Tonight's Giants Game

The Giants game was on the idiot box tonight, which was surprising since they were playing at home and the game was on free TV.

Ryan Sadowski in his second major league game pitched even better than in his first game against Milwaukie.  He held the Astros to three hits over seven innings with one walk and four strikeouts.  It was a clinic on good pitching: he threw strikes, got ahead of the hitters and had movement on his pitches.  He hit 94 on the radar gun once, but most of his fastballs were in the 89-91 mph range with movement.

Sadowski has clearly earned himself two consecutive shellings before the Giants demote him and call up Kevin Pucetas.

I also learned tonight to my great amazement that Darin Erstad is still playing at the major league level.  He won’t last much longer.  He went 0-for-2 and is now hitting .159 with an OPS below .500.

Erstad was a classic one-hit-wonder.  He was the first player selected in the 1995 Draft, and the Angels obviously thought he was the real deal.  He was for exactly one season.  In 2000, he hit .355 with 240 hits, 25 HR’s, 121 runs scored, a 100 RBIs and a .951 OPS.  His second best seasons in these categories were .299, 177 hits, 19 HRs, 99 runs scored (twice), 82 RBI’s, and an .839 OPS (his best OPS after 2000 was a feeble .746 in 2004).

Erstad is the classic mediocre white guy, who is good to have in the clubhouse, plays a little defense, and sticks around for years and years, as far as I can tell, mainly because his race is the right one (i.e., he’s popular with the fans).  B. J. Surhoff (interesting enough, he was the No. 1 pick in the 1985 Draft) was another recent example of this kind of player.  Their careers seemed to go on and on, playing regularly, mostly 1B and LF, even though their offense was poor even for a bench player at these positions.  Their defense was good, but it wasn’t that good.

Back in the 1980’s and the first half of the 1990’s, the Brewers and the Twins were notorious for carrying these kinds of players for years and years.  In the Twins’ defense, they won the World Series in both 1987 and 1991.  Still, there were enough Rick Mannings and Gene Larkins on their rosters to make you wonder.  (Gene Larkin was the best player ever to play at my Alma Mater, breaking most of Lou Gehrig’s records, and Larkin has two World Series rings, which is two more than Barry Bonds).

The only non-white player I can think of who fits into this category is Shawon Dunston, who managed to hang on for years even after he was no longer good enough defensively to be even a back-up middle infielder.  In 2002, when Dusty Baker was the Giants’ manager and Dunston was just a brutal hitter, hitting only .231 with a .536 OPS, I proclaimed all year long (I had part of a season ticket package that year) that the only way keeping Dunston on the roster made any sense was if Dunston, as a seasoned veteran, came through in the clutch at some crucial time late in the season with some key hit.

Again, to my amazement, Dunston did just that.  He had the basehit that beat the Cardinals in the last game of the NLCS scoring Kenny Lofton (another geezer, but he could still play); and Dunston hit a homerun in the fifth inning of Game Six of the World Series to stake the Giants to a 2-0 lead in what should have been the Giants’ Series clinching win (Dusty rode his bullpen horses all season long as hard as he could to get the Giants to that Game 6 and eight outs away from a World Championship, and bullpen just didn’t have quite enough left to get him to the finish line; Robb Nen, in fact, never pitched again after that series).

I usually don’t give much credence to old school B.S. about the advantages of having mediocre veteran players around at crunch time, but that time Dusty and Giants GM Brian Sabean were right.

Now that the pressure’s off, Jonathan Sanchez has pitched three shut-out innings in garbage time mopping up Sadowski’s two wins.  One wonders if Sanchez wouldn’t be better pitching in relief full time.