Saturday, March 03, 2007

Giants at Brewers - I

A beautiful day in Phoenix......AND the Giants overcome a 2-7 deficit to win the game 12-8. The goat of the game, for the Giants, had to be Matt Morris. He gave up 7 runs in only 1.2 innings of work. The rest of the Giants' pitchers.....made it through the next 7.1 innings by giving up only 1 additional run. The Giants' hitters did not give up.......and although they only had 12 hits.......10 of them singles......the normally free swinging team parleyed those 12 hits plus 12 walks and a HBP into 12 runs.

Although I did not get a good photo of him....the unsung pitching hero had to be non-roster invitee Scott Atchison. He relieved Morris with 2 out and 2 on........and although he allowed 1 additonal run (charged to Morris) to score, Atchison closed out the 2nd inning and pitched a 1-2-3 3rd inning to change the momentum of the game. Atchison did allow a one out single in the 3rd, but that baserunner was quicly erased on a CS on a great throw by Guillermo Rodriguez. Atchison was able to "stop the bleeding" and lead the way to an eventual Giants' win. Dan Giese pitched a clean 2 innings, allowing only 1 walk. Jack Taschner did well, pitching a 1-2-3 ninth inning tallying 2 groundouts and a strikeout.

Offensively, the Giants never gave up and erased the 2-7 deficit by scoring 3 in the 3rd, 3 in the 4th and 1 each in the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th. I did not get a photo of Nate Schierholtz, who pinch hit in the top of the 9th. Although it ended up being only a inconsequential 12th run, Nate had a first pitch single and drove in the Giants' final run of the game. Other than that I think I covered most of the offensive performances with the photo captions.

I have to tell you, about the time Matt Morris left the game, I thought today's game would be a close duplicate of yesterday's 21-2 drubbing. Although the Brewers continued to show that they can score runs in bunches.....the Giants showed an ability to fight back and score a few runs themselves. I was very disappointed in Morris' and Munter's performances......but I was very happy with the performances of Wilson and Taschner. After showing good control so far this spring, the Giants pitchers slipped back into their tendency to walk too many batters. Today's total of 8 walks was too many..........not as bad as the Brewers' 12 walks........but still WAY too many.

Tomorrow it will be back to Scottsdale Stadium for the Giants vs the Mariners. I sure hope the Giants players shake this flu bug that has been going around. I wanted to see how Bochy handles a club during the spring as opposed to Alou or Baker. With the flu going around, I don't think we are getting a true read on the man. Hopefully, tomorrow's game will last less than the 3 1/2 hours of today's game.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loved the free shirt they gave out today! Did you get one?

Giantfan9 said...

Nope......got there about an hour before game time and never even heard about a free shirt.....other than the ones they threw from on top of the Brewers dugout. I did see one kid wearing a shirt that said "Cerveceros" (Spanish for Brewers).....but that was the only one I saw. What did they give away?

Anonymous said...

yup, that's the one. I didn't notice until later in the game that the Brewers jersey also had Ceveceros. THat was probably the reason the brewers didn't have names on their backs.

Anonymous said...

Back to baseball... Geise really did great job. I was impressed

Anonymous said...

I got a shirt too, also a Telemondo shirt because it was some Latin theme day. I love the sausage race too. Back to the game, Morris was bad. The day before (Friday's), Cain was throwing well until Bonds dropped that flyball. I looked at Cain and saw him make a fist and throw his arms down, like he was pissed. I would be too if I should have been out of the inning. I thought Bochy or Rags was going to talk to Cain, but they left him out there and he got hit. I think the same thing happened early last season, where something bad happens and he couldn't get it locked down during his first few games. If I can pull it off, might try to make a couple of more games. Good meeting you, giantsfan9.