Blast from the Past: Bengie Molina Retires

Bengie Molina announced his retirement a few days ago. He had pretty much kept that bit of news to himself, but his wife had other ideas and planned a surprise party for him at their house in Arizona. My first thought when reading that was she did it to ensure Bengie doesn't change his mind, but I'll leave that between them.

The party was well attended by present and former players well represented by the Giants. Whatever we, as fans, think of Bengie and his catching abilities, Giants pitchers, not an easy bunch to catch or please, love pitching to him. So much so that if you want blame somebody for delaying Buster Posey's arrival in the majors, Giants pitchers probably have as much to do with it as anybody. Of course, they are just as protective of Buster now, but yeah, pitchers can be a funny bunch sometimes.

Bengie has a few obstacles to overcome in jockeying for position in the pantheon of Giants history. To begin with, he started his career with the Angels and was a member of the team that beat the Giants in the 2002 World Series. Secondly, he had the misfortune of coming on board with the Giants during the death throes of the Barry Bonds era and had the dubious and misplaces honor of emerging from the smoldering wreckage as his successor at cleanup hitter. Lastly, he was asked to hold the catcher position past the expiration date on his contract and career until the Giants deemed Buster Posey ready to handle the difficult and downright dangerous stuff the Giants pitching staff brought to the mound every game.

It was fairly easy for Giants fans to forgive his Angels history when he quickly brought stability to a position that had been manned by the likes of Eliezer Alfonso and Todd Greene the season before. Bengie gave Barry Bonds a bit of protection in the lineup and came up with enough big hits to earn the nickname Big Money. As the Barry Era drew to a close and no replacement for the big guy was forthcoming, the fans started to blame Bengie for being an obviously inadequate cleanup hitter. Later, as the first glow of the Buster Posey era started to dawn on the horizon, Bengie got blamed for holding back the arrival of The Chosen One. He didn't help himself with the fans by seeming to be less than enthused about the prospect of mentoring the young star. Nevermind that the Giants were waiting for a green light from the guy many of them wished was the Giants manager instead of Bruce Bochy, Steve Decker.

I'm going to leave the discusssion of Bengie's career with one thought. He might be one of the most underrated players in the recent history of the game. Now, the term "underrated" is thrown around way too much and is often impossible to prove or disprove. It's an opinion, a judgement call in most cases. With the emergence of advanced valuation systems, we can get pretty good objective estimates of player values in terms of the salary structure of Major League Baseball. Bengie Molina earned a total of just over $33 million over the course of his career. Now, that's a ridiculous amount of money, but we can objectively show that it was also a ridiculously low amount of compensation compared to other players in the game at the same time.

When you compress Bengie's statistics into a single value that estimates how much he contributed to his team, Win Above Replacement(WAR), he put up a total of 15.2 WAR over his career. Players on the open market in major league baseball get paid, on average, $4.5-5 M per WAR which means that Bengie was paid for less than half his market value over the course of his career. Even after you account for salary inflation, he outproduced his salary in all but 2 of the 10 peak seasons of his career. The biggest disparity was his 2008 season with the Giants when his 2.7 WAR was worth $12.4 M while his salary was $6.3 M.

As time goes on, I hope Bengie Molina will be remembered by Giants fans as a good Giant. As much as he gave to the team, it is unfortunate, though necessary, that he had to watch the Giants win it all from the opposing dugout. I'm glad he finally was presented with his Giants WS ring at his retirement party. It was well deserved.

Blast From the Past: Is Timmy A Latter Day Juan Marichal?

Throughout the history of their great franchise, the Giants have been blessed by several Hall of Fame caliber pitchers. Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry come to mind. I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing the Marichal/Perry era. While Mathewson is probably the dean of the list, I have always considered Juan Marichal to be the gold standard against whom subsequent Giants pitchers are judged. I've waited a long time for the Next Juan Marichal. I had long ago resigned myself to the reality that there will never be another Juan Marichal, and I still believe that. Baseball has changed enough that the things he did in his era will never be done again. Still, what we are currently witnessing from Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain is starting to rival Marichal/Perry. The addition of a World Series Championship doesn't hurt the current guys' case at all.

Fangraphs recently had a brief post of some comments Juan Marichal made about his contemporary, Luis Tiant. Just seeing the name Juan Marichal in print still gives me a thrill and a whole lot of memories came flooding back. About the same time, the guy at Bleacher Report ran a comp of Juan and Timmy that got me thinking that we may be witnessing something pretty special right now too. Something my daughters will look back on and say, "I wonder if there will ever be another Tim Lincecum?"

Juan Marichal was small for a pitcher at 6'0, 185 lbs. He had a distinctive deliivery in which he kicked his front foot almost straight up over his head while holding the ball back behind his right knee. I've always believed it was more for show than anything else, but it seemed to distract the hitters a bit and help him hide the ball. It sure was exciting to see, though. He arrived on the scene in 1960 with a flourish by pitching a complete game 1 hit shutout in his major league debut. He went 6-2 with a 2.66 ERA in 11 games that year. He went 13-10 with a 3.89 ERA in 1961 and 18-11 with a 3.36 ERA in 1962, the year the Giants went to the World Series.

1963 was the start of a remarkable run that rivals the best peaks in the history of the game. Over the next 10 seasons through 1971, he won 204 games, pitched 199 complete games with 43 shutouts. I grew up listening to games on the radio. Marichal's games just had a different tempo to them. Almost every batter had a quick 0-2 or 1-2 count. Juan was not a big strikeout pitcher but he used the pitcher's counts to his advantage forcing the batter to hit his pitch for weak contact. His career BABIP was .261. Despite the exaggerated motions in his delivery, he had legendary pinpoint control of all of his pitches. Over the course of his 16 year career, he averaged 1.82 BB/9.

Juan threw a variety of pitches including a fastball, curve, slider, changeup. His ace-in-the-hole pitch though was a screwball that allowed him to be extremely effective against lefthanded batters. What was unique about Juan was that he could throw all of his pitches from a variety of release points all starting with the signature leg kick.

Marichal's career mirrored his team during his amazing 10 year peak run in that over it's course, he might have been the best pitcher in the game, but in any give year it seemed like there was always one guy who was better. From 1963-1966 it was Sandy Koufax and later on it was Bob Gibson and then Tom Seaver. Juan never won a Cy Young Award. His career was marred by the Roseboro incident which may have contributed to his failure to win a Cy Young and delayed his induction into the Hall of Fame.

Tim Lincecum is even smaller than Juan Marichal, listed at 5'11", 163 lbs. His delivery, while different than Juan's is also distinctive and definitely contributes to his velocity. Like Juan, Tim throws a variety of pitches but has tended to rotate favorites rather than use his full arsenal at any given time. Timmy has added the long flying hair that adds to the flair of his already distinctive delivery. In addition to being a true ace pitcher, he's showman much like Juan.

Tim's major league debut was not nearly as sensational as Juan's as he got cuffed around by the Phillies and ended up with a 7-5 record with a 4.00 ERA in 2007. His sophomore campaign in 2008 rivaled any season any Giants pitcher has ever put up, 18-5, 2.62, 227 IP, 84 BB, 265 K's. That effort won him the Cy Young award in just his first complete season! He followed that up with an even more dominant effort, 15-7, 2.48, 225.1 IP, 68 BB, 261 K's. He cut his walks down while maintaining his K's and lowered his ERA. That effort won him a somewhat controversial Cy Young that was based more on sabermetric analysis than the more traditional W-L record. Timmy was less dominant in 2010, as he struggled with his command and a loss of velocity but still went 16-10 and won a 3'rd straight strikeout title. He capped the season off by going head-to-head with some of the best pitchers and lineups in baseball in the postseason and led the Giants to the only World Series title since they moved to San Francisco. Timmy seemed to return to form in 2011 with his 3'rd sub-3 ERA in 4 seasons but was hampered by a lack of run support for a 13-14 record.

