A good start...

[garyd4sf]

Who knew that Panik was our power hitter (and only run producer)?  Who knew that Sf could beat the Dodger's best pitcher (Kershaw) and best reliever (Jansen) in successive nights?  The pitchers are usually ahead of the hitters at this time of year... but by a mile? Who's bats wake up in the Easter weekend? Both Cueto and Wood were on their game.

I said the Dodgers had some weaknesses...here's what I see... Bellinger is a HR threat but pitchers have found a weakness in his swing...he struck out 17 times in the World series last year, in 7 games.The Dodger are a decent , not great defense. The Turner injury (he should be back in a few weeks) made them play Forsythe at third . He doesn't have a strong arm IMO. That made Utley or others at second lessening that defense as well. Kemp is a liability on D as well in the OF. Seager will eventually end up at 3B in his career.

Now the teams have their #3-#5 hurlers in the next 2 games. Should be interesting. 

[klaiggeb]

I know I didn't see this coming, Gary, and I'd bet you didn't either; being 2-0 to open the season.

But I'll take it!

I also have zero illusions about our team.

We play them 10 times in the first month, and if we could, at the very LEAST, split those 10, with Bum and Melancon on the shelf, I'd call that a victory.

[Islandboagie]

I'm starting to like this Watson feller.

[garyd4sf]

Mar 31, 2018 9:59:58 GMT -5 klaiggeb said:

I know I didn't see this coming, Gary, and I'd bet you didn't either; being 2-0 to open the season.

But I'll take it!

I also have zero illusions about our team.

We play them 10 times in the first month, and if we could, at the very LEAST, split those 10, with Bum and Melancon on the shelf, I'd call that a victory.

You don't have to bet. I didn't see this coming....I thought we would hit Ok (which we aren't), but the pitching has been greater than any of my thoughts...

[sfgdood]

I'm trying to figure out what happened to those ringers we brought in to beat up LH pitching and who these imposters are wearing #10 and #22

[rog]

Not only did the Giants beat the Dodgers' best starter and reliever, they likely beat the best starter and the best reliever in baseball.

[sfgdood]

And tonight they proved how little that matters

[sfgdood]

3 games, 2 runs...not good.

[Islandboagie]

I agree, Randy. 2 runs in the first 3 games is not acceptable. Our lineup as a whole has been pathetic.


However, Panik has done his job. Posey started hitting last night, Blanco was good last night too. Mccutchen has hit the ball hard a few times. But Longoria, Crawford and Belt have looked pathetic.

[rog]

I've mentioned this before, but it may be worth another look.

Evan Longoria had a different season with the bat than he's ever had before. Yes, his .737 OPS was the 2nd-worst of his career, but it is how he got there that is disconcerting.

First, the good: Evan's strikeout percentage was the best of his career at 16%. In other words, he struck out only one in six times, which is excellent for a power hitter.

But he was no longer a power hitter, which begins the bad. What happened? The year before he hit a career high 36 homers.

What happened is that he became an entirely different hitter. His fly balls, which had fueled his career-high homer total, fell by a full 10%. That's rare.

Despite the new tendency to hit the ball on the ground, one out of every seven fly balls he hit was a pop up. He hit the vall on the ground far too often, yet when he did hit it in the air, he got under it too much and hit it weakly toward the sky.

It's FAR too early to call it a trend, but so far Evan has struggled in ALL these areas. You ask rhetorically, when you're 0 for 11, what do you expect? And we don't expect it to be very good.

But we don't expect Evan to swing at nearly half the pitches outside the zone. We don't expect him to strike out more than a third of the time. We don't expect four of the seven times he's hit the ball to be ground balls. We don't expect him to have hit nary a line drive. We don't expect him to have hit only one ball hard in three games.

We don't expect pitchers to have so little fear of him, and him to have so little control of the strike zone that more than four out of every five first pitches has been a strike. Not when only four out of seven have been first-pitch strikes over his career. We don't expect one of his three fly balls to have been a pop up, when over his career one in 12 have been.

In other words, Evan isn't hitting in tough luck. He just isn't hitting. He was a very different hitter in 2017 than he had been earlier in his career, and the downward trends have continued to grow so far this season.

Will Evan break out of his slump? Of course he will. But so far our concerns over his significant changes as a hitter last season have been even more warranted than we could have expected. If we haven't already, we should lower our expectations for his season. Evan's bat needs to be resurrected from the dead.

Hopefully I've "anti-jinxed" him enough that he'll break out today. Break out in a rash. A rash of hits.

So far he's barely hitting the ball.

[rog]

And tonight they proved how little that matters



Rog -- The problem last night was that the Dodgers didn't throw out good enough pitchers, so Joe had no one to homer against.




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