Playing well just as break arrives
Farhan Zaidi has a great metric to judge how the Giants are playing. It could be called the Bruce Bochy Scowl Index.
“We’ve seen Boch smile a few times the last week, which is nice, a sign that things are going well,” the president of baseball operations said Sunday morning. “Don’t get me wrong, he still mostly gives me the look where it feels like he’s piercing a hole through my skull.”
Zaidi’s skull has been safer lately because the Giants are finally playing good baseball. They were more competitive, scored more runs and won more games toward the end of the first half, which ended with a crackling 10 victory against the Cardinals.
Evan Longoria hit his fifth homer of the week to break up a Jack Flaherty nohitter in the seventh inning, and Jeff Samardzija delivered his second straight superb start.
The Giants went into the AllStar break 4148 after win
ning seven of their final nine games and 15 of 25 over what easily was their best fourweek stretch of 2019.
Their season has started to look like a Broadway play. Intermission comes at a dramatic point in the plot, sending the audience into the break unsure how it will be resolved.
The conflict in this tale is whether the Giants will do enough to prevent Zaidi to go into sell mode before the July 31 trade deadline. The Giants have played well enough to force him into a “let’s see” mode.
Samardzija, who pitched 15 innings and allowed two runs over his two victories in the final week, sounds confident the team’s upswing will continue when the season resumes in Milwaukee on Friday night.
“July, August is when all these old bodies start warming up, breaking up all those little things that are going on,” Samardzija said. “You get nice and loose. Hopefully, we keep playing well and hitting the ball hard. It’s a lot of fun to watch this offense right now.”
Sunday's offense consisted of two hits, the Longoria homer with one out in the seventh and a floater to short left field by the next hitter, Alex Dickerson. Longoria jumped on a spinning slider and sent it deep into the leftfield seats for his 12th homer of the season, but only his second at Oracle Park.
“I haven’t hit many nodoubters here,” Longoria said, “but I knew that one was gone.”
Samardzija’s day was done by then. He cruised for six innings and needed a huge assist from Kevin Pillar to preserve his shutout after Paul DeJong’s leadoff single.
Pillar raced into Triples Alley and made one of his best catches with the Giants, diving to prevent a sure threebagger by Paul Goldschmidt that would have given the Cardinals a 10 lead, with a good chance for more.
Sam Dyson struck out three of his four batters in the eighth and Will Smith ended a perfect first half — 23 saves in 23 chances — on his way out the door toward Cleveland and the AllStar Game.
The 4147 record is not good. Fans who expected 100 losses might think it adequate. Bochy does not.
“I set the bar higher than that. Trust me,” he said. “With the experience we have here, the resumes and DNA, no. But at the same time, we could show we are better than we did in the this first half, and I believe we will.
“It will be up to us to prove the naysayers wrong. We still have a lot of games left.”
Zaidi said the goal on Opening Day was to play “meaningful baseball” as deep into the season as possible.
“Meaningful” is in the eye of the beholder. The Giants’ 51⁄2game deficit for the second wildcard spot does not seem impossible to overcome, but they would have to leapfrog seven teams.
But if “meaningful” means the faithful can visit the park or watch the Giants on TV confident that they won’t get shut out and can compete in every game, they finally have accomplished their mission after a lot of bad baseball.