Wednesday, September 16, 2020

	W-L	GB
Philadelphia	24-23		Gained a game on Miami
GIANTS	23-24		Smoked out in Seattle
Cincinnati	24-26	1/2	Half-game out of second
Colorado	22-25	1	Will A's also lose to Giants?
Milwaukee	22-25	1	Helped Reds with win
New York	21-27	2 1/2	Phils are knockin' 'em out

Yesterday

Giants did not play; air quality conditions in Seattle, due to wildfires, forced postponement of the game and the two-game series, which resumes at Oracle Park tonight.

Philadelphia defeated New York. Cincinnati beat Pittsburgh again, their fourth straight win. Colorado defeated the A's, and Milwaukee defeated St Louis.  The race has tightened up considerably, as you can see. (We reverted to the "legacy" Blogger format and will stick with it 'til it expires.)

Today

Giants against Seattle at the O; 6:45 PDT. Drew Smyly, not Tyler Anderson, will start against Ljay Newsome. 

Colorado hosts Oakland, Philadelphia the Mets. Milwaukee is at home for a doubleheader against the reeling Cardinals, who are this close to dropping out of second place and into our leaderboard. Cincinnati finishes up the Pittsburgh series with a chance for a four-game sweep. 

The Division Races

Remember those? Well, the Padres are making a major push for first place. They've won 8 of 10 and trail LA by two and a half. They've split the first two of their home series with the Dodgers and a win tonight would leave them only 1 1/2 behind with nine to play.  

The NL West is now the closest race in the game; the other leaders-- Atlanta, the Cubs, Tampa Bay, the surprising White Sox, and Oakland-- all are up by three or more. Of the runners-up, only San Diego has a firm grip on second place; the other divisions have several contenders jockeying for that position.  The AL at-large wild-card situation is much more settled than in the NL; Toronto and Cleveland will be the seventh and eighth teams unless one of them collapses. Toronto also has a chance to overtake the Yankees for second in the AL East; New York would then be a "wild" wild-card.

Be Careful What You Ask For, You May Get It-- Sort Of

Regular readers of this space-- yes, both of you!-- may remember some years back when, disgusted with the seemingly-endless 43-game postseason marathon, we proposed a tournament-style playoff for each league to determine the World Series teams, with games being played in one stadium. Well, Major League Baseball just unveiled the 2020 postseason schedule. While the eight-team wild-card round for each league will be played in the top seed's home ballparks, the Division Series and LCS will be played at neutral sites-- Houston and Arlington (Texas) for the NLDS, Arlington for the NLCS, and LA and San Diego for the ALDS, San Diego for the ALCS. Neutral indeed! The World Series will also be played at Arlington, in the brand-spankin'-new (and seriously awesome) Globe Life Field. 

The irony of the poor, benighted San Diego Padres, who haven't made the postseason in 14 years, playing in the NLDS and possibly the NLCS and the World Series, in Texas, while all the while playoff games are being played in their own home stadium without them-- well, keep in mind, the covid-19 restrictions remain in place and presumably, the cardboard cutouts in Petco Park won't object too loudly.  Expect LG and Visio sales in Southern California will spike appreciably in early October, if the stores haven't all been looted.  

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Yesterday

Giants were idle.

Philadelphia lost again at Miami, 6-2. 

Cincinnati swept a doubleheader from Pittsburgh.

Milwaukee split a doubleheader with St Louis. 

Colorado and New York were idle.  

Today

Giants at Seattle; 6:40 PDT. Tyler Anderson, who mastered the Mariners a week ago, opposes Ljay Newsome, who didn't get much of chance to face the Giants in his last aborted start.

Philadelphia are back home against the Mets, who can't afford to lose too many more.

Cincinnati has another opportunity to fatten up on the Pirates.

Milwaukee hosts St Louis; they trail the Cards by two games in the race for second place.  

Colorado gets the A's at home; Oakland has a big lead in the AL West and a chance for top seed.  

