Chris Stratton pitched like an ace and Steven Duggar supplied the offense with a 2-run dinger in the 2'nd inning to lead the Giants to a Win in the series opener against the NL West Leading D'Backs. Key Lines:
Steven Duggar CF- 1 for 3, HR(2). BA= .261. Duggar made Patrick Corbin and the D'Backs pay for not respecting him as the dinger came with 2 outs and a weak hitting pitcher on deck. After that, Corbin took him more seriously and made him look bad on K's in his next 2 AB's.
Chris Stratton RHP- 8 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 6 K's, GO/AO= 10/1. ERA= 4.99. Stratton showed some maturity in the first inning when he got BABIP'd by the first 2 batters and had to face a couple of red-hot batters in David Peralta and Paul Goldschmidt. First, the BABIP gods smiled on Stratton as 1B Austin Slater fielded a hot smash then made a bad throw to 2B but at least got the force-out there. Then he sawed off Goldy's bat for a soft liner to 2B Chase d'Arnaud and got out of the inning on a soft bouncer to 2B by Daniel Descalso.
Another interesting development was Stratton using a devastating changeup to attack the LH batters with. If he can get some consistency with that pitch to go with his FB and high spin curveball, well, you've got yourself a very nice SP!
With Will Smith and Mark Melancon needing a night off, Bochy played matchups in the 9'th with Tony Watson and Hunter Strickland. That almost blew up in his face as they each walked a batter and Strick went 3-2 on Nick Ahmed, but in the end, Ahmed hit a harmless flyball to Cutch to end it.
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The Win cut the Giants deficit in the NL West to 7 games. The Rockies sit 0.5 games behind pending the outcome of their game with the Angels. The Dodgers were idle and sit 2 games back in 3'rd place.
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Madison Bumgarner tries to keep hopes for a Giants sweep alive tomorrow evening facing Clay Buchholz.
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That was a heck of a game. It got done about 12:30 or so my time. Was worth staying up. What I thought was really cool is I expected Stratton to get lifted after the 6th. Krukow was saying he was going to be lifted after the 7th. Yet we saw him make it through the 8th and he put up the highest single-game pitch-count of his career and shaved about half-a-run off his ERA.
ReplyDeleteSlater: Did a great job digging out a couple of tough throws at 1B.
Duggar: So I'd been wondering why the OF was cut with that weird shape in CF. Apparently Duggar didn't know his range and was over-lapping the other two fielders. So they cut it so he knows which fly balls are his responsibility and which are for him to back-up the corner OFer. So a couple of times last night I saw him pull up and let the corner OFer get the ball even though he was right there.
They actually had to replace the grass in CF due to damage from a concert. Kruk and Kuip or Kruk and Miller were joking about the territory thing.
DeleteOh, well, that makes my observation 'confirmation bias!' Which means I just got a laugh out of being trolled.
ReplyDeletei'd like to see moronta get an opportunity to close if smith continues to struggle in september.
ReplyDelete