Timmy and Juan are difficult to compare given the different eras they pitched in, but from an "eyeball" look at the stats, Timmy's last 4 seasons are very comparable to the first 4 years of Juan's 10 year peak run, maybe even better! The Cy Young's are voted awards, and the Championship was a team effort, but you can't deny those are things Juan never accomplished. It remains to be seen if Timmy can maintain his dominance for another 6 years. If he does, he may well surpass Juan in my estimation as the greatest San Francisco Giants pitcher of all time.

For those of you who are begging for the Giants to accede to Timmy's demands for an 8 year contract, consider that if he were to maintain his dominance for the duration of the contract, his peak run would last 2 years longer than the reigning greatest pitcher in San Francisco Giants history. Here are some stats that might also give you pause:

K/9 starting 2009: 10.42, 9.79, 9.12.

BB/9 starting 2009: 2.72, 3.22, 3.57.

Incremental changes, to be sure, but a 3 year progression in one direction has to be noticed. 8 years, as we have learned with Barry Zito is a long, long time.

Blast From the Past: AFW, Brian Sabean's Plan For the Post-Bonds Era

Even the most ardent of Brian Sabean's detractors, and there are still a lot of holdouts out there, grudgingly admit that he deserves some credit for putting together the championship team of 2010. They are quick to add, though, that he just got lucky. Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. The theory goes that he was "lucky" to have a series of high draft picks which were supposedly slam dunks to produce MLB stars and then he had a string of luck with mid-season acquisitions and it all ended up in a perfect storm of luck to produce the 2010 championship. Most of the "detractors" have even conceded that the Barry Zito signing was probably done at the insistence of Peter Magowan. A lingering argument, which on the surface seems to have some merit, is that the team was unprepared for the Post-Bonds era and went through an unnecessary drought to get the high draft picks and eventually rebound to win the 2010 World Series.

Did Brian Sabean really just forget about preparing for the post-Bonds era? Not so fast there, detractors! Remember a trio of pitching prospects, Kurt Ainsworth, Jesse Foppert and Jerome Williams, AKA AFW? By now, it should be obvious that at the core of his soul, Brian Sabean believes in building a team around pitching, homegrown pitching! With that in mind, and the knowledge that in 2003, he had assembled one of the most impressive trifectas of pitching prospects in the history of baseball can lead one to conclude that Brian Sabean had indeed prepared for the post-Bonds era and he saw the future as being based on pitching, pitching and more pitching. I know there is a nemonic known as TINSTAAP, There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect, but it's pretty hard to find a similar run of monumental bad luck than the complete failure of 3 such highly ranked pitching prospects in succession.

Kurt Ainsworth was the Giants first round draft pick in 1999 out of LSU. I can't confirm this right now, but I believe he had undergone Tommy John Surgery at some point in his amateur career, but even in those days, TJ survivors frequently came back stronger than before the injury. Ainsworth didn't have overpowering stuff, but he could get his fastball up to 92 MPH and he had terrific command of two fastballs, slider, curve and changeup. In 2002, he had a record of 8-6 with an ERA of 3.41 at age 23 for AAA Fresno which is pretty good given league and park effects. He pitched in 25.2 innings for the Giants at the end of 2002 with an ERA of 2.10. He began the 2003 season in the Giants rotation and went 5-4 with an ERA of 3.82 over 66 IP, I remember one start in particular against the Dodgers where he threw something like 27 first pitch strikes and had all 5 of his pitches working. It was a thing of beauty. Alas, he went on the DL with a stress fracture of the right scapula, a rare injury, and was never the same again. He was later traded with Damien Moss to the Orioles for Sidney Ponson where his shoulder basically fell apart with both a labrum tear and a torn rotator cuff. Again, I may be wrong here, but I think I remember him also re-injuring his TJ repaired right elbow.

Jerome Williams was drafted in the supplemental first round of the 1999 draft out of high school in Hawaii. Despite being drafted out of high school, he progressed rapidly through the Giants farm system. Although he was somewhat inconsistent, the scouting reports were mostly positive having him with a FB up to 94 MPH and a rapidly developing changeup, slider and feel for pitching. During his development, he raised a few eyebrows by talking about dialing down the fastball to achieve better command and increasing his reliance on the changeup. Williams got his first callup in 2003 and pitched very well, going 7-5 with a 3.30 ERA during a Giants run that ended with a NLDS loss to the Florida Marlins in which he was the center of a controversy about who should start a must-win game. Williams showed up to spring training in 2004 looking visibly overweight, but eventually got into decent shape and put together a solid, if unspectacular, 10-7 record with a 4.24 ERA. After that, something went terribly wrong in his life. He married a girl from Fresno, seemed to lose interest in playing baseball, became grossly overweight, was demoted to the minors and eventually traded to the Cubs for LaTroy Hawkins. Despite numerous attempts with numerous organizations, including the Giants, he was never able to get his career back on track. He is currently signed to a minor league deal with the Angels.

Jesse Foppert was drafted in the second round of the 2001 draft out of USF. He immediately started putting up eye-popping numbers in the minor league and rocketed through the Giants farm system. Reports started surfacing in Baseball America of 97 MPH fastballs thrown with an effortless delivery. He split time in 2002 between AA and AAA and struck out a total of 183 batters. Entering 2003, he was BA's #5 overall prospect and the top ranked pitching prospect in all of baseball. He was brought up to the majors early in 2003 after an injury to Ryan Jensen. His arrival was possibly the most anticipated and most disappointing of any in the entire history of the Giants organization. He never once displayed the legendary fastball velocity that had been reported in the minors usually sitting at 87-90 MPH. His results were mediocre at best. On August 20, 2003 he went on the DL with "ulnar neuritis". He received a cortisone shot and while throwing in practice, felt a pop in the elbow and soon after underwent TJ surgery. Unlike many pitchers who have undergone the procedure, "Foppy" never made it back. He was traded from the Fresno roster to the Seattle Mariners in 2005 along with Yorvit Torrealba for Randy Winn. He never regained his once legendary form and now lives in Greenbrae where he is the pitching coach at Marin Catholic High School.

Brian Sabean wasn't content with just "AFW" in the organization. He drafted Matt Cain in 2002. After winning the NL Pennant in 2002, he traded Russ Ortiz to the Braves for Damien Moss and a young fireballing RHP named Manuel Mateo who soon rocketed to the top of BA's prospect lists and changed his name to his true identity of Merkin Valdez who was a few months older than Manuel Mateo. At one point in 2003, the Giants future rotation seemed set as far as the eye could see into the future. AFW plus Cain and Valdez were about as good as it gets in pitching prospects. Of the 5, only Cain would reach the stardom that was predicted for all of them to one degree or another. They were the Giants future that would carry on after Barry Bonds left the scene. There was even a good chance that some or all of them might help end the Bonds era with a long elusive championship!

Those who dismiss Brian Sabean's success in 2010 should also acknowledge that he also suffered a run of monumentally bad luck in the failure of "AFW". Even acknowledging TINSTAAP, which I don't personally believe in that much, it is hard to find a comparable run of bad luck in the development of a group of highly ranked pitching prospects.

We will never know how history might have been different had "AFW" succeeded, if even one of that trio had "made it." Perhaps they would not have been as dominant as Timmy, MadBum and Buster. Perhaps they would have been just good enough to help the Giants contend but never win it all, thus depriving the Giants of the chance to draft the core of the championship team. We'll never know, but as I like to say, "all things work together for good."

Hot Tip: Willie's Giant Christmas Present

Hey team! You have to check this one out! Willie Mays biographer, James Hirsch, ran a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Willie's reaction to the Giants winning the World Series. I knew Willie was ill and unable to throw out the first pitch at one of the games in SF and I was concerned about him. I was hoping he was well enough to be watching from somewhere. Looks like he just had a real bad cold and is OK. Whew! Hard to believe Willie is almost 80 years old.

http://topics.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704851204576034162643623674.html

Sorry I don't know how to make this a direct link. If that doesn't work, you can just google Willie's Giant Christmas Present and it will be the first thing to come up.

Must read for any long time Giants fan, and even for younger ones!

Blast From the Past: 2010 Season Memories, So Far....

Some things I will remember about this season for a long time, in no particular order, some good, some bad:

Aubrey Huff's HR pose: Head down, hunches shoulders up, takes a couple of stiff-legged steps then breaks into a trot.