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

This may be our last year on this platform. We will be actively searching for a new host for this blog once the World Series concludes.  In case you were wondering about the appearance of the leaderboard, our friends at Google keep making "improvements" to Blogger that make it harder and harder for simple text-intensive operations such as ours to operate. We keep the daily leaderboard on an Excel spreadsheet, and until today a simple copy-and-paste worked as expected. Now it loads the cells as a picture, box- and grid-lines intact, which looks unspeakably hokey. So we take the grid-lines off before the copy operation, and the result is what you see above. The text, as you've undoubtedly noticed, is not as sharp as the text here in the paragraphs. And pasting the cells as "text" scatters the rows and columns haphazardly all over the page. This is just one of many irritating "improvements" that have been foisted on us. For instance, it now takes two commands to get into create mode, for no apparent reason. And going back in to edit mode on a previous post, to correct an error for example, now dumps us into HTML mode, and switching to "Compose" mode triggers a warning about data loss. As IT professionals, we find this Mickey Mouse process increasingly frustrating, so, to paraphrase Smokey Robinson, we're gonna shop around. 

Monday, September 14, 2020

 

	W-L	GB
Philadelphia	23-22		Get swept, end up here
GIANTS	23-24		Get swept, end up here
Colorado	21-25	1 1/2	Angels doin' their job
Milwaukee	20-24	1 1/2	Couldn't take advantage
New York	21-26	2	Ryu remembers 'em from LA
Cincinnati	21-26	2	Ah, ah, ah, ah-- stayin' alive!

Yesterday

Giants were swept by San Diego in their false-positive-covid-test-induced doubleheader, 6-0 and 3-1.

Philadelphia was swept by the Marlins in Miami and dropped to third place in the East and first place in the at-large wild-card derby.

Colorado , Milwaukee, and New York all lost and failed to gain any ground. Cincinnati defeated St Louis; they've pulled within two games of second place in both races.

Today

Giants are idle; they're on their way to Seattle, their last road trip of the season.

Colorado and New York likewise are idle. Philadelphia has to deal with the Marlins one more time.

Elsewhere, doubleheaders abound. Cincinnati is home for two against the execrable Pirates. Watch out for the Reds. Milwaukee hosts two against the Cardinals.

Yesterday's Games

A bad day all around for San Francisco sports, as the 49ers inexplicably lost a winnable game to Arizona at Levi Stadium. In San Diego, Johnny Cueto simply didn't have it; he was dinged for six runs (four earned) in five-plus innings, allowing ten baserunners against 16 outs. Perhaps, then, it was just as well that the Giants' bats fell silent against Mike Clevinger, who looks something like a big beefy Tim Lincecum on the mound. He pitched a 7-inning complete game, allowing two hits. But it was the second game that really hurt. Logan Webb pitched pretty well, as did opposite number Garrett Richards. It was decided in the fifth when Sam Selman, so effective of late, faced four batters and lost the game. It went like this: walk, walk, single, sac bunt. In came Tyler Rogers; he forced a fielder's choice at home on a good play by Evan Longoria, but then gave up a RBI single to Manny Machado, the run charged to Selman. On a day when the Giants managed a grand total of five hits in 14 innings across two games, three runs was evidently enough. 

This doubleheader, which was originally announced as a single game and not changed until Sunday morning, had the smell of doom from the start after Friday night's game was postponed just minutes before the first pitch by reports of a positive covid-19 test in the Giants' clubhouse. (The team eventually admitted it was Alex Dickerson's test.) The twitterverse broke into excited chatter immediately, of course, with opinion evenly divided between the "abundance of caution" people and the "overreaction" crowd, which is our camp. We were suspicious of a false positive from the start, and it brings us no satisfaction to know we were right. Did anyone else see the MLB-MLBPA Joint Committee's statement on it, which read in part “the presumptive positive did not represent an actual infection?" "Presumptive positive?" Can't these people talk straight? What are they afraid of? It was a false positive, and playing tiddlywinks with the language serves no one.

