And now the Giants interrupt your regularly scheduled handegg contest with these important messages.

Kershaw scratched, Blanton starting.

— Alex Pavlovic (@AlexPavlovic) September 9, 2012

Kershaw has hip injury but expects to start Tuesday against the Diamondbacks.

— Alex Pavlovic (@AlexPavlovic) September 9, 2012

Zito-Blanton. Now THAT is how you steal the spotlight from the first NFL Sunday.

— Alex Pavlovic (@AlexPavlovic) September 9, 2012

Can you imagine that? Barry Zito versus Joe Blanton on ESPN? And a big rivalry game like this?

Giants and Dodgers best be trollin’ the nation here. They best be trollin’.

Madison Bumgarner: nice to children, but not the Dodger children. (Photo: imovermyhead/Flickr)

I’m going to start you off with a mind-blowing piece of trivia from the always-excellent Giants Nirvana:

This was the first occurrence in baseball history in which both starters have gone 8+ innings with 10+ strikeouts and zero walks.

— Giants Nirvana (@GiantsNirvana) August 21, 2012

Holy crap, people. Holy crap. We are living in an age of baseball wonders, and two of those wonders are Clayton Kershaw and Madison Bumgarner. Kershaw, of course, is an unspeakable creature of Mordor, with nothing but spite and bile in his heart, as with all Dodgers. But the man can pitch, and pitch he did, contributing his half of the twenty strikeouts and making Buster Posey in particular look pretty silly. It was going to take a miraculous effort to scratch anything across, and while we’ll come back to that in a second, the corollary was that the inexplicably functional Dodgers offense was going to have to be shut down.

And right on cue, Madison Bumgarner. 23-years-old, walking less than two batters a game this season, and spending the dawn of his career casually working the inside corner against right-handed hitters like it ain’t no thang. Tonight, if there was a thang, it was nowhere within Bumgarner’s vicinity. He pounded the corners with his fastball, jammed hitters into feeble groundouts, and relied mostly on an absolutely murderous slider (with even more movement than usual, it seemed) to get nine swinging strikeouts. There was also a strikeout looking, too. It was Hanley Ramirez (on a slider that didn’t dive into the dirt!). That’s never not funny. » Continue reading “Giants Recap: Duel of the Fates”

Challenge accepted. (Photo: Jill Clardy/Flickr)

I almost don’t want to spoil how good that win feels by talking about the details too much, so I won’t.

The Dodgers lost. The Giants won. Clayton Kershaw pitched and gave up earned runs at AT&T Park for the first time since roughly the Reagan administration. Ryan Vogelsong was one bad mother. Melky Cabrera hit the snot out of the ball. Buster Posey continued to have his Havin’ It Meter set to “ain’t”. It was good. It was real good.

Fingers crossed for another Happy Lincecum Day tomorrow and a move into first place.

*The last time the Dodgers were shut out in back to back games in San Francisco was August 15-16, 1987. 

Bochy: “It looked like we skipped spring training.”

— Andrew Baggarly (@CSNBaggs) May 8, 2012

To me it looked like this:

The Giants were bad. So very, very bad. How bad? I tried to use the game to get my reluctant 6 year old to go to sleep. Her reaction? ”The Giants are so bad at playing.” It worked – after 20 minutes she said she’d rather go to bed than watch more of the bad baseball. I should have been so lucky. » Continue reading “Giants Recap: Blergh”

After eight straight wins, and the Giants driving in more runs in the last week than they have all month combined (at least it seemed that way), the Dodgers, well Clayton Kershaw forced the G-men back into reality.

It was yet again a pitching battle, and a one run game, the same old Giants.

In LA, San Francisco lost 2-1 to their bitter rival. Not only is that enough to drop the team spirit, but now the Giants sit five games back from the wildcard spot in the National League, and six games from the NL West top position. With only eight games remaining, the playoff hopes are dwindling with each out.

It is possible for the Giants to make the postseason; it just is not all that probable right now.

The final score revealed the pitching battle as Tim Lincecum tossed seven decent innings for the Giants, while Kershaw earned his 20^th win of the season on seven and a third innings. Lincecum threw five strikeouts and gave up three walks. Yet, Kershaw bested him in each category, six K’s and two walks—just enough to give the Dodgers the winning edge.

Timmy gave up eight hits (Kershaw gave up six), including a solo homerun to Jerry Sands in the second inning to give the Dodgers a 2-0 lead.

Chris Stewart produced the lone score for the Giants in the eight on a homerun over the center field wall.

There is just a little hope left that the Giants will make the playoffs

The G-men have two more games in Los Angeles before they head to Arizona for three games. Every game, every at bat, every pitch, it all counts from here on out—there is no room for error.

The Los Angeles Dodgers came to AT&T Park Friday night and scraped out a 2-1 win over the stumbling San Francisco Giants. Giants nemesis Clayton Kershaw (18-5, 2.36) triumphed once again over the defending World Series champions.

The loss was particularly gut-wrenching because Linceceum deserved a win. San Francisco’s ace (12-12, 2.68) pitched a gem. He allowed one run on six hits. Yet his effort was squandered by the Giants anemic bats. The team managed to get an insufficient number of hits (3) and runs (1).

Lincecum held the Dodgers scoreless until the eighth inning. He was one out from escaping the inning when matters took a turn for the worse. L.A.’s Matt Kemp singled on a rolling ball that catcher Chris Stewart hoped would go foul. It didn’t. Thus, Kemp was on board with two outs. The next two batters singled and, just like that, the Dodgers tied the game, 1-1.

In the ninth, San Francisco’s Santiago Casilla (2-2, 1.45) gave up the winning run and got the loss. The run was scored, ironically, by the unpopular former Giant Eugenio Velez who entered the game as a pinch-runner.

Perhaps the Giants aren’t fully responsible for their quiet bats. There is the matter of Clayton Kershaw. The last time he lost to the Giants was August 1, 2010. He is now 5-0 with a 1.01 ERA against San Francisco. Impressive.