No Homers

It's amazing how good a game can feel when your chosen team has their biggest single inning offensive outburst in the first inning.

It was a weird game in general. The Giants played sort of terribly, the Jays (for once) caught a lot of breaks, a couple of Cy Young winning chuckers battled against each other and Maicer Izturis tried to steal third. With a left handed Colby Rasmus at the plate, which gave the overwhelmingly capable Buster Posey a clear and unobstructed view. Gibby later called it a "miscommunication of signs" but at the time, he made this face:

I won't jump to hard on Izturis (lots of runs and solid starting pitching makes me generous), but it was pretty funny that no one would make eye contact on the bench.

R.A. Dickey, pitching with a cracked fingernail, was not as efficient as he'd like to be, with 115 pitches over six innings.

“We've been playing better baseball,” Dickey said. “Outside of a couple of plays tonight, I feel we were a pretty good baseball team tonight. We pitched well. We played pretty good defence. We hit with runners in scoring position. We got a lot of two-out hits. We did a lot of good things tonight. And that’s what we've seen more and more of over the course of the last week and a half to two weeks.”

So what you are saying is good pitching, good defense and timely hitting wins baseball games.

Melky Cabrera, hitting leadoff, had himself a game last night versus his old team, going 4 for 5. As was well documented, Cabrera was leading the league in hitting while playing for the Giants last summer, before getting suspended for PEDs. The Giants went on to win the World Series and hipster baseball fans across the land rejoiced. Giants' manager Bruce Bochy gave Cabrera his World Series ring in the clubhouse, privately. And for whatever reason, there is drama.  This reminds me a lot of when Colby Rasmus was traded from the Cardinals in 2011 and even after St.Louis won the World Series that year, the beat writers continue to harp on him.

Let it go. Flags Fly Forever.

One of the interesting things last night was that the Jays scored 10 runs without the benefit of the homer. Which, naturally, brought the "homers kill rallies" tweet debates back to life. I was glad to see the diversity of offense presented, but I wouldn't have been mad about a homer or two mixed in. As I've said before, they don't kill rallies. They are the exclamation point of a rally.

I'm not mentioning that ninth inning, because it didn't happen. Totally unnecessary walks preceding 3-run Panda homers will not make you friends, Brad Lincoln.  But I will say that people should stop calling for Casey Janssen every time things get a little difficult or hard to watch. There was still a massive lead and two outs.  If you break Casey Janssen, he can't come out to play anymore. 

I'm trying to not make this blog overly SOSHed, but during the Sox game in Tampa last night (which the Rays won 5-3), there was an extensive discussion about moving the Rays out of their horrible stadium, to Montreal. Way to keep things interesting, Bostonians.