When the Giants Come to Town, It's Bye-Bye Baby

08.06.2007
Hello Henry

I was off the grid this weekend and only just now (Sunday night) saw #755. The best thing about it, other than the big fucking sigh of relief, is that Bonds hit it to left field. Which means he’s got his stroke back, which means the Giants may score a few more runs between now and October and watching the team will occasionally be more fun than cleaning my toenails with a grapefruit knife. Sorry, I can’t find an appropriate YouTube video for that one.

Note above I didn’t write “the Giants may win a few more games,” because I’m not holding out for any such splendor in the grass. To paraphrase Axel Rose, I used to love the bullpen, but I had to kill the bullpen after Friday and Saturday’s ickfests, and as the Giants slog through this stretch of 60 games in 45 cities in 20 days while singing 88 lines about 44 women, or whatever it is, I can’t see the ‘pen getting any better. Oh wait, maybe they’ll call up Scott Munter. Mmmkay.

Nice move: Barry Zito pitched in with a scoreless relief inning today to help the frazzled bullpen. The bad news is that Zito threw today because Noah Lowry left early with a sore arm. Keep your fingers crossed it isn’t serious. If it is, remember pitching injuries are a part of the game, and the Giants are fortunate to have decent reinforcements, such as…

PLODAW (player of da weekend): Pat Misch, who gave up a couple runs but struck out eight without walking a batter in his first major-league start. Huzzah! When other teams break down his performance on video, would it be considered a Mischigander?

And congratulations to Tom Glavine, an old-school lefty malo who keeps on keepin’ on with win #300 tonight, as well as to Alex Rodriguez, who is sometimes called A-Rod. He hit home run #500 yesterday and will almost certainly break Barry Bonds’s all-time record as long as he doesn’t get eaten by alligators or become addicted to cough syrup. In case you’re wondering, Barry Zito has 110 career wins and needs an average of 18 wins a year for the next 11 years if he’s to win #300, like Glavine, in his age-41 season.  
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[August 6, 2007 3:46 PM]  |  link  |  reply
obsessivegiantscompulsive said

Luckily, it looks like Misch and Ortiz are ready to take the mound as starters, so the Giants could just shut Lowry down on the DL (unfortunately during his key August stretch) since it's not like we're going to catch the leaders, and have a rotation of Zito, Cain, Lincecum, Misch, and Ortiz.

I was hoping for a nice August in terms of wins but this weekend in San Diego basically killed that hope. Man that was brutal, and yet, the heartening thing was that the Giants were in each game against one of our divisional leaders, and should have won at least one if not two of the games with just OK relief, the bullpen totally blew up Cain's beauty of a game and both Sat and Sun games were winnable with either a key hit, a key pitch. We were not that far away from a sweep.

Yeah, the bullpen was horribly disappointing after a pretty OK year thus far. Perhaps someone should go back down and work on things for next year, and give us a fresher arm for the bullpen, like Brian Wilson, who has been pitching well recently. Maybe it's time to try him out as our closer and put Hennessey back in a setup role.

The main problem with the bullpen is if you look at the inherited runners kept from scoring stats, only Sanchez and Kline is doing well there (80-90%). ALL of the rest were at 60's% or lower, Messenger has been particularly bad at that (50%), so he should really be starting innings in relief, not coming in key situations. But since we are clearly in a learning about our player's capabilities mode, we will continue to see these players go out and test themselves over again.

In any case, Wilson is suppose to be our closer of the future, seems like the time to bring him up and see how he does, particularly since he is doing well right now. I assume Hennessey didn't think that he would necessarily have that role for the rest of the season, unless he was lights out, and thus far he hasn't.

But I don't know who to send down. Despite his horrible ERA, Taschner has the 3rd best inherited strand rate between Sanchez and Kline; I guess the other relievers have been costing him runs when they allowed his runners to score after relieving him. He has been fantastic against RHH, not so good against LHH, which suggests a bit of bad luck there with LHH since he should be better against them.

The other pitchers have shiny ERAs but bad inherited runners scoring rate. As of August 5, Chulk is at 52%, Correia 64%, Hennessey 68%, Kline 90%, Messenger 50%, Sanchez 85%, Taschner 69%. I'm not sure where exactly is good, but I'm pretty sure that anything under 70% is bad. For comparison, the Padres relievers have the following: Bell 70%, Brocail 94%, Cameron 90%, Hampson 78%, Hoffman 86%, Meredith 71%, Thompson 67%.

Maybe one of the OFs will be sent down for an extra reliever given how many games ahead there is plus the bullpen was drained over the weekend.

Also, I wonder what trade Sabean was working on Sat before it fell through and they decided to DL Aurilia instead. Seemed like a position player on the 25 man since they DLed Aurilia only after the trade died and he's a position player. I would guess that Sweeney and Klesko would be the hottest commodities and players most easily replaceable. Durham isn't hitting and was injured again recently, Vizquel they probably will need next season unless they really believe that A-Rod is coming here (NOT!), Feliz might return because of his defense and improved hitting, and I would have to think that Roberts is wanted for his knowledge on stealing and his passing some of Maury Wills techniques to our many fine young speedsters in our farm system. He has a very high success rate.

I guess there goes Lowry's trade value for this season, we'll have to wait until the off-season to trade him if we want anyone good for him. One rumor I saw at the Merc last week was that Sanchez could have fetched us Carlos Gomez from the Mets - which wouldn't have been that bad a trade, some liken him to a Jose Reyes in CF, he steals even more bases than Davis, and I think he's only 20 years old.