The Dodgers got shut out in St. Louis this evening with that old Giants nemesis John Lackey delivering the goods for the Cardinals. In San Francisco the old man of the staff, Tim Hudson, tired of the smack-talk here at RMC, kicked some ass of his own and led the Giants to another win against the Braves. Buster Posey was Mr. Clutch with the bat and the home team prevailed 4-2 over Atlanta. The Giants sit at 30-20 for a nice .600 win percentage and have a half game edge over the Dodgers who are 28-19 (.596), falling to 7-12 on the road with the loss tonight.
The Giants have now won five in a row. It's a looooooooong season my friends, we cruised past the one-quarter mark when LA was getting smoked three straight two weeks back. We are creeping up on the one-third mark (game 54) which I believe will be Tuesday the 2nd versus the Pirates. It has been terribly exciting to watch the ballclub do everything right consistently for several weeks now (they are 25-10 or .714 since 4/21), but we know these things are fleeting. They will play stretches of bad baseball in the remaining 112 games, this we know for sure. But damn if they don't look good! What a lineup--I'm not sure I can recall a batting order this tough from top to bottom. In the Bonds Era they had some serious offense, but did they have the one-through-eight we see with these guys?
Tim Lincecum gets the start tomorrow at 7:05 pm. I hate weekend night games--all weekend games should be played in the day time. Save the night games for Monday through Friday.
GO GIANTS!
--M.C.
4 comments:
It's the most relentless batting order I can remember the team's sustaining, with every player at about .300, give or take .020 or so, and every player, as OGC has remarked, sufficiently adept against same-hand pitching that playing match-ups against them doesn't work. With McGehee in exile, the likelihood of a DP to ease the stress on an opposing pitcher has gone sharply down, and the pressure on individual batters to keep the line moving, for fear of a rally-killing DP, has commensurately gone down. This isn't only a successful lineup in fact, but a successful lineup-type in principle, too.
It's a beautiful thing when there is only the pitching spot to pitch around and not even that when Mad Bum is the starter. You can see it wear the opposing starter down as the game progresses.
Yep, regression is a hard fact of life. That is probably why I never really enjoy being reminded of it. Thanks MOC! ;)
However, I do want to remind every one that regression to a mean is always dependent on a time reference. No one expects things to average out in a week, or even a month. So why is a season long enough? What about a team having a good half decade, rather than just a good couple months? Sure, almost all the time a full season will include the entire spectrum of win/lose experience, but not always. Some teams just kick butt from the start and don't know any better. Are the 2015 Giants a team like that? I kinda doubt it... Pitching is a little old and banged up, the offense looks good but we rely on a lot of youth, so that can be sketchy. I know we are a contender and a serious threat to take it all, but we probably are not a juggernaut that wins over a 100 games.
However, it could be argued that we are and this year's team is on the verge of true greatness. We already had our terrible spell in April so maybe we don't do that again and the regression God is appeased. But the big thing that makes me think that these Giants may be this good ALL SEASON is Matt Cain. When he returns aren't we a better team? If he is anything like the old Matt, we get a huge injection of talent, poise and leadership. I still can not believe our success without him, yet I feel he will only make us much stronger. I sometimes feel that my expectations for Matt are too high, but then I see the name of the blog and I can't help myself. We signed on to this guy for life and I dearly miss him!
Hudson rosed to occasion in this start, per PQS, it is his first quality start (sabermetrically) in the ten starts he has had thus far this season. I recall someone noting that Hudson might have still been recovering from the extra work of last season (or the shortened off-season), plus his spring training was delays, resulting in a kind of spring training period he's been going through. Perhaps that was true, maybe he's finally rounding into shape, which would be great, based on what he did at the start of last season for us, while healthy and ready for b'ar.
I think this team is on the verge of greatness. Not entirely the way it looked pre-season - thought Matty would be part of the fun, but hey, Heston! - but my analysis found that while we lost Morse and Sandoval, production from Aoki, McGehee, and Panik would replace that. It helps that Panik is not only hitting what he did last year, but hitting what he hit last year when he finally figured things out, after about a month. It helps that Belt and Crawford are hitting like they did in short spurts, but now in a long, extended, spurt, hopefully they can keep things going.
The hitting has led the way again, like last season, and hopefully the pitching is rounding into dominant shape now, and can carry the load once the Regression Gods hit the hitters, like it did last season, until all the injuries caught up with them.
And great point, Cain would be a huge injection of savviness and toughness into the rotation, that could help propel the team after the ASB.
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