Giants at Brewers - Take III

Another beautiful mid-80's day in the Maryvale section of Phoenix.......and another Giants win over the Brewers. Again the Giants fell behind, but only 1-0 today before storming back to take an eventual 10-5 lead into the 9th, before winning by the final score of 10-7.

Since both teams had 10 hits and 1 error, the big difference in the game today was free passes, mostly by the Brewers' pitching staff. Through 8 1/2 innings, the Giants pitching staff had given up ZERO walks. The Brewers had shown more power, with 3 HRs.....but each of the HRs was a solo shot, because the Giants pitchers avoided bunching basehits and did not walk anyone.

The Brewers' pitching staff, by contrast, walked 11 batters and hit another 3 Giants (the boxscore says 12/2 but they are wrong). 14 free passes will do bad things to your chances to win a ballgame.........bad things. Of the 14 passes, 5 of them scored.......providing the exact run differential going into the bottom of the 9th.

Brian Wilson continued to prove that walks are a bad thing in the bottom of the 9th. After he got 2 quick outs on weak groundballs, he gave up a very long double. Then he proceeded to walk, back, to back, to back Brewers, forcing in 1 run and leaving the bases loaded in a now 10-6 game. The first walk was a good 7 pitch AB by Lance Nix, however Wilson only threw 1 strike total to the next 2 batters. Wilson then gave a weakly hit ball to SS.......too weakly as it turns out. The ball was hit to no man's land between the SS and the pitcher and wound up as an RBI infield single. Now it was 10-7 with the bases STILL loaded and STILL 2 outs. At this point I started to get worried, with visions of Benitez dancing in my head. Wilson, however, proved my worry to be unfounded when he struck out the next batter on 4 pitches. Walks will kill you....I hate em....just HATE em.

As far as the rest of the Giants pitchers go......they did pretty well. As I said in a prior post....these Brewers have a little bit of offense. Noah Lowry pitched well, giving up 2 runs on only 2 hits. Unfortunately the two hits were a solo HR to Johnny Estrada in the 2nd.....and a 2-out double in the 3rd that was followed by an error by Eugenio Velez, which allowed an unearned run to score. Lowry then picked the runner off of 1B (1-3-6) to end the inning. Lowry threw 46 pitches, including 6 pitches to Prince Fielder before the pickoff got him out of that AB. Lowry did not go to a full count on any batter. His pitches seemed to have quite a bit of zip on them. He threw a few changeups.......but I don't remember seeing any of those really silly swings that you see when Lowry's changeup is really on.

Lowry was followed by 3 innings by Sun-Woo Kim. Kim had a bit of trouble to start as he gave up back-to-back HRs to the first 2 batters he faced, Prince Fielder and Bill Hall. Kim then went 1-2-3 through the rest of the inning and gave up only a double in the 5th and a single in the 6th. Kim needed only 36 pitches to complete his 3 innings, including a 6 pitch 6th. His fastball really has a lot of zip on it, but it seems pretty straight. As long as he hits the corners, he is OK. When he throws it down the middle, it gets hit pretty good. He also has a nice, very slow curve that looks to be pretty much 12 to 6 with a lot of break. Kim has looked much better than I expected.

Osiris Matos threw a nice 8 pitch, 1-2-3 7th inning with 1 strikout. Dan Giese threw the 8th and gave up a solo HR to the first batter he faced. He got the next 3 batters out easily and only needed 11 piches to get through the inning. I already detailed Wilson's 9th inning in detail.

Our dinner reservations are in 20 minutes so I have to get going. I will try to get back later this evening to detail how the offense looked.