Barry Zito did not get much run support, but he didn't need it as he pitched 8 stellar innings of 1 run ball and 2 runs was just enough to get another 1 run win. Key Lines:
Miguel Tejada- 2 for 3, 2B, BB. BA= .240. Tejada was a key player scoring the winning run after a double in the 6'th. He played decent defense, but I though Brandon Crawford should have been out at SS for the 9'th inning. Miggy is hitting .364 over his last 10 games. Take that, haters!
Eli Whiteside- 2 for 3, HR(3). BA= .225. Whitey got the Giants their first run with a HR to left. He also threw out Jason Bartlett at 2B to help snuff out a rally in the 4'th inning after the Padres had worked runners at first and third with no outs situation. Whitey is hitting .270 over his last 10 games. He's hitting .333 in July so far after hitting .250/.322/.404 in the month of June.
Barry Zito- 8 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 0 BB, 7 K's. ERA= 3.18. Zito was in command the whole way. He was getting first pitch strikes with a variety of pitches. He relied mostly on his curve, slider and change only rarely throwing the FB. The FB was more like a reverse changeup and that made 85 MPH look like 90. I think I remember Zito getting that idea from the way Hector Sanchez called his pitches in Fresno, at least Zito gave him credit for it. I will say that the ump had a generous strike zone for Zito tonight, not extreme but definitely generous.
With the Win, the Giants maintained their 2 game lead over the D'Backs, who defeated St Louis 4-1, in the NL West. The Reeling Rockies lost their 5'th in a row, this time to the Atlanta Braves 6-3 to drop 8.5 games off the pace. The Padres dropped to 10 games behind. The Dodgers remained in last place, 12 games behind the Giants with a 6-0 win over the Mets.
Ryan Vogelsong tries to keep the magic going, taking on knuckleballer RA Dickey tomorrow evening at AT&T.
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DrB, according to interviews just after DL, he said he dumped slider because it was not in the same slot as other pitches, making it harder for him to find slot consistently. Also was noted that it was added after Cy Young season, implying that may have caused his decline since then. But if so, why did it take so long to figure out?
ReplyDeleteI know that this is pretty unrelated to THIS current post, but as long as Nate is having a pretty good offensive streak going right now, I thought that some of you may be interested about this. I commented a few posts back mentioning Nate's batting stance after noticing changes he made. There's an interesting article along with a few pictures that shows the transformation of Nate's batting stance from being an open stance to a closed stance. Courtesy of Splashing Pumpkins:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.splashingpumpkins.com/2011/07/look-at-nates-batting-stance.html
Anon, good call on Nate's stance. Nice visuals from the SP site. Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteKruk was confusing me last night. He kept calling Zito's breaking balls sliders. There may have been some sliders in there, but most of the ones Kruk was calling sliders looked a lot more like curveballs to me, and I don't mean slurves. He was calling good old fashioned rainbow curves sliders.
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