Welcome to the Ryan Klesko School of Base running, where base hits turn into adventures.

For those that missed Klesko’s marvelous slide into third for a triple, you can check out the highlights on the Giants main page, here. The article’s headline made me grimace, as it’s title of ‘Gritty Giants get second win over Cards’ contains the most overused word of recent baseball vernacular, gritty. I blame Eckstein. I don’t think we can even call what Klesko did a slide, it was more one half belly flop other half just plain falling down. It was ugly, even painful looking, but it worked. We can dog Animal Power all we want for that slide, but it’s no where close to the worst baserunning ever.

Beating the World Champs is great but did anyone actually see the Cardinals lineup yesterday? When Scott Spiezio is hitting 4th and Aaron Miles, David Eckstein, and So Taguchi are also starting, scoring runs are going to be a problem. If you take Pujols out of that lineup, the starting infield looks like something out of the late 1800′s.

Here’s some observations from the game:

• Noah pitched a fine game. His first win of the season yielded a line of (7 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 4 SO, 1 HR). One thing I’ve noticed this year while watching Noah pitch is that he seems to be moving away from his changeup even more. The curveball seems to be his new pitch. I only noticed a few changeups yesterday.

• Aurilia continues his hot start with a 1-3 effort that included a walk and a 2-run double that put the Giants on top. His hitting streak is up to 12 games now.

• Klesko had a great game too, hitting the aforementioned triple, a double, and a single in 4 ABs. I’ve been surprised with how good Klesko has looked early on after missing just about all of 2006. Bochy needs to find a way to get Klesko in more against RHP.

The Giants continue to make steady progress back to the .500 mark. A win tonight against the D-Backs would place them only 1 game under .500. The Giants will send the resurrected man Russ Ortiz to the mound tonight against his former team. The D-Backs will counter with Doug Davis. I think the key for the Giants tonight will be patience. In 2006 Davis walked 102 batters in 203.1 innings for a BB/9 of 4.51. So far in ’07, Davis has struggled to find the zone walking 12 in 16 innings pitched. A smart team would take advantage of this.