The San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies played 18 innings of baseball last night. In that game, the Giants used every available reliever (and even Derek Rodriguez got used as a pinch hitter). So the one thing the Giants wanted was to have today's afternoon starter give them a good outing. Who better than Madison Bumgarner, 50% stubborn ox anyway?
Madison did what he was asked, and did it well. 98 pitches got him through 7 innings. He gave up 1 run in the 6th and 1 in the 7th after the Giants already had 3 on the board. He gave up 6 hits, struck out 7 and walked no one. Although the Giants used every reliever last night, an number were only used for 1 inning; Moronta, Dyson, Watson, and Smith. Madison came out to pitch the 7th, but the first batter, Chris Ianetta, landed on second base with what probably should have been cut off to hold him to a single. Reyes Moronta was brought in, and did a fine job of striking out the next three batters. Sam Dyson made it an uneventful 9th for the Giants third win in a row, and third over Colorado. Given the way Colorado chewed up and spit out the Giants last year, I am surprised. They, like the Giants, have had a lot of trouble putting runs on the board this year. For example, Nolan Arenado has yet to hit a home run. I expect that to change, but you need to jump on teams when they are down and the Giants haven't done nearly enough of that in the last couple years.
And speaking of runs, the Giants, after doing just enough the last couple nights, added on in the bottom of the 8th (sac flies from and Parra and Duggar) to make the final score Rockies 2, Giants 5. Buster Posey picked up his first rbi of the season with a 3rd inning double, and Pillar got the other 2 rbi with a sac fly in the 3rd and a solo home run in the 5th.
But really: pitching. The Giants have held the Rockies to 4 runs in 36 innings. The Giants are right up there with the best in the NL in pitching stats, along with Pittsburgh, and we'll see them on the road trip that starts after tomorrow's game. But first, tomorrow. Everyone's tired, but with a decent start out of Dutch, and with Watson and Smith having today off, anything (like a sweep) is possible.
6 comments:
Yeah, you said it, this is the time to beat up on a team, when they are down. Nice to see them get the additional runs. It was a little dicey relying on Bumgarner late in the game. The Rockies finally broke through against him. Hampson and Reynolds had seen him twice already, and Iannetta got two hits off him, both times leading off (the 6th and the 8th). But Boch had to stretch him out and take the chance, it was going to be hard to get more than two innings out of the 'pen.
Reyes Moronta was the player of the game! That was an epic performance with the tying run on second and no outs. He saved the day--getting those three outs in that spot was the difference.
Holland looked good last time out, let's hope he can do that tomorrow. Maybe the lineup can bust out with another 5-run performance.
Today the umpires may have finally swung a game to the giants favor. And Arenado let them know about it. He was lucky not to be kicked out of the game. On a full count, Bumgarner definitely missed inside by quite a margin, and it was called strike 3, with a runner already on and Story in the on deck circle. In fairness a similar horrible call was made earlier on Posey on a strike 2 pitch, and it definitely messed up his AB. I have notice from watching many games so far this year, not just the giants games, that the inside of the plate to right hand hitters has been called a strike much more often this year by many umpires. I am sure the players will adjust. A key bad call at a crucial time, can be a game changer, and this time for a change it went our way. They statistically owe us many more. Although the defense, zone wise has been very good, a few mental lapses this year have caused the giants several runs. Fairly sure that when Parra missed the cutoff man, it cost us a run.
FanGraphs has its own version of box scores and it includes a strike zone map and pitch locations. I think the only thing you can do about blown calls is hope they even out! Seriously, if you have good at-bats and swing at good pitches and hit the ball hard things will work out in your favor. The Giants don't win by blowouts. With the weak lineup they have no margin for error so the close calls make a bigger impact.
I think you also have to consider that image that the center-field camera shows (including the graphic box on tv) is not the same strike zone that the umpire sees. The camera looks over the right shoulder of the pitcher, the umpire looks over the right shoulder of the catcher when the batter is right handed, so looks across the plate at an inside pitch. So when you see something crossing the strike zone and being caught inside, the umpire has the problem of depth perspective from his viewing angle. The thing you can hope for is consistent calls to locations. The location for that third strike looks a lot closer to the box in the graphic on espn than it looked on tv. Still, that was probably a gift call.
Robot umps are a long way away, if you think about it. There is a great deal of uncertainty in determining balls and strikes. Humans do it, overall, pretty well. I expect it will be a while before "expert systems" can be built to take over the task. And those systems will have to be damn-near perfect. We can forgive a human ump for a close call, but not a robot!
I used to give the umpires more credit, but now that we have these super large high definition TV's with ultra-slow motion play back, one can see how bad a call actually is. The bad calls to Arenado and to Posey were not even close. This last game, the K zone was quite different for Holland and it shows. By the way, Holland has 12 of the 40 walks that the giants have given up. A good sign for the giants so far, is that they are not walking guys in huge chunks, which should help in their ability to limit runs for the opposition.
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