Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Giants vs A's 3-13-07

Once again.....regular as clockwork. The Giants face the A's in Spring Training.......and lose. I knew with the night game I wouldn't have the time to post a decent post.......so I didn't even bring my camera or scorebook. I also know the game was on FSBA, so many of you were able to see it. There were a lot of A's fans around me, so I spent quite a bit of time wandering around, viewing the game from other vantage points I normally don't see. Just some quick impressions of the game.

There were more scouts in attendance than I can ever remember seeing at a Spring Training game. Must have been 40-50 of them. Heck I didn't think there were that many teams in the league. ;-) I can't really figure why a team would send more than 1 scout to the same game........but I guess Armando Benitez is such an enigma.........teams want as many opinions as possible. Speaking of Mando......I read this morning that his fastball was better than in his last outing. Maybe it was because he threw more offspeed stuff last night.........but I thought the fastball was better last time. Mando had a couple of good corner pitches, including a called 3rd strike......but really, other than the scoreless inning......his performance was nothing to write home about.

Noah Lowry lost it completely in the 3rd inning. He was not only throwing too many balls.......he was missing by a ton. Looked like he was throwing MUCH worse from the stretch than he was from the windup. Five walks are WAY too many.......the 5 strikeouts were nice though. It was good to see him come back and throw a scoreless 4th inning though....I thought he was done after 3. The bullpen pretty much stunk again. Jack Taschner has me worried. I was counting on him to be a lefty stalwart in the pen. When he wasn't throwing balls.......he was throwing the ball over the heart of the plate. I thought Sun-Woo Kim had a very good first 2 innings, but he also fell apart in his 3rd inning of work.

The Giants offense was pretty much non-existent again. They managed only 6 hits with Pedro Feliz getting half of them. My boy, Kevin Frandsen, hasn't been looking great so far this spring and he had a terrible game last night. 0 for 4 with a GIDP and a pick off. Kevin is not hiding his feelings when he does poorly. Last night he had a severe case of the "Gumby shoulders" as Krukow would say..........Krukow was in the TV booth......so maybe he did say it. Hey....at least Frandsen started a couple of DP's from the SS position. Without 3 DP's....the game really would have been ugly.

All in all a game that I am glad I didn't spend too much time on. The good news is that it was a beautiful night and a nice change from the hot days we have been having here. Today it is off to Tempe for a game against the Angels.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Giantsfan9....I love the website and will be going to games this weekend. Would love to come by and say hi on Friday or Sunday. Where do you sit?

allfrank said...

I read (sorry, can't remember where) that one scout siad most of Armando's fastballs were 88-89. He did have a few at 93, but they had no movement.

Anonymous said...

Hey GF9, I see Velez was optioned to Fresno this morning.