The term “pitchers duel” has always been a little funny – hard to punctuate – to me. There’s so much that goes into an at-bat, an inning, a game, that it’s really hard to know whether a low-scoring game is the result of great pitching, terrible hitting, or a spectacular conflagration of both. The number of times the Giants had to “tip their cap” to some middle-of-the-rotation spaz from wherever was so ridiculous that aside from leaving my cap permanently tipped, I couldn’t really trust a boxscore. Every time I heard about some pitcher having a “great” outing, I had to check who he had pitched against.

But then tonight happened, and it was spectacular, and it was a duel.

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Pitch 5, pictured above, made Twitter explode

Well, sometimes you just have to tip your cap to the opposing pitcher. Often, in fact, when it’s Roy Halladay, one of the best pitchers of this generation. Even more often when you’re a Giants fan.

But today was especially frustrating because, well, Halladay didn’t look great. He consistently got first-pitch strikes and used the leverage to abuse hitters with cutters, splitters and curves, but he didn’t seem to fool the hitters overall. Sandoval got BABIP’d on hard line drives before pounding it directly off the base for a hit, Pagan flied out deep to right, and he and Posey both almost chipped off pieces of the Doc with hard comebackers. Melky walked on four pitches, Belt went 0-2 to a walk, and Huff even draw a walk. With pen. It looked like this: Continue reading →