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The Giants end their road trip, which started promisingly, with a resounding thud. They got whipped by Jason Vargas on Wednesday night with rookie Tyler Beede getting knocked around. Today they played tough against Zack Wheeler and got a gritty effort from rookie Shaun Anderson but still lost. I thought it was a mistake to send Anderson out for the 7th inning. He had pitched five scoreless after being rocked for two homers in the 1st inning. With a 3-2 lead I thought they'd bring in Moronta to start the frame and go with Watson and Smith to close it out. Alas, Anderson walked the first guy and he scored the tying run after a fluky sequence which ended with Moronta giving up a bloop on a pitch well out of the zone. Watson got a double play to end the frame, and Mark Melancon got the 8th and he fell apart. Todd Frazier's homer to break the tie was one of those impossible hits, but the rest of the inning was a disaster.
Giants square off against the high-flying Dodgers this weekend in San Francisco. Friday night looks like a major mismatch with Drew Pomeranz facing Clayton Kershaw at 7:15 Pacific. Starters for Saturday (vs. Rich Hill) and Sunday (vs. Walker Buehler) are TBD. At least they don't have to face Hyun-Jin Ryu.
--M.C.
4 comments:
The Athletic has a good piece by Baggs about FZ, Michael Holmes (draft director), and the 2019 Draft. There's a quote from FZ that I have to share:
“I’m going to say something really nerdy, but …” Zaidi said. “The equilibrium is really precarious. It’s so context-driven by what everybody else is doing. That’s why you want to stay true to the talent. That’s where you can be opportunistic if the industry as a whole starts leaning in one direction or the other.”
That's the influence of Game Theory--the talk about "equilibrium." A lot of Nobel Prizes have been given out in economics for applications of game theory. FZ has a PhD in economics, so it's not surprising that game theory is part of his everyday speech!
The Mets half of the 7th. A walk. Then a double play ball that was hit too slowly to get 1, because Nido couldn't bunt. A pop-up bunt that should have been caught, but wasn't (or maybe couldn't have been because it was in the 4 square inches of space that were uncatchable. And McNeil's bloop "oh, gosh, somehow my bat hit the ball" to score the Mets third run. This is why we can't have nice things.
Even if the giants had a chance this time to come back in the ninth, which is unlikely, the home plate ump did what we saw earlier in the year. He completely expanded the strike zone for a mets pitcher who had been struggling, and made the poor hitting giants look even worse. On the 1-0 pitch to Sandoval, he called a pitch a strike that was about a foot high and perhaps outside as well. I do think that umping can make a difference. Not saying the giants would have or could have done anything anyway, but the home plate ump made sure not to leave it up to chance. This is not being a sore loser over a team that is fighting for the pennant, this is an observation made that happens a bit too frequently. There was a bad call made against the Yankees the other day, and it was all over the N.Y. newspapers. You know Angel Hernandez will pay the price for making one of his infamous calls, but this time against the Yanks.
Samardzija-Bumgarner this weekend.
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