We repeatedly hear that 190,000 Americans have died from covid-19, which is complete bovine excrement. What those numbers mean is that 190,000 Americans who had the coronavirus have died, of multiple causes. 91% of those people had serious pre-existing illnesses or conditions unrelated to covid-19. Yes, covid-19 is listed as a contributing factor in those cases, just as every diagnosed ailment is listed as a contributing factor.  We forget that six months ago, the "experts" predicted millions of American deaths from this pandemic, and we have yet to realize that not only have they not been held accountable for their scare tactics, but many of these "experts" are still out there making pronouncements, predictions, and recommendations, and politicians and presidential candidates are still taking them seriously. How much is enough? There is no proof that even one healthy, physically fit American of young or middle age has been struck down dead by covid-19.  Clearly, those at high risk for all communicable diseases, such as the 'flu', are at high risk for this one, too. But it's just as clear that the panicky responses and the ongoing lockdowns have harmed tens of millions, some perhaps permanently. At what point does "abundance of caution" result in "economic depression?" And just how much of this lockdown mentality is operating with one eye on November 3?

Okay. The Giants survived the sweep because Miami and Philadelphia have been beating up on each other, and because the teams right behind them are in even worse shape. After a week of being over .500, the Giants are now one win below it, but retain their playoff position for the moment. They have two more days off this week; why a fourth game at San Diego wasn't scheduled for today escapes us. Thursday they return home for the final ten (or eleven) games: three across the Bay at Oakland over next weekend, then four against Colorado, then the final three (or four) against the Padres, against whom the Giants are now 1-5 on the season. The finale on Sunday, September 27 is scheduled for 12:05 PDT; it's possible the teams may play two if necessary to break or avoid a tie. 

Sunday, September 13, 2020

 

	W-L	GB
GIANTS	23-22		Idle hands paid off.
Miami	21-21	1/2	Now 4-11 on "home" field
Colorado	21-24	1 1/2	Lost on 3-run homer in 11th
Milwaukee	20-23	1 1/2	Now trail Cards by 2 games
New York	21-25	2	Jays are smelling playoffs
Cincinnati	20-26	3	On the verge of extinction

Yesterday

Giants were idle. Turns out the covid-19 test was a false positive. No infected Giants. 

Everyone else lost. That gained half-game almost makes up for the postponements.

Today

Giants resume at San Diego with the Cueto-Richards matchup. 1:10 PM PDT. No doubleheader today.

There is a doubleheader in Miami, where the Marlins host the Phillies, who can pretty much nail down a playoff spot today with a sweep.

Colorado's at home against the Angels and Milwaukee hosts the Cubs, who lead St Louis by 3. New York  and Toronto meet at Buffalo's Sahlen Field. Cincinnati's at St Louis, and the Cardinals, like the Phillies, are smelling playoffs in a head-to-head series.

Saturday, September 12, 2020

W-L GB Miami 21-20 Pythagoras has 'em at .435 GIANTS 23-22   Sunday DH ahead? Colorado 21-23 1 1/2 Gained half a game Milwaukee 20-22 1 1/2 Trail Cards by 1 game New York 21-24 2 18 runs in Buffalo! Cincinnati 20-25 3 Still have a shot at 2nd place

Yesterday

Giants and San Diego were postponed moments before the first pitch when a Giants player was reported as testing positive for covid-19.

Miami split a doubleheader with Philadelphia.

Colorado, Milwaukee, New York, and Cincinnati all won.

Today

Giants are idle as today's game is postponed as well (unless the test turns out to be a false positive). Best guess is a doubleheader tomorrow and a game Monday. It's also possible one of these games might be rescheduled for the Oracle Park series at season's end.

Miami hosts Philadelphia, Milwaukee has the Cubs at home, Cincinnati is at St Louis and the Mets are at Buffalo against Toronto. 

Off To The Races

The Cardinals have dropped to 19-19, a worse record than the Giants and Miami, but still good enough for second place in the Central. The Brewers and the Reds thus have, as they say, "options."  Milwaukee is only one game behind. Ironically, the Reds are helping the team ahead of them when they beat the other team ahead of them. 

