Bay City Ball

The Giants split a 4 game series with the Phillies by picking up the last game with a 8-1 win. With a few things going the Giants way, they could have easily swept the series but such is baseball. The biggest contributions come from Barry Zito, who went 6 innings while only giving up one unearned run, and Ryan Klesko, who looked absolutely fabulous hitting a 3-run bomb.

Speaking of Klesko, he’s done amazingly well for a guy that missed all of 2006 with injury problems. For the season he’s hitting (.308/.383/.477) and OPS’ing (.860) and all for a cool 1.5 million dollars. I don’t expect Klesko to keep these numbers up all year long but I think he’ll perform around his career norms of (.281/.372/.507) with maybe a drop in the slugging. He can still get on base and swing the bat though. Bochy should always start him at firstbase against RHP. Always. The other thing that I like about Klesko is that he knows that he’s not going to hit 30 HRS a year anymore and I’ve heard him saying that he just trys to hit line drives now-a-days. Smart hitter.

Barry Zito has lowered his ERA to 3.83 and even though he was in a lot of jams on Monday, he pitched out of all of them when it counted. Watching Zito pitch, I had forgot how good his change-up was and the curveball he threw Chase Utley in the 3rd inning to strike him out looking was cartoon-ish. The official Barry Zito motto should be “Pretty darned good, but not great”. Anyways, it’s been good to see Zito run together a string of quality starts after some early season scuffling. He’s always done better later in the season.

The Giants head into early June still looking for traction, sitting 2 games under the .500 mark. They enter the next series against the Diamondbacks who’ve been playing good baseball and are just .5 games out of first. A sweep, or even taking 2 out of 3 would go a long way to getting the Giants back on track as division contenders. It will be no easy task, as the Giants will face the trio of Johnson-Webb-Hernandez. Let’s go Giants!

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Other News

• John Sickels has a quick piece on college slugger Beau Mills, who some project to go to the Giants at #10 in the draft. Mills is a legitimate hitter that could move quickly through the minors and end up playing first base for the Giants.

• The Rox DFA Steve Finley. Finley was hitting just .181 in 94 ABs with just 1 HR. That 1 HR was against, you guessed it, the Giants. Now thats the Finely I remember.

• Check out Giants Blog ‘Trapped in LA‘ who’s moved into some comfy new dot com threads.