Huff's enthusiasm and surprising athleticism. I hadn't seen him too much because he spent most of his career in the AL, but I had been led to believe he was one dimensional player, all bat. He brought his bat, but brought a lot more with it.

Juan Uribe's Jazz Hands after hitting a HR.

The hundred different expressions on Uribe's face seemingly without him moving a muscle in his face.

The growth of Jonathan Sanchez.

The growth of Madison Bumgarner.

Vicente Padilla beaning Aaron Rowand in the eye.

Timmy L drilling Matt Kemp in frustration and in the process completely getting into the Dodgers' heads. IMO, that one act did as much to derail the Dodgers' season as anything.

The 15 inning loss to the Colorado Rockies. One of the two lowest points of the season.

The 4 game sweep of the Brewers in Milwaukee. Picked themselves up off the floor after the debacle in Colorado. I think that was Buster's breakout series too.

The joy and pride of watching Buster Posey live up to the promise of his talent and then some. My gosh! This kid has it all, talent, money, looks.....I can't see how he is not going to be a huge star. Heck, he already is!

Pat Burrell's HR off the W sign on the in Petco Park. What a stupendous blast!

Watching Andres Torres hit the ball HARD, drive after drive, up the alleys, off of walls, over walls. Some team needs to hire his private hitting coach.

Brian Wilson's orange shoes and then his explanation for being fined $1000. "For having too much awesome on my feet, obviously." LOL! How great is that?

The movement on Sergio Romo's slider.

Bruce Bochy harrumphing out of the dugout to point out Don Mattingly's two trips to the mound. The Dodgers subsequent meltdown.

The broken bat triple by Carlos Gonzalez, the other lowest point in the season.

The blown call by Phil Cuzzi on what should have been Travis Ishikawa scoring the winning run against the Mets.

Jerry Crawford giving Tim Stauffer a mile wide strike zone and Buster Posey's reaction.

Going to Dodger Stadium with my daughter and watching the Giants come back from a 4-0 deficit to win 5-4 on 4 dingers, including a monster shot by Buster Posey for the Giants first run of the game. The best game I've ever seen in person!

Ramon Ramirez' strikeout of Miggy Tejada in the final game.

Multiple trips to the ER for chest pain after a Brian Wilson Save(just kidding on this one).

Seeing Brandon Belt hit a HR in Lake Elsinore.

Seeing the San Jose Giants win a playoff game with a buddy in Rancho Cucamonga.

There are many, many more wonderful memories from this season. It's been fun and an honor to write a blog post after each and every game and each and every minor league game of this great season.

What memories will you carry with you from this season?

To be continued.....

Blast From the Past: Bob Shaw RIP

Some of you may remember back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post on Bob Shaw, former Giants RHP who I believe pitched the first Giants game I ever listened to on the radio. Now comes word that Bob Shaw has died from liver cancer at the age of 77. Sorry I don't know how to do links on this blog, but here it is:

www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/remembering-bob-shaw

You can also find the link by going to the fangraphs link over on the left and then looking on the right side of their links page to the Hardball Times section.

Shaw is probably best known to Giants fans as the man who taught Gaylord Perry how the throw the spitter.

Blast From the Past: Bobby Thomson, RIP

Bobby Thomson died yesterday at the age of 86. Perhaps no one in the history of sports achieved instant fame and then had that moment frozen into immortality quite the way Bobby Thomson did just a bit short of 59 years ago at the Polo Grounds in New York City.

The Giants had already made an improbable comeback, overcoming a 13 1/2 game deficit by winning 37 of their last 44 games to finish in a tie with the Brooklyn Dodgers for the NL Pennant. There were generally no playoff games back in those days. Just the pennant race and then the World Series between the two league champions, so a 3 game playoff to decide the league championship was in itself unusually exciting. I'm pretty sure that the fact that it involved two teams from NY played a role in raising the stakes in the eyes of the press and to the ultimate immortality of Thomson's role. The Giants and Dodgers split the first two games of the series. The third game found the Dodgers leading 4-1 going to the bottom of the 9'th inning for the home-team Giants. The Giants managed to plate one run and then had 2 runners on base with 2 outs when Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate.

I had always thought that Bobby Thomson's HR that day was almost a fluke, a chance occurence by a pretty average or even below average ballplayer. I learned something new today. I discovered that Bobby Thomson was actually a pretty darn good player who was known for hitting HR's. In fact, he hit a total of 264 HR's in a career that lasted just over 12 seasons. He averaged about 22 HR's per season for his career. That's pretty darn good even by recent standards. In the history making 1951 season, he hit a career high 32 HR's which was 5'th best in the majors. Giants fans had every right to hope for something good to happen when Thomson came to the plate that October afternoon.

The Dodger's pitcher was Ralph Branca who had once won 21 games for the Dodgers, but was on the downside of his career by 1951. With 2 runners on base and a rookie named Willie Mays in the on-deck circle, Thomson hit a shot down the LF line that found the short porch in the Polo Grounds for a walk-off game winning, playoff-series winning HR. The Korean War was in progress, and radio had recently gained the ability to cover the world. The game was broadcast on Armed Forces Radio. I believe an episode of M.A.S.H was based on the event. Thomson's HR would soon be immortalized as "The Shot Heard Round the World." And it was! Adding to the drama was Giants radio broadcaster Russ Hodges who screamed into the microphone, "The Giant win the pennant!" "The Giants win the Pennant!" over and over for several minutes.

I remember listening to the last game of the 1966 season. The Giants had already been eliminated in a very close race with the Dodgers for the NL Pennant. The game had a sad, autumn feel to it, even to a young kid 10 years old at the time. As the postgame show came to an end, they replayed Hodges' call of Bobby Thomson's HR. That is a moment I will never, ever forget. I had read about the event in the Word Book Encyclopedia and in a book about the history of baseball written by Russ Hodges, but hearing a recording of Hodges' call just sent a wave of excitement through me that, for a moment, made me forget that the Giants had just finished second to the Dodgers for the second year in a row. When it was done, I was left with a yearning to hear the game where the Giants won the World Series in my time that has burned inside me for 44 years now. I'm still waiting for that game and that call!

Down on the Farm: Fred Lewis Prospect Retrospective

Fred Lewis was one of my favorite prospects in the Giants system for a long time. Perhaps no prospect in recent Giants history has had as much of a polarizing effect on Giants fans as Fred Lewis. Even with his trade out of the organization, the debate rages on in the blogosphere. Interestingly, opinions on various sites seem to be fairly united within the site, but polar opposite from the consensus on other sites. For instance, fans who post frequently on the sfgiants.com message board are virtually unanimous that Fred was a terrible player and his trade is addition by subtraction. Meanwhile, the trade is being greeted on mccoveychronicles.com with weeping an gnashing of teeth. The McChron crowd has been so into Fred Lewis for so long that they have been jokingly accused of all being Fred's relatives! Let's take a look at his career in the Giants organization:

Lewis was drafted in round 2 of the 2002 MLB draft, #66 overall out of Southern University at age 21. He was an athletic player who had concentrated on football up to that point, so in terms of baseball experience he was still much like a high school draftee. He signed right away and had a good first pro season for Salem-Keizer in the Northwest League: .322/.396/.397. Moved up to Low A Hagerstown for 2003 he struggled to a .250/.361/.336 line. Some fans, including me, noted that the SAL is a pitching friendly league and that Fred had put up a good OBP of .361, or an IsoOBP(OBP-BA) of .111 which is excellent. The folks at Baseball America were unimpressed quoting an unnamed coach in the organization as saying Fred drew a lot of walks "by accident." Brian Buscher, who was a teammate of Fred's at Hagerstown, was cited by the same publication as having a much more "advanced" approach at the plate even though Buscher's OBP was a pitiful .318 and he had an OPS of just .638 compared to Fred's .697.

The 2004 season found Fred Lewis moved up a notch to High A San Jose where continued to show excellent on base skills and much improved hitting to go along with it: .301/.424!/.451 with 8 HR's and 33 SB's. I saw Lewis early in the 2004 season and he looked skinny and awkward at the plate, reminding me of a young Willie McGee. Later in the year, he had filled out his frame considerably and had a much more aggressive stance at the plate. A late season promo to Fresno went well also with a .304./429/.478 line in 6 games.

