Alright, now raise your hand if you saw Zito's complete
game, 4 hit, 0 walk shutout coming.
That's what I thought.
This is the point where my audience would look like my
statistics class on a Wednesday night (not only half empty, but also answerless
and baffled). It's a crazy, mixed up
time for Giants fans right now - we live in a world where the aces get shelled
and Zito is lights out. A world where
the Giants defense plays like a scene from the Three Stooges remake. A world where runs are becoming easier to
attain than outs. Have we entered the
Twilight Zone?Not quite. Some of these are anomalies and some of these are not. Let's separate fact from fantasy after the first four games of the season.
Lincecum, Bumgarner
and Cain getting shelled - obviously fantasy is a poor choice of words
here; perhaps a better way to describe this would be a nightmare. I'm sure I'm not the only person who foresaw
a mediocre start to the season - after all, the Giants were opening at Chase
Field, the home of a team that squashed San Francisco's hopes of repeating
fairly early last season. I just figured
it would be of the 3-1 variety with the runs coming on some sort of bullpen
breakdown. I didn't think Timmy and Co.
would be tossing the Snakes batting practice for the first three games of the
season.
Luckily for Giants fans, this is a nightmare - one they'll
be waking up from soon. Lincecum settled
down for a good four innings after getting smacked around early, while
Bumgarner is prone to getting slapped from time to time and Matt Cain was left
in perhaps a few batters too long. All of them suffered the consequences of
some poor fielding (on an even worse infield in Arizona), making it difficult
to end innings that otherwise would have been squandered rallies. If you're panicking about the Giants'
starting rotation, knock it off. This is
not a cause for concern - yet.
Brandon Crawford,
Pablo Sandoval and Buster Posey audition for The Three Stooges - This is
also a fantasy. Posey is still getting
his bearings at catcher, undoubtedly with some jitters in the wake of the Scott
Cousins incident. Brandon Crawford is
suffering from a hand injury and the infield position players have yet to field
a routine ground ball. As Posey returns
to form and Crawford's hand recovers, this should even itself out. I certainly don't foresee this season
becoming a comedy of errors, that's for sure.
The Giants line up
can actually hit the ball - With the exception of Angel Pagan and Ryan
Theriot, I would say this has become a fact.
That's not to say that Pagan and Theriot will hit .190 the rest of the
way while the rest of the order hits near .300, but this team has shown some
pop and I doubt that it's an anomaly.
The Giants decision to go with power in the lineup seems to be paying
off. Melky Cabrera looks like a stellar
addition. Pablo Sandoval is crushing the
ball. Buster Posey hasn't missed a beat
at the plate, and the young guns aren't too bad at hitting the balls
themselves. The Giants won't be
Cespedesing the ball all over the field for the next 157 games of the year, but
they won't be historically bad again offensively.
Barry Zito is going
to baffle batters and shock the world
- I'll leave this one up to you. Given
this town's ability to insanely overreact when anything out of the ordinary
happens, I wasn't shocked by the outcry of praise and hope after Zito's latest
shutout. In fact - I called it.
But will it last? His
mechanics changed, as promised, and as a result he was able to get his velocity
up (88 mph on some of his fast balls, certainly not Santiago Casilla speed but
better than the 80 mph we knew and loved last year) and locate his
curveball. The question is whether he
can find longevity for this new form and keep hitters from figuring him
out. But if you’re into taking risks, go
ahead and grab those Zito jerseys now so you can profess that you saw it coming. After all, it's a crazy, mixed up world we
live in, and when it comes to Giants baseball, anything is possible.
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