Remember how MLB sold us on interleague play with the promise that fans in any city would get to see all the other teams, at least within 3 years? The last time the Yankees were in San Francisco, at what was then Pacific Bell Park, was just before the park-opening 2000 season for a couple of exhibition games.
They're back, and without their marquee sluggers, Stanton and Judge. No matter, they still won by a score of 7 - 3. Madison Bumgarner squared off against James Paxton, lefty against lefty. Madison put us in a 2 run hole to lead off the first inning, again. The Giants got 1 of those runs back, though in the bottom of the 1st. That would make, if I am correct, the 2nd 1st inning run they have scored this year. The Yankees added 1 in the 3rd, 1 in the 5th and 1 in the 6th. That made it 5 - 1. Madison pitched into the 6th, but after the score and a sacrifice to move runners, he was pulled for Nick Vincent. Madison did not give up a home run, nor did he walk anyone, but he gave up 11 hits, and that's too many for 5 2/3 innings. He struck out 5. The Giants scored 2 in their half of the inning, but James Paxton was the better pitcher; 5 hits, 3 BB, 3 runs, 8K. The Yanks got 2 more in the 9th with Melancon pitching, Luke Voit homering and scoring our old friend DJ LeMahieu.
Buster Posey had 2 rbi, Solarte had the other 1. Buster is hitting .234. That is the best average of any of the batters in the line-up for the Giants, except for Austin Tyler, who has only 17 at bats. .234. My god.
6 comments:
I am not correct. The paper says last night's first inning run was the first of the season.
How 'bout those Dubs, though.
Lots of hard hit balls off Maddy. Right-handers are clobbering him. He needs to find his groove soon. Paxton threw 98 mph. Whenever he needed a strike he just fired his bazooka.
Belt hit another 400-foot bomb that would have been a homer in many places, and Duggar tripped on the bullpen mound and cost the Giants an out.
The Giants are going to reconfigure the field in the off-season. They are going to move in the fences at Triples Alley and put the bullpens out in center field. It's been talked about before but plays like those happening on the same night against the premier MLB franchise are exclamation points. No, it won't cure .234, but it will make the park less of an outlier. It would still be a pitchers yard, but not so extreme. And the bullpens are clearly a hazard--very few parks have that feature anymore.
I expect lots of changes to the ball club. It might take a while before we notice the impacts, and we might never know which ones worked!
From Baggs at The Athletic (paywall):
BOCH:
“It’s worth it, I think, for all of us to sit down and talk about it and do what we think is the best thing for our team,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy told The Athletic. “(Triples Alley) would be a great place to put the bullpens. There’s room out there. Personally, I feel if you hit a ball 400 feet, it should be a home run. So yeah, I think we should all be open minded to making a change.”
BUSTER:
“Getting the bullpens off the field would be a great thing,” Posey said. “For 10 years, I’ve seen guys face plant going down the line or a ball drops because they’re looking at the mounds. I don’t know. It’s just not smart to me to have the bullpens right there by the foul line. If the bullpens went to right center, I personally would not be opposed to it."
FZ:
“I’ve always felt that having some idiosyncrasies to your home ballpark should play to your benefit because you have the opportunity to build your roster to take advantage of it. You have the ability to draft and develop players in a way that their style of play is conducive to winning in that environment.
“But you also have to continue to track whether you’ve become so idiosyncratic that you become an outlier in a way where it may ultimately become a disadvantage for you. The way teams are, as the surge in power numbers has become a bigger part of a winning formula for teams around the league, that’s something we have to take a look at.”
So opposing teams will now be able to hit more home runs against the Giants? Fun!
They've never had an issue before, so I don't expect much change! :-)
The real story is that the Giants have been left behind because they failed to adapt to a changing baseball landscape. What worked 5 or 10 years ago doesn't work as well today. Success does not mean keep on doing what you are doing it means keep evolving and don't make assumptions. One of the things that happens to successful organizations is that they think everything they are doing is right, that is, they suffer from confirmation bias. They overlook weaknesses in their processes because the outcomes are good. When the outcomes turn bad, they have not done the self evaluation they should have done and aren't prepared to make the changes needed to improve.
FZ brought in new people in administrative posts and I expect there will be many more. Minor-league instruction, for example, looks like it could use a complete overhaul. The Yankees B-team is making the Giants A-team look like amateurs. Somehow that organization has a continuous pipeline of big league-ready talent. The Giants have the financial resources to do that--they are a wealthy franchise. Now it is a matter of getting talented people into key positions to build their own pipeline to keep the team on the field competitive.
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