The 2005 stop was AA Norwich, where Fred and several other Giants prospects struggled mightily to hit. Fred emerged from an early season slump, which may have been affected by the bad weather in the Northeast, to post a mildly disappointing final line of .273/.361/.396 with 7 HR's and 30 SB's. 2006 at Fresno was better, but still a bit disappointing considering the favorable hitting environment in the PCL: .276/.375/.454 with 12 HR's and 18 SB's. A late season callup went well with 5 hits in 13 AB's for the SF Giants.

2007 found Fred back in Fresno where he showed off his power for the first time with a .292/.366/.550 line with 8 HR's in 58 games. A midseason callup to SF was wildly successful as he hit a grand slam HR and hit for the cycle within a few games. Fred's final 2007 MLB line was .287/.374/.408.

Many fans thought Fred should have a starting job nailed down for 2008 on the strength of his MLB debut, but the Giants had other ideas and brought in the veteran CF/leadoff hitter Dave Roberts with Fred occupying the bench to start the season. Roberts got hurt early on though, and Fred played in 133 games with 468 AB's putting up a fine line of .282/.351/.440 with 9 HR's, 11 triples, 25 doubles and 21 SB's.

Perhaps overly enthusiastic about his emerging power, the Giants ordained Fred to be their starting LF and #3 hitter going into the 2009 season. Unfortunately, he slumped early. The Giants tried to move him back to leadoff to take advantage of his on-base skills, but Fred complained publicly that he had prepared all offseason to hit #3 and didn't feel comfortable hitting leadoff. That apparently bought him a ticket to the back of the Bruce Bochy's doghouse and he played only spottily in a bench role after that. His final 2009 line was a greatly disappointing .258/.348/.390, but once again, his OBP and OPS were among the highest on a very weak hitting team.

Defensively, Fred Lewis had a penchant going all the way back to his minor league days of muffing easy looking plays, which brought down the wrath of many fans who also grew frustrated with his perhaps overly patient approach at the plate which resulted in a lot of called third strikes. Of course that same approach also led to a relatively high OBP, but you tend to remember the looking K's that end a rally longer than the walks that result in a LOB. Interestingly, newer defensive metrics such as UZR rate Fred as an above average fielder. While he makes a few spectacular gaffes in the field, he also uses his speed and athleticism to make successful plays on a lot of balls that other OF's would never get close to.

While John Bowker showed that a player can dig himself out of Bochy's doghouse with a terrific spring training performance, Fred Lewis wasn't able to do that as his play was again inconsistent and he came up with an minor injury late which forced a trip to the DL and a rehab stint in Fresno. While you could certainly make a case for the Giants to keep Fred Lewis around and give him more chances, the roster is crowded with playes in similar boats. In the end, Fred was not able to build a compelling reason why he should be given a chance over several others including Nate Schierholtz, John Bowker, Eugenio Velez and Andres Torres. Torres probably has the least future of all those names, but he has proven himself to be a useful bench player who can help in more ways than Fred including batting righthanded against LHP's.

Fred Lewis was one of my favorite Giants prospects for several years. I am sad that he ultimately failed to be in impact player for the Giants. While I feel that he could have become that with more patience from Giants management, I can't say that he would have gotten more of an opportunity with anther organization. He will clearly be a backup in Toronto, although typical of Fred's career, he would have been starting tonight except he arrived too late and will start the first game of his Blue Jays career sitting on the bench.

Blast From the Past: Opening Day 1977, Gary Thomasson's Home Run

1977 was the dawn of the Tommy Lasorda era for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He arrived with about as much hype as any manager in the history of the game. Lasorda was good at promoting baseball, but he was even better at promoting himself. He had been campaigning relentlessly for the job for several years and finally got his wish. The LA media fell in love with him and the stories in the LA times and other media outlets were nauseatingly fawning. The Dodgers lineup of Lopes, Russell, Reggie Smith, Garvey, Cey, Dusty Baker, etc had come of age along with a deep rotation headed by a guy I hated as much as any Dodger who has ever played, Don Sutton. They were loaded for bear, knew it, and proclaimed it to the world.

My parents had moved to Southern California. I was living at home and commuting daily to college in Riverside. As a commuter student, I didn't know too many people on campus. I used to pack a lunch and eat it in my car while I listened to the radio. I had never gotten to listen to an Opening Day game because they were always day games during the week and I was always in school. My afternoon class didn't start until 1:30, so I was excited to catch the first inning or two. That it was Giants vs Dodgers was made it all the more exciting.

The Giants didn't have a terrible team that year. They still had Bill Madlock. Jack Clark was just coming on board. Darrell Evans was an underrated hitter. Willie McCovey was back with the team and would hit 28 HR's that year. The strength of the team was a scrappy pitching staff led by Jim Barr, Ed Halicki and John "The Count" Montfusco. I had a sliver of hope that the Giants would give the Dodgers a run for their money, but deep inside, I knew that the LA sportwriters were right. The Dodgers were just too good!

The Giants also had a scrappy outfielder named Gary Thomasson who was hitting leadoff that Opening Day. He stood in for the first pitch from the hated Don Sutton......and hit it out of the park!! Man, did I ever love it! First pitch from the pitcher I hated more than any other player and bam, gone! Sutton went on to retire the next 3 batters easily and I had to get to class, so I grudgingly turned off the radio and headed off. Well, it turned out I didn't miss much as that was pretty much all the offense the Giants could muster against Sutton that day in losing 5-1.

After the game, a controversy erupted over the home run by Thomasson. Major League Baseball had switched to Rawlings baseballs that year and it seems the plan was to send the game ball to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Someone had told Sutton that Thomasson would take the first pitch so the ball could be saved, or so Sutton claimed. In this scenario, Sutton threw a batting practice fastball down the middle of the plate that Thomasson wasn't supposed to swing at. Thomasson claimed he knew of no such plan, was first ball swinging, and whacked it over the fence. As far as I know, Sutton's claim has never been verified. Whether true or not, I've always thought it was bush league of Sutton to go to that excuse.

The Dodgers went on to run away with the NL West and got to the World Series. They would go on to almost a decade of dominating the Giants until Will Clark came along. 1977 would prove to be Gary Thomasson's best MLB season with a line of .256/.358/.451 with 17 HR's and 16 SB's. He would be traded in the offseason along with several other players to the Oakland A's for Vida Blue. Thomasson actually finished his MLB career with the Dodgers before signing a big contract to play in Japan, where he was a bust. Gary Thomasson is a footnote in the history of Giants baseball, but I will always remember him for the opening day when he showed up the pitcher I hated more than any other.

Blast From the Past: 1984

There was an interesting article on The Hardball Times yesterday looking at historical pitching data(credit fangraphs.com for linking the article):

www.harballtimes.com/main/article/ten-things-i-didn't-know-about-starting-rotations

As measured by ERA+, the 1984 Giants had the second worst starting rotation IN THE HISTORY OF BASEBALL! Now, I'm not the biggest fan of ERA+ as a statistic, especially when used to compare one era to another, but the entry got me to thinking, "who were the pitchers in that Giants rotation, anyway?"

There are basically 3 eras in the history of my Giants fandom:

1966-1971. The Wonder Years! I was 10 years old when I discovered baseball and the Giants on the radio. I was lucky enough to get in on one of the more amazing periods by any team in baseball history. The last few years of Willie Mays' career. Willie McCovey winning some HR and RBI titles on his way to the HOF. Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry fashioning Hall of Fame careers. The Giants not winning a World Series! Those were days filled with wonder and dreams.

