They Don't Get Much Uglier Than Tonight's Game

Well, the Giants had a golden opportunity, and they pissed it away like too much beer.

Zito was terrific, allowing only one run in six innings of work, and the bullpen held until crunch time in the bottom of the 14th. The killer blow, more than Ryan Spillborghs’ homerun, was the walk to pitcher Adam Eaton immediately prior.

Eaton is a good-hitting pitcher with a career .194 batting average.  However, he’s still a pitcher, and this plate appearance was his first of 2009.  You have to make him hit the ball or strike out trying.

Teams that make the post-season don’t give away games like this. Of course, if the Giants had been able to score more than one run in the first thirteen innings, it might not have ended the way it did.

It was the same old story. Some singles, a couple of doubles, no homeruns, and only two walks drawn through the first 12 innings.  eams that don’t hit homeruns and don’t draw walks can’t score enough runs to win consistently unless every position player hits at least .290, even with the pitching the Giants have had this season.

The unwillingness to take a walk is an organizational flaw. The Giants have long drafted on physical talent rather than proven ability to the play game. This works well for pitchers, who to a greater degree can be taught how to pitch (or can have the catcher or the manager calling all the pitches), but hitters who come into professional baseball as free swingers usually remain free swingers.

As a result, the Giants’ farm teams are loaded with guys who can hit a little, but don’t have enough plate discipline to ever become major league stars.  Once they come up to the Show, major league batteries and advance scouts find the pitches these hitters can’t lay off of, and that’s all they see until they’re sent back down to AAA.

One thing that has really bothered me of late is a couple of recent articles in the San Francisco Chronicle recounting how Pablo Sandoval made an out or two in some crucial situation because he swung at a pitch way out of the strikezone, and then dumb-ass, old-school manager Bruce Bochy is quoted as saying, “We don’t want Pablo taking pitches.  We want him to be aggressive.  Blah, blah, blah.”

Here’s John Shea’s article for yesterday’s ballgame which gives a great example of what I’m talking about:

“Pablo Sandoval took some of the blame, admitting he swung at what would have been ball four in a crucial eighth-inning at-bat.

“The Giants were down 3-2 with Eugenio Velez at third and one out, and Sandoval worked the count to 3-2 (after falling behind 0-2), but swung at Ubaldo Jimenez’s curve that was about to bounce in the dirt.

“He hit a routine grounder to first, and Velez was forced to hold. Bengie Molina flied to left for the final out.

“Manager Bruce Bochy defended the free-swinging Sandoval, saying, ‘That’s Pablo. A 3-2 count there, the guy made a pretty good pitch. A lot of hitters would chase that pitch.’

“Catcher Chris Iannetta knew Sandoval would. That’s why he jogged to the mound and told Jimenez to bounce the 3-2 pitch with first base open. Jimenez tried, and Sandoval swung anyway.

“‘I didn’t get the job done,’ Sandoval said. ‘I have to be more patient at the plate in that situation. We have to get these wins, especially with the pennant race and wild-card situation. We’ve got to play the right way.’”

Good ol’ dumb-ass Boch defending Sandoval for swinging at a pitch nowhere near the strikezone, when even Sandoval realized he needed to be more selective.  As this article flat out states, if a major league battery knows that a hitter will swing at pitches out of the strikezone, they won’t throw any pitches in the strikezone, at least not when it could cost them a ball game.

Sandoval has an amazing ability to hit bad pitches. There are probably few other hitters in baseball that could have put the bat on a pitch like that.  However, putting the bat on the ball isn’t enough. Sandoval may hit .150 when he swings at pitches like that, higher than any other hitter in baseball now that Vladimir Guerrero’s best years are behind him, but that’s still pretty terrible.

The problem is that until he shows he can lay off those pitches most of the time, those are the only pitches he’s going to get in these situations.

Bochy’s not a bad manager for a young, rebuilding team, because he’s a players’ manager, who doesn’t put a lot of extra pressure on the young guys who are trying to adjust the pressures and stresses that come with playing in the majors. However, I’m not convinced that he’s smart enough or capable of pushing a team to perform at the level necessary to win in a pennant race.

Bochy had success in San Diego, winning the NL West four times and winning the NL pennant in 1998, so it’s entirely possible I’m wrong. However, he sure hasn’t shown much in his time in San Francisco, even taking into account the bad teams he’s had to work with.

What concerns me is that the Giants are continuing to make a lot dumb mistakes and not playing the kind of fundamental baseball where they move up runners and score men from third with less than two outs, the way a team with the Giants’ limited offense needs to do.

The Giants traded away two very talented young pitchers at the trade deadline to win this year.  When a player makes bone-head plays, it’s time for Bochy to call a spade a dirty shovel and say, yes, it was a bone-head play, and the offending player needs to knock it off or he’ll find himself riding the pine until further notice.

If the Giants are going to trade aways some of their future to win now, then, dammit, they need to get serious about playing to win now.  Unfortunately, after tonight’s game, it may already be too late.