Meanwhile, Miami has a golden opportunity to move ahead of the Phillies in this weekend home series; they're only half a game back. The Mets are within two and a half.  They got options, too.

San Diego's five and a half-game lead over the Giants is probably too much to overcome, so the Giants and Rockies have only one shot at this postseason. But we could see "Philadelphia" and "St Louis" replace "Miami" and "Milwaukee" on that leaderboard (followerboard?) in the next couple of days. 

Friday, September 11, 2020

	W-L	GB
Miami	20-19		Lead Giants by .002
GIANTS	23-22		Must split this series
Colorado	20-23	2	Angels in town
Milwaukee	19-22	2	Cubs can fatten their lead
New York	20-24	2 1/2	"Niagara Falls!---"
Cincinnati	19-25	3 1/2	Killer loss at Wrigley Field

Yesterday

Giants lost the opener at San Diego, 6-1.

Miami defeated Philadelphia with a walk-off hit in the ninth, 7-6.

Cincinnati lost at Chicago. The rest of the field was idle. 

Today

Giants at San Diego; 6:10 PM PDT. Johnny Cueto goes up against Garrett Richards, who five years ago looked to be one of the next Great Young Pitchers. Then a series of injuries derailed his career and he hasn't been the same since. Nor have the Angels, for whom he then pitched. He's now 32, and we wish him all the success in the world-- next week.

Miami hosts Philadelphia. The Rockies welcome those same Angels. Milwaukee has the division-leading Cubs at home. New York is in Buffalo to play the homeless Blue Jays, and Cincinnati, fighting for their lives, have a tough row to hoe at division rival St Louis.   

Last Night's Game

It was a rather perfunctory affair compared to the growing excitement that's accompanied the Giants' recent surge. Donovan (3-for-4) Solano and Wilmer Flores (home run, double), accounted for what offense there was, counterbalanced by three ground-ball double plays. Drew Smyly, who relieved the ineffective Trevor Cahill, pitched four innings, striking out eight while allowing one earned run (and one unearned). It seems clear from here that Cahill is not right and probably needs the IL; Smyly would seem a logical choice to replace him. San Diego, meanwhile, divvied up the pitching among seven guys. It was 4-1 after three and just sort of muddled along from there.

They're all big this time of year, but having lost the opener, it's imperative the Ginats answer back tonight and banish all thought of a disastrous sweep. Johnny Cueto's two most recent starts, both against Arizona, have been good. He hasn't had an assignment like this since Game One of the 2016 NLDS; it's time to step up.  

Yesterday the Giants parted ways with Pablo Sandoval, whom they first signed as a 17-year-old kid in 2003, and whose heroics are an indelible part of Giants history.  He has three rings. He had what may have been the biggest hit of the 2010 NLCS after a season of disappointment. He was the MVP of the 2012 World Series, tying one of the all-time Series records with three home runs in Game One. He caught the popup that clinched the 2014 World Series with Madison Bumgarner on the mound and the tying run on third. Less remembered, perhaps, is that Sandoval had 12 hits and a .429 average in that Series, and if not for "Bum" he would have been a Series MVP candidate. (Oddly enough, Hunter Pence also had 12 hits in that Series. Pence, too, was sadly given his release earlier this year.)  

Pable Sandoval was also the Giants' MVP in 2009 when he alone seemed to carry that undernourished offense into contention-- .330, 25 homers, 90 RBI, .943 OPS. He had another big year in 2011, trying to make up for Buster Posey's season-ending injury. After that he settled in to a solid groove for three years, with those magnificent postseason flourishes. Beloved as the "Kung Fu Panda" by Giants fans, he then shocked us all by signing a mega-deal with Boston for 2015; at least one Bay Area DJ reportedly had Steve Miller's "Take the Money and Run" on nonstop play after the news came in. 