1972-1985. The Dark Years. Willie Mays traded and the end of his career. The dashed promise of of another great team built around Bobby Bonds, Garry Maddox, Gary Mathews, George Foster and Dave Kingman. Johnnie Lemaster. My family moved away from Northern California in 1972. I could occasionally find a broadcast at night, but the reception would fade in and out. I still tried to look up the boxscores every day, but I didn't always have access to a newspaper and it wasn't quite the same anyway. I went on to college, med school, marriage and residency. Not a lot of room for being a baseball fan in there. They had a pretty good team in 1978 with Jack Clark in his prime, Willie McCovey in the Indian Summer of his career, and a tough pitching staff led by Vida Blue and a young Rob Knepper. By this time I was living in Southern California and would catch an occasional TV or radio broadcast on the Dodger stations. The one moment that stands out in my mind from this entire era, for some reason, is Mike Ivie hitting a pinch-hit grand slam against the Dodgers in Candlestick Park.

1986-Present. Will Clark and Beyond. I will always believe that the drafting of Will Clark was THE watershed moment in the history of the San Francisco Giants. I know there have been several times when the team almost left town, but in my mind, Will Clark saved Giants baseball in San Francisco. Around this time, ESPN started showing a lot more games on TV, so it was a lot easier to tune into games and get to know the players better. Then came Barry Bonds, Pac Bell Park, the internets and finally, MLB packages on satellite TV. I had kids of my own who got to see the last few years of Barry Bonds' career. I had come full circle!

Back to the 1984 Giants and the second worst starting rotation in baseball history. Who were these pitchers? What was the rest of that team like? What was their W-L record? I couldn't have been good! I looked up the team's stats under Historical Stats on sfgiants.com.

The team wasn't all bad. It had three .300 hitters: Jeffrey Leonard, Chili Davis and what was left of Al Oliver. Dan Gladden hit .351 over 87 games. It had three hitters with 20 HR's: Leonard, Davis and Bob Brenly. Dusty Baker played on that team. Jack Clark went .320.434/.530 with 11 HR's but for only 57 games and punched his ticket out of town. Of course, it also had Johnnie Lemaster, the absolute worst hitter to ever put on a Giants uniform with the possible exception of Hal Lanier. All in all, it was a good hitting team though: 2'nd in the NL in BA, #3 in OBP, #3 in HR's, and #5 in Runs. As with the entire Giants history, one has to wonder what might have been had Jack Clark played a full season.

But, who were those pitchers, the members of the 2'nd worst starting rotation of all time?

"Wild" Bill Laskey was the workhorse of the staff pitching 207.2 innings. That produced a 9-14 record with a 4.33 ERA. Not bad by today's standards but that was a different era. Laskey wasn't much of a pitcher. He just threw the ball up there, let 'em hit it and hoped his fielders would catch it as his 71 K/50 BB will attest.

Mike Krukow was a member of that team. Krukow would go on to greater things after Roger Craig became the manager, but he wasn't very good in 1984: 11-12, 4.56, 199.1 IP, 78 BB, 141 K's.

Mark Davis would go on to have some good seasons and eventually cash in on a big free agent contract, but he was downright terrible in 1984: 5-17, 5.36, 174.2 IP, 54 BB, 124 K's.

I have no recollection of Jeff Robinson: 7-15, 4.56, 171.2 IP, 52 BB, 102 K's.

The 5'th starter was by committee and spread out over several pitchers. Mark Grant made the most starts at 10 games with a record of 1-4 and an ERA of 6.37. Atlee Hammaker was a bright spot making 6 starts with an ERA of 2.18.

All in all, the Giants finished with a 66-96 record. They scored 682 runs, but allowed 807, 60 more than the Cincinnati Reds who were the second worst pitching team in the NL that year. Even a full contribution from Jack Clark would not have saved that season. Clark got shipped out to St. Louis the following offseason for 4 stiffs. 1985 would be an even worse season before Will Clark and Roger Craig arrived to save the team in 1986.

Blast From the Past: Joe Nathan

Joe Nathan has a torn ACL in his right elbow and will likely undergo "Tommy John" surgery in the near future. The announcement got me to reminiscing about Nathan's career with the Giants, and of course The Trade. Joe Nathan's story is one of the more unusual ones in MLB.

Nathan was a shortstop at Division III SUNY Stony Brook, which has since graduated to a division I program. He was a two time Academic All-American and a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society. Most scouts thought he looked more like a pitcher and noted his plus arm from SS. The Giants drafted him in the 6'th round in 1995. He signed immediately, played infield for Bellingham in the Northwest League, but didn't hit. The Giants wanted him to pitch, but he went back to school for his senior year and graduated. After graduation, he decided to give pitching a try and spent the next two years in the Giants farm system.

Joe Nathan made his MLB debut on April 21, 1999 pitching 7 shutout innings. He had a very live fastball that reached the mid-upper 90's finishing the season at 7-4 with an ERA of 4.18. He struggled in 2000 with shoulder pain and wildness and underwent arthroscopic shoulder surgery after the season. For the next two seasons, Joe's fastball deserted him. He struggled in the minors with low velocity and high ERA's. Nathan kept after it, though, and learned how to pitch without the overpowering velocity developing better command and secondary pitches.

Nathan's velocity was back to the mid-90's in the spring of 2003 and he won a bullpen job with the Giants. He became the "high leverage" pitcher going into games at pivotal moments usually with runners on base. He rang up a 12-4 record with an ERA of 2.96. Although he did not record any Saves, he was probably the most valuable reliever, if not pitcher, on the team. Joe struggled a bit late in the season, and in the playoffs, he lost confidence and Felipe Alou, who was an impatient and uncommunicative manager, lost confidence in him. His season ended when Alou yanked him in the middle of an AB in the playoffs against the Florida Marlins. Nathan clearly was afraid to throw a strike, and was making half-hearted pickoff throws to first just to avoid throwing a pitch.

That offseason, the Giants traded Nathan, along with prospects Boof Bonser and Francisco Liriano to the Minnesota Twins for All-Star catcher AJ Pierzynski. Of course, us Giants fans know the rest of this story all too well. AJ was a disaster in San Francisco while the Twins immediately installed Joe Nathan as their closer where he proceeded to save 246 games over the next 6 seasons while never exceeding an ERA of 2.70.

Joe Nathan's story is another microcosm of my entire experience as a Giants fan. Great promise, disappointment, bad trades and what ifs. After all the patience the organization showed him in the minors and after his shoulder surgery, why did they give up on him so quickly after his confidence lapse in 2003? What role did Felipe Alou play in losing Nathan? What if the Giants had kept Nathan and made him the closer in 2004? Would Steve Finley have hit that grand slam HR? Would the Giants have already clinched the division making Finley's HR a non-factor? Would the Giants have spent their money on someone other than Armando Benitez before the 2005 season? What if? What if? What if?

Blast From the Past: Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend

I'm not much of a book reader. I read articles, because you can usually get to the gist of them pretty fast. The stuff on baseball websites is about the longest my attention span can go. As for books, I used to read books, mostly biographies and history stuff. I gave that up years ago when I started to read the biography of General Douglas McArthur. I found that the author kept repeating the same point over and over chapter after chapter. A book that was 1000 pages long could have easily been condensed into about 300 and not shortchanged the subject.

I decided to try to turn over a new leaf with the release of Willie Mays: The Legend, The Life by James Hirsch. I simply don't have time to sit down and read a book from cover to cover, but decided I would try to read one chapter per day until I finished it. I have read the first several chapters and while I have run into some of the same type of repetition that so turned me off from the McArthur book, I have learned enough new things about Willie Mays to keep going. I'm thinking I will like some of the baseball stories better as I get into his major league career.

I would say I have taken away 3 main points so far:

1. I never realized what long odds Willie Mays had to overcome as a child, or what role his father played in his upbringing. He was born to unwed teenage parents and essentially abandoned by his mother. His grandparents were all either dead or not available. He was cared for and raised by a maternal aunt who was younger than his mother! His father remained involved as was a major influence in his career and philosophy of life. Willie Howard "Cat" Mays, Sr. recognized his son's athletic potential at a young age and made sure to pass on everything he knew about the game from playing for industrial league teams in the Birmingham, AL area. His entire local community recognized his rare talent at an early age and gave him breaks in school, and helped keep him out of trouble so as not to have his potential derailed and squandered by bad habits, trouble with the law or lack of money. In a sense, Willie Mays was raised by a village, but his father and aunt played the dominant roles.

