Through a combination of quirky work/gym schedules, early start times and overall malaise on my part, my partner Thomas Todd has been a trooper at cranking out these postgame wraps in my absence.
I offered to finally write my first tonight; 5:40 pm start, so I figured I could watch the game, jot down some notes, and still have a pretty nice little Wednesday. I was going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if I would’ve had enough time.
Well, that didn’t exactly happen.
It’s hard to know what to take from this game, aside from a newfound hatred for this juiced ball bullshit, and Coors Field in general. Tim Lincecum didn’t finish the third, Manny Burriss got three hits, and the Rockies managed to score 17 runs without a homer. None of those are going to happen very often.
It’s tempting (and fun!) to overreact to Hector Sanchez’s and Brett Pill’s respective defensive issues; if Hector had managed to block Lincecum’s pitches better, a lot of things could have been different. Certainly a few people wouldn’t have moved up 90 feet/scored, but also Lincecum may have felt like he couldn’t throw in the dirt for fear of another squirt-away. That certainly didn’t make the difference in this game, but hey. If Brett Pill hadn’t clanked twice on that 8-3-2-1-5-3-5-6 single by Ramon Hernandez, it could’ve saved a run or two. It wouldn’t have made the difference, but hey again.
Defensive acumen as part of a player’s skill set comes down to a few marginal small sample sizes that can have disastrous consequences. When they say that a player is spending extra time in the minors to work on his defense, and all we can see are those shiny hitting numbers, this may be the kind of thing they’re trying to avoid.
Fun fact: Before Carlos Gonzalez did it tonight, the last player to triple twice in the same game was Brett Pill, who did it on September 17 last year. Mark DeRosa batted cleanup that day.
Enough about that stupid game. Here’s my best shot at some Thomas Todd-style stats of the day:
47: Minutes combined between the Bottom of the 3rd and the Top of the 4th innings
34: Total hits in this game
25: Total runs in this game
10: Total pitchers used
10: Errors for the Giants this season
7: The position that Ryan Theriot should never, ever play
6: Number of times I wondered what Todd Helton was smiling at
5.8: Giants average runs/per so far this season
4: Hours of my life I’ll never get back
Shingles: I hear they suck
3: Times I considered changing my fantasy team name to “Pocket Full of Shingles”
2: Total hits for Angel Pagan this season
1: More stupid game in that stupid stadium before the Home Opener
Bonus stat of the day:
