The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant!
Well, no.
The Giants sweep a series and win their third in a row for the first time this year!
The Giants sweep a series and win their third in a row for the first time this year!
The Giants sweep a series and win their third in a row for the first time this year!
The Giants sweep a series and win their third in a row for the first time this year!
I'm giddy.
Ty Blach on the mound for the 3rd game against a tired, beat up Colorado Rockies team. You have to take advantage of situations like that, and the Giants did. Ty was far from perfect. He made a throwing error in the 1st to allow the Rockies to score the first run. He flung the ball far to the right of Brandon Belt on a bunt single in the 6th, turning it into a triple. That was the Rockies third run, which tied the Giants at the time. Mostly, though he pitched well, giving us 6 1/3 in 110 pitches on a day after a 14 inning night game. Ty gave up 3 runs on 7 hits (only 1 of those runs was "earned" although it is tough to say he didn't earn them when it was his errors that led to the runs). He walked 3 and struck out 6. George Kontos and Steve Okert both pitched last night, but they gave us an inning and 1 1/3, respectively, holding the Rox at 3. Hunter Strickland got a 1-out save.
Jae-gyun Hwang made his major league debut. He got the Giants' first run home on a 1-3 ground out with Joe Panik on the bases. Nick Hundley homered with Austin Slater on base in the 4th. That put the Giants ahead until the Rockies scored in the 6th. In the bottom of the 6th, Hwang came to the plate against Kyle Freeland. He put one 417 feet into the left field bleachers. The guy has some power. The Giants added 1 in the 8th when Belt grounded into a fielder's choice to score Gorkys Hernandez who was in scoring position from yet another wild pitch by Rockies' reliever Jake McGee.
I am a big fan of having Asians on the Giants. San Francisco is a gateway to Asia, there is a lot of Asian culture here, and those people are Giants fans. Check this out (be sure to hear the call in Korean). You know what's happening in Korea right now? Well, not right now, it's 7:45 Thursday morning, but soon, stores will be selling out of Giants merchandise. Travel agencies will be developing tours that include Giants games. Giants games will be broadcast in Korea. And some young kid will grow up wanting to be a San Francisco Giant, and he will turn out to be an absolute stud.
I am thrilled. The Giants have now played a couple of games like contenders. It is damn near impossible at this point that they would be in contention this year, but there has never been a reason that they can't play like it.
7 comments:
Beauty, mate. Fine spot o'prose there. 'Play like contenders', yeah.
This is a must-read. Homers are way up all over baseball except at AT&T and it's not just because the lineup sucks. Homework assignment to all RMC'ers: read this piece and be prepared to do some 'splainin'!!
LarryB talks 2018.
From the Larry Baer interview: "But that also means this is a roster that is essentially pot-committed."
I'm not sure that recreational marijuana is the answer to the Giants woes. Now for the fans.......
On the home run piece:
So home runs are down by less than 2/1000 (0.2%) at ATT and up by a variable number at other parks, but in no case as much as 30/1000 (3%). So the question is, given that the teams change players (and noting that San Francisco has not added a power hitter since 2014) and that games are played 1/2 at home, is this significant? I'm not convinced it is. How much impact does one guy like an Aaron Judge have? Is that +2.28% at Yankee Stadium because of him? As I recall, a couple teams moved their fences in within the last couple years, too. Unless now, for some reason, the old adage "Pitching beats hitting" has been somehow reversed, this seems like a big pile o' nothing.
The Giants could use some more power, that's obvious. But they have banked on pitching, picking up Cueto and Moore. Moore, particularly, has not been as advertised this year. I still am not convinced that the trend towards more home runs means that the Giants "model" is defunct. If all the other kids jump off a roof, does that make it a good idea?
It's a hard place to hit homers, that's for sure. And the Giants have had good pitching for a long time, that suppresses homers, too. I do think the low rate this year is a bit of an anomaly, more than anything else. But the game is enjoying a huge surge in homers and the Giants do need more power hitting, I note that two homers were the difference in Sunday's game. Two homers hit by the Giants, I should add. The 2012 Giants were last in homers but around league average in doubles and SLG, so they weren't anemic on offense, they had above-average OBA and BA. That's the issue with the 2017 Giants, they don't slug enough they plain and simply don't hit enough or get on base enough. I note they lead baseball in sac flies--man I really want to see fewer of those so-called "productive" outs. A pernicious concept, really. Outs suck and the Giants make the most or nearly the most outs in the whole game. Only already good-hitting teams can "waste" scoring opportunities by relying on outs to move runners.
But I do think it is weird that homers are so infrequent in SF compared to everywhere else. It's just weird.
Jim Albert (co-author of "Curve Ball" which I highly recommend) has a blog post on his thoughts about the homer spike:
Usually we associate high home run hitting with the leaders (Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, etc). But this graph indicates that the 2017 home run surge is due to the increase in home run hitting among the non-sluggers — the players who generally don’t hit many home runs.
Do we see this on the Giants? I don't think so.
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