2. Although Willie Mays was born with 5 plus baseball "tools", by the time he was in his late teens he already had polished "skills", which helped his career immensely. His father, other industrial league players, and Negro League players taught him things like the correct side of the base to slide to, and how to hit a curveball when he was still just a young lad in single digit years of age. Later on, you could see this same philosophy practiced when Mays adopted a young Barry Bonds as his God Son, and Dusty Baker allowing Giants players kids to hang around in the dugout.

3. "Cat" Mays philosophy of life in dealing with racial oppression was to adapt rather than fight. He patiently waited for opportunities and took them when they appeared. He pounded the same notion into his son. Stay out of trouble! Maximize your potential to succeed! Don't take unnecessary risks! Don't smoke or drink alcohol! Stay away from the law! Don't get into fights! Don't work in the coal mine! You will get maimed or killed, and if you don't, your lungs will be ruined. Don't play football, the risk of injury is too great! Don't be a pitcher! Pitchers can blow out their arms and end their careers before they really start! As an adult, Mays would be criticized for being too passive in the struggle for civil rights, but his philosophy and actions were a direct extension of what his father taught him. I was struck by how much this philosophy reminded me of a Chinese language movie I saw years ago called To Live about the life of a Chinese man who survived and even thrived by staying non-political, and making himself useful to whoever happened to be in power after the most recent revolution.

I will post updates periodically as I work my way through the book.

Blast From the Past: Willie Mays

I just bought my copy of the new book Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend. I haven't had a chance to read it, but I've skimmed through a few pages. I looks like it's chock full of anecdotes from Willie's fabled career. Willie's career started before I was born, and I only started becoming aware of baseball in the waning years. Still, I don't think any player has had a bigger impact on my baseball consciousness. I was aware of the name Willie Mays at least a couple of years before I really became aware of baseball as an organized sport. Somehow just the name itself is magical. It flows off the tongue, working much better as a first and last name combined than either part of the name by itself. WillieMays! It's really just one word. The name itself gives me goosebumps to say it. As I started listening to games, there was a sense of anticipation like no other each time Russ Hodges or Lon Simmons announced his name as he came to bat. You had a sense that you were getting a minds eye glimpse of something truly special. More often than not, the anticipation was rewarded with a special feat on the field.

I started following baseball games on the radio in late 1965 and early 1966, right about the time Willie hit HR #500. That started the milestone watches as Mays passed legend after legend in various career statistics. Of course, the most important and most exciting were the home runs. Mel Ott was at 511. I was happy when I found out that Mel Ott also played for the Giants. Ted WIlliams was at 521. Then, Jimmy Foxx at 534. Nowadays, there are so many players with 500 career home runs, I have completely lost track. Back then, it was just Ott, Williams, Foxx and Babe Ruth with Willie Mays climbing through the ranks. Now it was just Willie and The Babe, the Great White Whale of my baseball fan life. It seemed like such a huge gap after clicking off Ott, Williams and Foxx. I used to subtract the difference and then divide it by the number of HR's I thought Willie could hit to see how many seasons it would take. I could tell Willie's career was on the wane and knew it was going to be a nail biter at best. #600 finally came, but they weren't adding up as fast as Mays seemed to be fading. Meanwhile, Henry Aaron was charging on the outside, clicking off 40 HR season after 40 HR season, seemingly getting stronger with age as Mays was fading.

Call me a homer, but I've never felt it was right that Aaron was the one who passed Babe Ruth. I had read a biography of Mays and knew he had missed the '52 and '53 seasons to military service. What if he could have played those two seasons? What if the wind at Candlestick Park didn't hold up balls hit to left field? What if Aaron hadn't played in that bandbox on Atlanta? Why did Willie's body seem to wear out before Aaron's? What if? What if? What if? The disappointment became sort of a microcosm of of my entire experience as a Giants fan. The Giants had the best record in the National League over the course of several seasons, but always finished second to somebody, the Dodgers, the Cardinals, the Braves, the Pirates. Juan Marichal never won a Cy Young Award. The 2002 World Series. Mays fell just short of The Babe's record while Aaron passed it. Years later, I would look at Barry Bonds' run at the record as an exorcism of those demons, and I think Willie Mays did too, in a way, but that's a whole other story! I'm still waiting.

Willie Mays was a role model. Back in the 1960's, the health dangers of smoking were just starting to come to light. Everybody, and I mean everybody smoked. I grew up in a strict Seventh-Day Adventist home. Smoking and drinking alcohol were forbidden. That was OK as long as we were in our local SDA community up in the hills above St. Helena, CA, but anywhere else you went, people smoked and drank alcohol. It seemed like there must be something wrong with us. When I read in Willie May's biography that he did not smoke or drink alcohol, suddenly, I didn't feel like we were so.....so odd. If Willie Mays didn't smoke or drink alcohol, it was OK for us not to smoke or drink alcohol too!

I was 15 years old when I went to my first baseball game at Candlestick Park. My dad was not into sports. My parents tolerated my interest in baseball and the Giants, but considered it to be borderline "worldly' entertainment. We lived way out in the hills of Napa County and rarely ventured into the city. Finally, early in the 1971 season, several of my friends and I got together and mail ordered tickets to Giants-Dodgers game on a Sunday afternoon in May. My dad and another dad agreed to drive us down and go to the game with us. The Giants had gotten off to a great start. They had an exciting young shortstop named Chris Speier. Bobby Bonds was just coming into his own as a star player. Mays, McCovey, Marichal and Perry all seemed to have something left. It was a great team! The game was sold out and we were way up in the nosebleed bleachers down the right field line. I only remember bits and pieces of the game. It was a sloppy game with a bunch of Dodger runs scored on errors. Bobby Bonds hit a monstrous 3 run homer to left field to temporarily give the Giants the lead. Willie Mays hit a double down the left field line. The Giants eventually lost 9-6. It seemed like kind of a let down after all the anticipation. Over the years, I have come to treasure that game and that experience. Living in Southern California, I sometimes feel like I have to explain why I am a Giants fans to my friends and co-workers who are either Dodger or Angels fans. I've found that I really only need to say one thing. "I saw Willie Mays play in Candlestick Park!" The questions stop. They exclaim how great that is and understand why I am a Giants fan.

As the decade of the 70's dawned, it was obvious that the end of the Willie Mays era was rapidly coming to an end. He contributed to the 1971 run that ended in a loss to the Pirates in the playoffs, but he was exhausted by the end of the season, and fading fast. It was a shock to hear he had been traded to the Mets, but I knew it was really just a formality. His career was really over. Charlie Williams had pitched a great game against the Giants the year before, and I was excited to think that they were getting an up and coming young pitcher from a team that seemed to have an endless supply of great young pitchers, the Mets. Alas, Charlie Williams was a bust as were so many players the Giants acquired in trades over the next few years. For those of you who might be young Giants fans out there, you see, being a young Giants fan is not much different than being an old Giants fan! Another disappointment, Willie Mays didn't retire as a Giant!

To me, the number 24 is the most hallowed of all Giants uniform numbers. I remember Juan Marichal for his leg kick and great pitching, but I have to stop and think that he was #27. Willie McCovey was #44, but so was Hank Aaron's. #24 was Willie Mays number and Willie Mays wore #24. I'm sure there have been other ballplayers on other teams that have worn #24. I think Barry Bonds wore it in Pittsburgh. #24 does not belong to any other player the way it belongs to Willie Mays. The Giants could unretire all the other retired numbers, and it wouldn't bother me a lot, but no other Giants player should ever, under any circumstances wear #24. I gave a copy of Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend to a friend at work who is a lifelong Dodger fan. He immediately whipped out his laptop computer and pulled up an old video of him and his family at Dodgers stadium as a kid. The camera panned down to the field where Willie Mays had just hit a home run and was trotting down the first base line. "There he is," my Dodger fan friend said, "number 24!"

