The Giants nightmare opponent continued to bedevil them as a familiar story unfolded at Petco Park again tonight. Key lines:
Pablo Sandoval- 1 for 2, 2 BB. The Giants drew a total of 5 walks in the game, so it wasn't a matter of too much hacking. They just don't hit against these pitchers and they don't hit in this stadium. That's a lot of not hitting!
Matt Cain- 6 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 5 BB, 5 K's. ERA= 3.33. Cain pitched well enough that he should be able to win a majority of games like this. The 5 BB's tell you he wasn't at the top of his game though.
The Giants record fell to 21-16, 1.5 games behind the Padres who are at 23-15. Tomorrow we get round 3 of Sanchez vs Latos which has ended badly despite sensational pitching by Sanchez the last two rounds.
Around the League: The Dodgers won their 8'th in a row beating up on Houston 8-2 behind another fine pitching effort by John Ely to move within 0.5 games of the Giants at 21-17. Colorado fell back to a .500 record at 19-19 losing 4-2 in 10 innings to the Cubbies. Arizona improved their last place record to 16-23 with a 5-1 win over Florida behind Edwin Jackson.
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Doc - I'm curious what your personal reaction is to this problem with the Padres. On the one hand, the Giants record against everybody else so far is quite good; you could decide that SD just happens to have our number, for whatever reason, and figure that over the course of a 162-game season things will even out and the Giants will be fine.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, one could view the lack of hitting versus the Padres as symptomatic of poor roster construction, and that this is in fact an accurate reflection of who the Giants are, and shows just how badly we need an impact bat.
Do you subscribe to either of those views, or do you see it differently? Just curious.
I think it's a combination of both. I think both the Padres and Petco have the Giants number and it's gotten into the Giants heads. It's also undeniable that the Giants are offensively challenged. They've been able to score enough runs against other teams most of the time, even against good pitchers like Roy Halladay and Adam Wainwright, but even at best, you always have the feeling that scoring a lot of runs for the Giants is more a matter of luck than skill. Maybe Bud Black and the Padre pitchers have just seen more of the Giants hitters than most teams and have something figured out?
ReplyDeleteI also think the Padres have figured out that it's worth the effort to scrap and scrape for runs here and there against the Giants. AGone's sac bunt last night was hugely symbolic of that attitude, if nothing else. The Padres go into games with the Giants knowing that if they don't have to score more than 3 runs to have a great chance at winning, so they set about to scratch out those runs from the beginning of the game.
But yeah, I would give a resounding yes to the need for an impact bat, or even two! The problem is how you go about getting said bats.
How many times has Matt Cain pitched AT LEAST 6 innings and give up NO MORE THAN 2 runs, and NOT gotten the win?
ReplyDeleteAnswer: 37
I just threw up in my mouth a bit...
We knew going into last year the Giants were going to have trouble scoring runs. We knew going into this year the Giants made some additions to help score runs but no one that would be a for sure run producer. The Padres will fall off sooner or later in the season and we will look back at these games and think damn if would could have won a couple of those games. We would be in the playoffs.... (i hope we still make it though)
ReplyDeleteKing of Cali
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