he has in two months and drew a walk. Blanco stole second, went to third on one of Joe Panik's two hits and then stupidly ran into an out on Brandon Crawford's weak contact. Then, in the 7th, with Madison still the pitcher of record, Angel Pagan led off with a double and then stupidly decided to steal third with Buster Posey at the plate. Just a note here, Buster Posey is a pretty good hitter.
Two hitters into the 8th, the game was tied. Cole Hamels was relieved by Ken Giles, who gave up a single to Pablo Sandoval to lead off the bottom of the 8th. After a sacrifice that put Pablo on second, Tim Flannery stupidly sent Pablo home on a Joe Panik single to shallow right field. Pablo was out by at least 30 feet. In the 9th, the Giants put runners on via walks and moved them up via a wild pitch, but managed to escape with the score tied. They did not, of course, score.
In the 10th, Javier Lopez rounded out the display of incompetence by barely hitting Chase Utley with a pitch with the bases loaded, before giving up a sacrifice fly to make the final score 5 - 3.
2 comments:
I know that Gregor Blanco has done some positive things for San Francisco. However, it seems like whenever I sit down and look at the tv, he is doing idiotic things. In addition to sprinting for home on Crawford's bad bunt attempt only to get hung out, in the bottom of the eighth, he popped up his bunt attempt and stood there and watched as it fell between three Phillies before he started running. I counted 5 seconds. Could he have been safe at first? I don't know, but I would have liked to see him try. So he both ran into an out and failed to run into an out.
Definitely some astonishingly bad baserunning. Falnnery deserves muchof the blame--sneding home Sandoval was ridiculous. A game the Giants should have won. Seems like I've written that a lot this season.
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