Blast From the Past: Me and the Screwball

The first time I ever heard of a pitch called the screwball, I was listening to a game on the radio between the Giants and the Houston Astros. The Astros pitcher that day was a smallish Cuban pitcher named Mike Cuellar. From the way Russ and Lon were describing the game, Cuellar didn't throw very hard, but he was giving the Giants' hitters fits with a pitch called the screwball. I had never heard of such a pitch and my imagination ran wild as to just what the ball did between leaving the pitcher's hand and home plate, and just how you would throw such a pitch anyway. Although Russ and Lon didn't explain exactly what it was, I picked up that the pitch was slow and was tailing away from righthanded batters, and the Giants hitters were foolishly trying to pull everything resulting in either strikeouts or harmless ground outs. Cuellar, of course, would be later traded to the Baltimore Orioles, for Curt Blefary, where he would blossom into a perennial 20 game winner as part of a legendary Orioles starting rotation and would win a Cy Young award, largely because of that pitch, the screwball. Wow, I thought! Why don't the Giants have pitchers who throw this great pitch? As I later learned, not only did the Giants have screwball pitchers, Giants pitchers had played a central role in the history of the pitch.

I tried to read everything I could get my hands on about the screwball. I learned that it is basically a reverse curveball thrown by snapping the wrist down and in rather than down and out at the point of release of the pitch. It breaks very similarly to the curveball, but in the opposite direction. Thrown by a lefthanded pitcher, it breaks away from a righthanded batter and vice-versa. Back in those days, before the development of the circle change, it was about the only pitch that broke away from opposite-handed batters, and so was a great weapon, especially for lefthanded pitchers who had to face more righthanded batters than righthanded pitchers had to face lefthanded batters, but there were still some RHP's who used it, including Juan Marichal.

In the summer, I used to set up a radio on our back porch and point it out toward our lawn to listen to day games, which were more numerous back in those days. I had a pitchback and would pretend to be the pitcher. I would try to throw the pitches that Russ and Lon were describing. I was interested in science and math, and I would read up on the various pitches and try to understand the mechanics of throwing them and how that would produce the movement on the pitch. I tried to throw screwballs, but could never see the break on it when throwing a baseball. I think it was because I just couldn't generate enough velocity to produce enough air resistance to make the ball change direction. What was really fun was to try it with a wiffleball where the movements are exaggerated. Then I could really see how pitching mechanics translated into ball movement.

Somewhere around this time, I read a biography of the great Giants pitcher, Christy Mathewson. Undoubtedly there were pitchers before Mathewson who used the "screwgie", but he is really the guy who put it on the baseball map. Mathewson had attended college at a time when the vast majority of ballplayers had no education at all. Whether his educational advantage had anything to do with his understanding and use of the screwball, I don't know, but Mathewson baffled National League hitters for over 15 years on his way to 373 wins in his career.

Carl Hubbell was star pitcher the Giants in the 1930's. Hubbell was more of a classic screwball pitcher, a small lefthander who probably didn't have the biggest fastball in the world. Hubbell threw the pitch so much that his elbow became permanently deformed from the unnatural stresses. Hubbell rode it to a career ERA of 2.98 with 253 wins between 1928 and 1943, all with the New York Giants. In one All-Star game, he famously struck out a 7 batters in a row from a "murderers row" AL lineup that included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and several other legendary hitters.

Juan Marichal threw the pitch, but did not rely on it the way a lefty like Cuellar or Hubbell did, It was just part of Juan's seemingly endless arsenal of pitches. I remember he used to bring it out as a strikeout pitch against tough lefthanded batters.

1967 was a down year for Juan Marichal. The whole season might have been a complete disaster were it not for the return of a Giants lefthander named Mike McCormick. McCormick had been somewhat successful as a conventional lefthanded pltcher with the Giants and then traded away. He was on the verge of pitching his way out of baseball when he added a screwball to his repertoire just in time to come back to the Giants for the 1967 season. Using the pitch to great effect against righthanded batters, Mike won 22 games and the NL Cy Young Award that year. Carl Hubbell, who by that time was the Giants farm system director was beaming with pride, and delighted in pointing out the role the screwball played in McCormick's success. Unfortunately, that success was short lived and Mike was soon out of baseball.

The last pitchers I recall throwing the "screwgie" were Mike Marshall and Fernando Valenzuela of the hated Dodgers. The thing that was different about them is that they seemed to throw the pitch with equal effectiveness against both right and left handed batters. The development of the circle change provided an offspeed pitch that moved away from opposite handed batters and was easier to throw, control and less stressful on the arm.

I don't know of any current MLB pitcher that throws the "screwgie." I know I am always on the lookout for it, and haven't seen one in years. Dallas Braden of the A's threw one in the minor leagues, but I believe he has since scrapped it. One reason I was hoping the Giants would sign Japanese pitcher Hisanori Takahashi is that he features a screwball in his repertoire. Alas, if he uses it in the major leagues, it will be with the Mets.

Blast From the Past: Tony Cloninger's Two Grand Slams

The first ballgame I ever listened to on the radio was in 1965, but it wasn't until 1966 that I started following baseball and listening to games on a regular basis. As I listened to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons call the games, I slowly started to get a sense of the history of the game, the seasons, the rhythms and how it all fit together. The first time I had the sense that I was experiencing something special, something historic, and that it could happen at any moment, was on July 3, 1966.

My family lived way out in the mountains of Napa County. We didn't have TV, didn't get a daily newspaper, and my mother only listened to the classical music station on the radio. I didn't have my own transistor radio, but if I was lucky enough to know when a game was on, my parents would let me sit in an old car we had parked under a tree on our property and listen to games on the car radio. Yeah, I know it's weird but that's how it was. At other times, I'd take a bat and ball and head out to the oat field behind our property and hit balls to nobody. I'd hit it and then go chase it down, come back and hit it again. I'd pretend to be players on the Giants team and work my way through the lineup, hitting right-handed if it was Willie Mays turn to hit, and lefthanded if it was Willie McCovey's. Even though I never played organized baseball, I can still hit just as well lefthanded as righthanded, something I've always been proud of. But, I digress......

I don't remember how I knew there would be a game on Sunday, July 3, 1966, but I did and I was very excited. I wasn't allowed to go out to the old car and listen until the family had finished lunch, and lunch was a bit late that day. By the time I got out to the car, turned on the radio and found KSFO on the dial, I was dismayed to hear Russ announce the end of the first inning and say the score was 7-0 Braves. 7-0 Braves! The game was over before it got started, at least for me! I had been looking forward to this game, and I loved the sound of the announcers calling the game, and I wasn't about to be denied this opportunity, so I kept listening. Somewhere along the way, I picked up that Joe Torre had hit a 3 run homer in the first inning and the pitcher of all things, Tony Cloninger, had hit a grand slam! The Giants pulled most of their starting players early, and Ray Sadecki came in to pitch mom-up. I kept listening. In the fourth inning, the Braves loaded the bases again and who should come to the plate but Tony Cloninger. Blam! He hits another grand slam! The score was now 13-0, and Tony Cloninger had set a record by hitting two grand slam home runs in one game. I kept listening. Russ and Lon kept talking about the marvel of the two grand slams, probably because there wasn't anything else going on in the game to talk about. The Giants scratched out 3 runs and the Braves added 4 more including a RBI single by Cloninger in the 9'th inning. Another record, 9 RBI's in one game for a pitcher. Those records still stand to this day. The final score was 17-3!

Even though it was an embarrassing defeat for my Giants, that game is as vivid in my memory now as it was the next day. I have won several sports trivia quizzes by knowing Tony Cloninger's name as the pitcher who accomplished those feats that day. To this day, I absolutely hate arriving or tuning into a game even one pitch late. I am always uncomfortable leaving a game early even if the score is ridiculously lopsided. You just never know when history might be made in front of your eyes or ears.

Blast From the Past: Bob Shaw

The first game I ever listened to on the radio was pitched by Bob Shaw for the Giants. I'm pretty sure it was during the '65 season. It was an evening game in New York against the Mets. I was about 9 years old. My family was driving from Yosemite to Southern California on a road trip vacation to visit relatives. My dad was trying to find something on the radio to keep him awake while driving. He found the game and left it on, possibly at my urging, because my dad was never interested in sports. There was just something about the way Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons were describing the action that caught my imagination. I was forever hooked as a baseball fan from that day on. I don't remember too much about the game, but the Giants won 2-1. For awhile, it seemed like every game I listened to had Bob Shaw pitching for the Giants. It wouldn't be until the following mid-season that I would get to listen to a game Juan Marichal pitched. More on that later.

