Saturday, August 9, 2014

Up to Date in Kansas City

I thought I would wait until today to post about last night's game to see if I might be able to put a more positive spin on things.  But I can't really.  We had our ace on the mound, our lead off man back, were on the road and a lot of hitters seemed to be, after such a long period of suckitude, getting it together.  But we lost to Kansas City, 4 - 2.

That puts us at .500 for this road trip, which might be OK, except that the road is where we are supposed to be making up ground for sucking at home.  After a great April and May, a horrible June and July, August is looking mediocre.  We got 12 hits, 2 each from Sandoval, Morse, Arias and Duffy, who were all grouped together, but managed only 2 runs.  Kansas City's defense if very good, the Giants made 3 errors.  Madison went 9 innings - I am not sure why, throwing 123 pitches, gave up 3 earned runs.  That Billy Butler guy isn't the son of Brett Butler, is he?  I never did trust that guy.

Brandon Belt is back on the concussion DL.  That really bothers me - I pray it is not one of those career ending kind of things - from such a freak injury.  We had our starting line-up back, for one game and we lost that game.  I am starting to wonder about Jake Peavy.  He seems like he pitches well, but then implodes all at once and gets hung with a loss.  With Morse starting to hit, Buster hitting and Sandoval hitting, we are only playing .500 ball.  Are we really capable of playoff-caliber baseball?  We could not take advantage of the Brewers win over the doggers, and it is that time of year when you can't just hope another team does your work for you.  We will have to beat the doggers head to head if we have any hope at all of playing in the post season.

4 comments:

Brother Bob said...

Three starts from Peavy and we clearly have as a pattern. Like Zo said, he starts well then implodes. This seems fluky and might not mean anything, but it's disappointing.
Likewise disappointing is the fact that we are 0-2 since Pagan got back.
Oh well, it's a weird season, isn't it?

M.C. O'Connor said...

Definitely a hard to take loss. The game seemed to be summed up when Morse made that great stop to start a DP but threw a little off the bag to Duffy who did not get the out at second and then he chucked it past MadBum covering first and that led to two runs. It shouldn't come down to that--bad sequence or not. The team should have enough offense to score 3 or 4 runs, fer chrissakes. Man, they need to start winning some games!

obsessivegiantscompulsive said...

I've been reading that Peavy has been doing that all season, and that reminded me of Lincecum the past few years. Hopefully Bochy and Righetti can do their mojo and get him back on track, he was still pretty good the past couple of seasons, only he was BABIPed badly on the road, not just Boston, plus way too many homers on the road. The BABIP has followed him to SF, his FIP is a fine 2.92 right now. But if he is having the same problem as Lincecum was having, we need him to right things, it is not just bad luck.

And Lincecum, he hasn't been the same since he relieved for us, perhaps it would have been better to let Colvin pitch that inning. Plus Bochy messed up earlier in that game, he used a pitcher for less than an inning, had he stretched that guy for another inning, he probably wouldn't need to go to Lincecum, that has cost us 3 bad starts from Tim, whereas he had a great stretch before that.

And the team's offense did have enough to score 3-4 runs, if Pence didn't overslide, that's 3 runs, and if Blanco had beat the throw, that's another run, plus the inning is still alive in either case to try to get more runs. Base running mistakes costed us big time.

DrBGiantsfan said...

I think Peavy is what he is, a very good pitcher with some age and a whole lot of mileage on his arm along with an extensive injury history. He's 5 inning pitcher at this point and should not be counted on for more.