squally1313

We are absolutely fine. Seriously..plan their pitchers for the rest of the game. Try to keep a straight face.

Every time they show Hendricks walking off the mound, I can't decide if I see more 2003 Conor oberst or the weird brother from wedding crashers.

Yeah take a look through the Giants bullpen stats and it gets hilarious trying to figure out how they fill 7 innings. Unless Matt Moore is about to come in this is about to get ugly.

Nice call smoltz

This very mortal looking Clayton Kershaw is a pretty encouraging development.

This has been a really interesting game to watch. The field is worse than what you'd see at your local park district. Just the whole setting is really...unique, I guess is the best/nicest way to say it. Plus some Cuban guy just spiked one of our guys in the head (I know basically nothing about American soccer outside of the basics) and the color guy has been ripping into the ref for the last 5 minutes. Plus the hot mic caught jurgen screaming 'are you horsefeathering blind' at the ref.

No Hammel, no Caesar.

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I guess it depends on who's expectations you're talking about. I don't think we were considered an underdog nationally, but I could see the different expectations just because it was a year before Theo's plan was supposed to pay off, so it was a free year or whatever. Either way, I thought we were better than the Mets (and cardinals) last year, and we're better than the giants this year. Hopefully that'll play out starting tomorrow.

How so? We were the best team in the national league (if not all of baseball, don't remember anything about the American League) going into the playoffs. We're the best team now.

Oh yeah, so this is why the Red Sox didn't just blow everyone away.

I couldn't tell exactly what roster set-up/playing time distribution they were using, because towards the bottom they had the Dodgers at 117 wins, but I assume the main idea behind it was a healthy Kershaw, Hill, and Maeda pitching 75% of the games, as opposed to 60%.

Soler's numbers against Cueto look really solid. Do we want him out of the game? I could buy Cog's .798 OPS in 20 PAs as meaningful or maybe Javy's 4 Ks in 6 PAs but I wouldn't take much from Georgie's 2-3 with a double. Personally I just want to see the Voltron defense in as much as possible. Coghlan's bat is preferable to Javy's against a righty, but I don't think it makes up for the defensive downgrade, especially against a team that puts so many balls in play. Plus that gives you another lefty off the bench with Montero to make it less likely we'll see LaStella. Or if Joe wants to use Contreras as a pinch hitter and therefore Miggy has to be the backup catcher.

Hasn't Baez been playing third for most of Lester's starts, which would push Bryant to left field for game 1?

His postseason last year was strange. He had 2 great starts, one mediocre start and 1 disastrous start. 9 IP 1 ER, 2 H, 3 BB in the World Series was pretty damn good. Also even though the combined numbers suck (5.40 ERA in 4 starts last year) his OPS against was only .588 during those starts. I look at Cueto is a very good sometimes great pitcher, but he doesn't scare me in the way that Bumgarner does. We can hit him. It might only be a couple of runs but if we can get him out of the game early enough and Lester is on, I'm not terribly concerned with facing him. Normally I'd be a little concerned with the potential of losing 1 of the first 2 games at home, especially with Bumgarner on the mound in game 3, but I love the pitching matchup in game 4, so at worst we should get to game 5 barring standard baseball randomness, and again I am not particularly intimidated facing Cueto in that game. Yeah, .588 is pretty good, but it seems like it was driven largely by a .206 BABIP, which I can't see him repeating. Ks were down, walks were up, fly balls and home runs up a little. Again, small sample size, but if we're going to give Bumgarner credit for stepping his game up in the postseason (when in 2014 and last night his peripherals actually look worse than his career numbers), we can maybe say Cueto takes a small step back come October.

These last two nights were a good tune up after not having had much emotional investment in baseball over the last month or so. Going to be a long time until tomorrow night (that 7:00-8:00 hour tomorrow is going to be torture and I'll probably just be drinking continuously). I know this is meatbally, but Cueto has basically been the anti-Bumgarner in the playoffs so far in his career. Crowd should be plenty rowdy and can hopefully get in his head.

Saturday is 2 days rest. Who is "they?" Yeah, not my best opening sentence. I was following the Fangraphs chat yesterday and Cameron and the other guy both thought that would be the case, but they were thinking about it as starting on three days, so maybe all of us were off. For Bumgarner to pitch twice in this series, he's going to need to pitch on two days rest at least once. If that happens, I'm not super concerned.

They're already talking about Bumgarner going Saturday on three days rest, and then presumably going game 5 too, which means they'd probably throw Cueto in game 4 on short rest. If that's what you think you have to resort to in order to have a chance, well...good luck. High of 70 on Friday and high of 68 on Saturday. Dong them into oblivion the first two games while the defense shuts down their feeble attempts at offense, and Jake will take advantage of whatever they call Safe-Co now and shut them down in game three to end this even year [expletive] and reignite God mode.

The Giants are going to be really easy to hate, which I appreciate.

The Giants leader in home runs was Belt with all of 17. Their lineup of no-power, all-contact guys going up against the best defensive team of all time? Sure, let's horsefeathering go.

Welp...bring it Cueto.

Getting guys tired. They're probably stretching and whatnot between innings and stuff so getting warm quickly shouldn't be a problem at this point. But just like, play catch or whatever. Have a lefty throwing right now to at least make the Giants think about who to put out as a pinch hitter. I'm sure you're right to a certain extent, but on a colder night like this...just seems weird.

Another thing I don't get since I've only managed games in video games....how do you not have both bullpen mounds occupied at all times from here on out? Like what's the harm?

I can see that, but isn't it a sport driven more by 'luck' than most others? Not saying imperfect umpires are the equivalent of a bloop single, but something about a pitch on the corner having some percentage of being called a strike, and having small ways to improve that percentage, kinda speaks to the same thing for me. A strike is a strike and a ball is a ball. We have the technology to make it a uniform thing now. It should be done. It's not a luck or grey area or nostalgic thing or whatever you want to spin it as. Yeah, I was making counter arguments to myself as soon as I posted that one. I'll never be able to make a logical argument to support it, I just think the drama generated in the split second between watching the pitch and waiting for the umps call adds to the experience. But it's probably just one of my first 'old man' beliefs.

In a sport that requires so much precision in so many ways, it's weird that variability is accepted, much less desired by some. I can see that, but isn't it a sport driven more by 'luck' than most others? Not saying imperfect umpires are the equivalent of a bloop single, but something about a pitch on the corner having some percentage of being called a strike, and having small ways to improve that percentage, kinda speaks to the same thing for me.