Bob Shaw came to the Giants before the 1964 season in a trade with the Milwaukee Braves for Felipe Alou, among others. He was a journeyman RHP who managed to put together 3 or 4 pretty good seasons in a 10 season career. Prior to pitching for the Braves, he was a member of the Go-Go White Sox who lost to the Dodgers in the 1959 World Series. Shaw pitched two of those games winning one against none other than Sandy Koufax, and losing one. He had played in college, something of a rarity back in those days, and was known as a bit of a flake. He broke in with the Detroit Tigers. When the Tigers sent him back to the minors, he refused to go. After staring them down for 10 days, they traded him to the White Sox where his career flourished and he got to play in a WS. One time, after getting into a contract dispute with the White Sox ownership, he climbed on the roof of Comiskey Park and shouted down at fans coming into the Stadium, "What are you doing here, they're going to lose!", or something to that effect. He was also known for getting called for 5 balks in one inning in 1963 while pitching for Milwaukee.

Shaw was always suspected of throwing a spitball, not an entirely unusual situation in those days. Most baseball pitchers back then probably threw some type of illegal pitch. It wasn't until the late '60's when pitching became so dominant that baseball cracked down and started disallowing pitchers to go to their mouths on the mound. Shaw always denied throwing a spitter. He said that if opposing hitters thought he was, it just gave him an advantage with his conventional pitches because they were distracted. In his book, Gaylord Perry identified Shaw as the person who taught him the spitter. Shaw allegedly worked with Perry through the '64 and '65 seasons helping him perfect the pitch. Perry had his breakout season in 1966. Shaw was sold to the Mets during the '66 season after posting a 1-4 record with a 6.25 ERA in 13 appearances.

Bob Shaw was used mostly in relief in '64 after coming to the Giants, but moved into a fulltime starter role one game into the '65 season. He went on to post a 16-9 record with an ERA of 2.64 as the Giants second best pitcher that year after Juan Marichal. I remember his games tended to be laborious affairs. I don't think anyone kept track of pitch counts in those days, but it seemed like Shaw went to 3-2 on almost every batter he faced. Ultimately, he didn't strike out or walk very many batters, he just took his time getting them to put the ball in play. I remember the first time I listened to a Juan Marichal game, the difference was striking. Juan would jump ahead of the hitters and put them away quickly rarely getting to 3 balls in the count. Juan's games were much more crisp, fast moving and fun to listen to. Shaw was a classic contact pitcher whose success was largely dependent on what happened to the ball after it was put in play, in other words, luck. He would have a great season followed by 2-3 mediocre ones then another great season. Less than 2 years after his stellar '65 season, he was out of baseball for good.

Shaw was an avid student of pitching mechanics. He wrote a book called Pitching that can still be purchased on amazon.com. There were 4 copies available when I looked. The amazon.com add has several testimonials from little league coach types about how they used the book in their coaching to great success. He was the pitching coach for the Milwaukee Brewers until he "resigned" in 1973. He was criticized for tinkering too much with the pitchers deliveries and blamed for ruining at least one Brewers pitcher's career. On the other hand, Jim Colburn credited Shaw with turning his career around. Shaw retired to Jupiter, Florida and continued to teach pitching in baseball clinics and camps. He was an avid investor in the stock market and in real estate. He was honored at US Cellular Field in Chicago, along with the other 1959 White Sox when the Sox played in the WS in 2005. That is the last reference I could find on him. I assume he is still alive and living in Florida. Born in 1933, he will be 77 sometime this year.

Blast From the Past: Jim Ray Hart

Several readers have commented on the shout out to Jim Ray Hart in my biographical sketch. I thought I would do a retrospective on Jim Ray's career, and maybe start a series looking at some of the less well-known Giants of yesteryear.

JIm Ray Hart was signed by the Giants as an amateur free agent in 1960 out of Hookerton, NC. He had a rather rough introduction to major league baseball in 1963 at the age of 21, when in his second MLB AB, he was hit by a Bob Gibson fastball that broke his left scapula. In his fourth game back from that injury, he was beaned by Curt Simmons and sat out the rest of the season. Injuries would continue to play a major role in Jim Ray's career. In 1964, he was coming into second base against the Dodgers and Maury Wills skulled him with a relay throw that hit him square in the forehead. Hospitalized overnight for observation, Jim Ray came back to play the next day. I remember listening to the second game of a doubleheader in 1966, I think, when the Giants needed a hit late in the game. Jim Ray had suffered a hand injury in game 1, and came up as a pinch-hitter in that spot with his thumb bandaged, delivering the key hit that the Giants needed. Another shoulder injury in 1969 contributed to the rapid decline of his career, although injuries may not have played the key role most biographies attribute to them.

For 5 seasons, from 1964-1968, Jim Ray Hart could hold his own in any discussion of who were the best Giants players, even in who the best hitters in baseball were!:

1964: .286/.342/.498 with 31 HR's.
1965: .299/.349/.487 with 23 HR's, 30 doubles and 6 triples.
1966: .285/.342/.510 with 33 HR's.
1967: .289/.373/.509 with 29 HR's.
1968: .258/.323/.444 with 23 HR's. Remember, 1968 was The Year of the Pitcher after which they lowered the mounds and made other rule changes.

During this run, Jim Ray finished second to Richie Allen in the 1964 Rookie of the Year voting. He was top 20 in MVP voting in '64, '65 and '67, and played in the All-Star game in 1966. He was league top 10 in many offensive categories during that run. On July 8, 1970, long after his career had started to decline, Jim Ray showed that he had something left by hitting for the cycle including a HR and triple with 6 RBI's in ONE INNING! Jim Ray was not a good fielder, and hated playing third base. "It's just too damn close to the hitter," is one quote attributed to him. Although he made a lot of errors, and seemed to have limited range, he was involved in 24 DP's in two of his seasons, which is a lot for a third baseman. I remember as a kid not understanding why the shortstop was considered part of a double play combination because it seemed like all the Giants DP's were started by Jimmy Ray from 3B!

Ages 27-32 are the peak years for most baseball players, but Jim Ray's playing time started to fall way off in 1969 at age 27, and he was out of baseball by 1974 at the age of 32. The mid-late 60's were part of a second "dead ball era" in baseball which may have also held down his offensive stats. Another factor in holding down his stats was the wind at Candlestick Park. In the afternoon and evenings, the wind would blow straight out to RF, sometimes at gale force, which tended to blow balls hit to straightaway LF out toward CF where they would be easily caught by the centerfielder. Willie Mays could compensate for this by driving the ball to right-center and RF, but Jim Ray was a dead pull hitter, and it affected his numbers. I found a chart of his Home-Road Splits:

PA: Overall- 4236, Home- 1987, Road- 2249.
HR: Overall- 170, Home- 72, Road- 98.
BA: Overall- .278, Home- .258, Road- .296.
OBP: Overall- .345, Home- .329, Road- .360
SLG%: Overall- .467, Home- .430, Road- .500!

While his relatively short career has been often attributed to an accumulation of injuries, another factor probably played a much larger role. I found an article from Baseball Digest, June 1991 where Jim Ray talked about what might have been had he not had an addiction to alcohol. He admitted that in later years, he was much more interested in collecting his paycheck for drinking money than in playing the game, and often came to the park hung over or drunk. At one point in his life, he lost everything and was basically on the streets of SF picking up lost change just to buy drinks. He passed out on a flight to Toronto for an old-timer's game, and that was the wake-up call he needed to get his life back. He entered and successfully completed a rehab program in San Mateo. As of the 1991 Baseball Digest article, Jim Ray was sober, working at a warehouse in Sacramento, and living there with his family. That is the last reference I was able to find in my internet search.

How much could the Giants use a hitter like Jim Ray Hart now? When I see Giants prospect Thomas Neal play, he reminds me a lot of Jim Ray, the stocky yet athletic build, the ability to hit for average, power and plate discipline. The Giants will be very fortunate if Thomas has a career resembling Jim Ray Hart's. Hopefully, Thomas will take better care of himself and enjoy a much longer career.