wonder if pettite's pulling a wagner and hiding an injury from us for half the season before admitting it
Do the fan segments where they have the fans talk annoy anybody else? I'm fairly convinced the Giants are getting a more lenient strike zone than the Astros are. Nice play Berkman.
I'm a very patient person, but leadoff walks from our bullpen have come WAY too often this season. It's completely unacceptable in my opinion
Walks, in general, have hurt this pitching staff all year. Oswalt had awful control yesterday... Pettite today... Qualls, Lidge, and Wheeler the last game... awful awful awful pitching so far on this road trip, with the exception of Taylor's gem in Colorado (minus the leadoff WALK he gave up in the 8th that led to a run).
It does seem that way - but we have walked the fewest batters of any team in the NL (going into today, at least).
Yet they give up the fewest walks in the league. I can think of several big situations with guys on base where they've gotten ahead in the count 0-2, 1-2 & just grooved the next pitch.
That hurts even more then... when you consider that a ton of those "few" walks happened in mid-late game situations that eventually led to losses. Imagine if we were closer to average in starters ERA or walks allowed... where the hell would our record be? Right now, the pitching staff is in need of some consistency... Roy and Andy are having as rough a stretch of any they've had the last two years, you still don't know for sure whether Wandy's success is real, and the league will soon see enough of Buchholz/Nieve to inflict some rookie damage.
Yup. 7th inning and on, we have the 2nd worst ERA in the NL, and we're 10th in the league in walks allowed there. 1st through 6th inning, we're far and away the best in both walks and ERA.
To make it worse, we're 5th in the league in runs scored in the 1-6th innings, but 12th in the 7th or later. Not sure how much it really means statistically though - the Reds, best offense in the NL, are 14th in runs scored in the 7th+ innings, while the Cards (#4 overall) are 15th.
No matter what happens for the rest of the road trip... its clear that while it was fun to get off to the great start, there's still some tweaking left to do on this team. Thankfully, they don't have to play lights-out baseball just to get back into a race... but that doesn't excuse them from developing more of a mental toughness on the road, so that they don't look so lost away from MMP. I'll temper the doomsday response after losses, and the jump for joy response after big wins (got a little too giddy after the STL series)... and simply say that they still are at the early stages of this season, and any jump to conclusion based on today's standings would be idiotic and short-sighted. That being said... an 0-7 road trip would like to be avoided please.
Gallo in another close game... I'd rather have just let Qualls bat. EDIT: And once again, he fails to retire the left-hander... and he gets taken out for Wheeler (who is much better than Gallo against lefties). So, WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST PUT HIM IN TO BEGIN THE INNING?!?
Garner's starting to piss me off more, because he truly believes he'll get lefties out... despite what his career stats over the last 3 years show. Something just tells me that if you're a lefty in the bullpen, no matter how good you are, Garner will put you in to look "smart" in going to the lefty-lefty situation. If they're really set on doing that, Pupurra needs to go out and find a lefty better than Mike Gallo (which really shouldn't be THAT hard), and give him to Garner to play with.
