Age doesn’t mean prone to injury, but ...
The Giants regulars fighting injuries had a relatively good Friday.
Evan Longoria (strained right oblique) took groundballs and reported only minor discomfort when he bent to his right side. Brandon Belt (rightheel inflammation) is ready to play an intrasquad game without running Saturday night. Hunter Pence (rightfoot inflammation) has been cleared to run at full speed.
Manager Gabe Kapler would not rule any of them out for Thursday’s season opener against the Dodgers in Los Angeles.
The common denominator is age. Pence, Longoria and Belt are 37, 34 and 32, respectively.
Age alone does not necessarily make any particular player more injuryprone, but this year bears obvious differences. Players had to ramp up from their winter workouts for four weeks in spring training, shut it down for more than three months, then fire up their bodies again.
It’s too early to compile numbers that show whether older players are losing more days to injury than they would in an ordinary season, but
the question is worth asking and will be examined.
“I get why you’re thinking that and making the correlation. It’s fair,” Kapler said before Friday night’s intrasquad game, while suggesting Belt and Longoria do not fit the norm.
“As a player myself, earlier in my career my body just naturally bounced back after being down an extended period of time,” he said. “Sometimes it took a little longer as I got up there.”
“The players we’re talking about here … are elite athletes who have been among the best of the last 10 years. They’re different, and they’ve demonstrated an ability to bounce back.”
Brady gone: Mike Yastrzemski talked about hitting lefties, the work he was able to do during the coronavirus hiatus with Reds catcher and former Vanderbilt teammate Curt Casali, playing right field when Mauricio Dubon is in center, and so on.
Then, we got to the meat of the interview when the Bostonarea native was asked how his friends and family reacted to Tom Brady leaving the Patriots for Tampa Bay and Cam Newton taking his place.
“Everybody was excited about Newton,” Yastrzemski said. “With Brady the reaction was hit and miss. People are sad, angry and some people are just living on past memories. I was floating in the middle. It hurts. It will be weird not seeing No. 12 being our quarterback, but we’ll get through.”
Crowd noise: The Giants experimented with pipedin crowd noise Friday night now that they have received the standard audio Major League Baseball has sent all 30 teams. They didn’t have the volume cranked up too high and it sounded like, well, pipedin crowd noise.
But the quality was better than the audio the Giants tried earlier this week.
“It didn’t hit the right notes,” Kapler said. “We turned it off fairly quickly.”
As for the seveninning game, Jeff Samardzija did not look particularly strong in three innings. He did not strike out a hitter and allowed two runs, albeit without much hard contact. Tony Watson pitched in a game for the first time this season, spring or summer training, after dealing with a sore shoulder. He struck out Jaylin Davis and Hunter Pence in his inning.
Pence hit his second homer in two days, this one off Andrew Suarez, who then surrendered a monster shot to Joey Bart. The Orange team, which included Pence and Bart, won 43.