Never svelte, but still a fine athlete and agile in the field as a Giant, Sandoval in Boston came to epitomize the nouveau-riche lazy ballplayer. His weight went way up, his stats went way down, injuries followed, and after two years of this the Red Sox cut him loose early in 2017, swallowing the money rather than letting him take up a lineup spot.  Bobby Evans immediately signed him for the minimum, and in the midst of the Giants' worst season in thirty years it seemed like yet another grim joke to be played on the fans. Howls of "Traitor!" came from the stands as well as from social media.  But over the next two years, the Panda quietly rehabilitated himself as a super-utility player, pinch-hitter, and even a pitcher! Last year he put up a 1.5 WAR in 296 at-bats with a .820 OPS. He was all the way back, not just in our hearts but on the field. 

His second San Francisco farewell has been gracious, humble, and classy. He knew it was getting to be time to go, and when the team signed Justin Smoak last week, the message was clear.  The longest-tenured San Francisco Giant will be missed by all  who favor the orange and black, for his irrepressible spirit, his winning attitude, and the historic moments where he rose to the occasion on baseball's biggest stage. Vaya con Dios, Pablo Sandoval.

About a year after we fled California and established in Virginia, we took a drive up near Shanksville, Penmnsylvania, to visit the Flight 93 Memorial Park. If you haven't been there, this is a good time to go. You have to drive, which keeps you away from crowds, and except for days like today, it's rarely crowded. And it is open every day.  There will be a lot of 9-11 memorial activity next year, so between now and then consider a quiet contemplative visit to this place of honor. And consider those "ordinary people" who made a heroic stand worthy of the greatest warriors. Would you-- would I-- summon up such courage in similar circumstance? These are the questions that come to mind on this tragic anniversary.  God bless America.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

 

	W-L	GB
GIANTS	23-21		Now comes the real challenge.
Miami	19-19		Braves evidently had enough
Colorado	20-23	1 1/2	SD tightening their grip
Milwaukee	19-22	1 1/2	Explosive end to losing skid
New York	20-24	2	Conforto's catch sparks rally
Cincinnati	19-24	2 1/2	Bauer shuts out Cubs

Yesterday

Giants bombarded Seattle, 10-1, completing a 5-1 homestand.

Miami was overwhelmed by Atlanta, 29-9, the most runs ever given up (or scored) by a NL team.

Colorado lost again at San Diego.

Everyone else won. The Brewers awakened from their coma with a 19-0 walloping of the Tigers in Detroit, New York edged out the Orioles, and the Reds won at Wrigley Field.

Today

Giants begin a four-game series at San Diego. Trevor Cahill may start if he feels up to it; Drew Smyly, fresh off the IL, may go instead. Chris Paddack, who pitched well against the Giants earlier this season, starts for the Padres.

Miami opens a series with Philadelphia at home; Cincinnati finishes up at Chicago. Everyone else is idle.

Last Night's Game

Mike Yastrzemski launched a three-run homer off lefty Nick Margevicius in the third, and the Giants never looked back. Trevor Anderson pitched six three-hit shutout innings, and it was 7-0 by the time he departed. Evan Longoria, who is up to .291, drove in three runs on two singles. He has 24 RBI in 37 games.   Joey Bart was 2-for-4 and is up to .283. Brandon (1.051) Belt drew his daily walk and "drove" in a run with it. 

And Now...

You can say the stretch drive really begins at this moment. The Giants are at San Diego for the first of a four-game set that will do much to determine both teams' fortunes this year. The Padres are just as hot as the Giants: 8-2 over their last ten (and so are the Dodgers; the NL West has the three hottest teams in baseball). They have a four-and-one-half-game lead over the Giants for second place in the division and the automatic playoff berth that comes with it. Should the Giants win three of four, that margin would be two-and-a-half and we'd have a race for second. A split would be just fine as far as San Diego are concerned, and, though they don't want it, the Giants would probably take it as well. Having a lead in the wild-card race at this point is infinitely better than being among the four teams scrambling below to stay ahead of each other and catch those in front. A .500 record the rest of the way would leave the Giants at 31-29; that will probably be enough to get them in. You don't want to say this stuff in the clubhouse, but out here on the internet we're not so constrained.  The going is about to get tougher, so it's a good thing the Giants "got going" three weeks ago.