…has a career ERA+ of 105, though most of his best work has come out of the bullpen.
…like most pitchers, has a much better strikeout rate as a reliever than a starter. For Correia, it’s the difference between an average and above-average strikeout rate.
…is already in his arbitration years. He’s only making a little over $1M this season, but he’ll probably be in line to make somewhere between $5M and $8M combined over the next two seasons.
…has Cory Bailey as one of his Baseball Reference comparables. Cory Bailey! I totally forgot about that guy. Bailey was supposed to be John Johnstone before John Johnstone was John Johnstone, but then he wasn’t. But I digress....
Last night was within the range of expected Correia starts. He pitched good, but not great, and got through six innings. You could say that Correia is the very model of a modern average innings-eater (of repertoire slider, change, and hittable-yet-decent heater). He has value to a team when he’s healthy, but he’ll never make the All-Star team. If he’s your ace, you’re in trouble. If he’s your fifth starter, you’re doing quite well for yourself. In cereal terms, Correia is a bowl of Corn Flakes. Tim Lincecum is a bowl of magic Cap'n Crunch that doesn't cut the roof of your mouth all to hell, but I digress....
Correia will never bring back fair value in a trade. Another organization wouldn’t give up a decent and young position player, especially one who is ready to start, for Correia. But if the Giants don’t get a player back who fits that description, why would it be worthwhile to trade Correia at all? He has more value to the Giants than would a utility player or questionable prospect. Not that the Giants should be looking to trade Correia right now, of course. This is all theoryland stuff.
My crazy idea, then: What about a three- or four-year extension for Correia? Buy out his arbitration years, and give him some instant security. A three-year deal shouldn’t cost more than $10M total, and perhaps the Giants could include a fourth-year option. Consider it overpriced mediocrity insurance. The premiums might cost a bit more than the team had planned for, but it could prevent a Carlos Silva-type deal in the future. If Correia never throws another pitch, the contract wouldn’t make a huge difference against future roster building efforts, but if he pitches at a league-average level, he’ll be very cost efficient.
Just a thought. He's a handy guy to have around, but maybe it's a little silly to talk extension with a pitcher who has thrown all of 50 innings after returning from injury.
In typical Giants fashion, our hometown favorites came back from being down 3-0, and then 5-2 on two dramatic home runs, by John Bowker and Ray Durham respectively. Once again in typical Giants fashion, we managed to instantly negate any hope for a win by promptly coughing up the game the very next inning.
Allow [...] - [Read more]
Warning: The following post is a ponderous and pretentious mess that aspires to be one of those crappy "Why Do We Like Them Sports?"-essays. As such, I've condensed the entire post into two sentences at the very end. Please go straight to the end of the post if you know what's good for you.
Every year that I've followed the Giants, the season has ended in agony. Sometimes its a dull cocktail of apathy and disgust (the last three seasons), and sometimes its a sudden drop of a toaster in the bathtub of hope (1997-2004). Yet every year, I come back. I pin my hopes on teenagers in Oregon and Georgia to help in five years, and I pin them on twenty-somethings in San Francisco to help immediately. It never works. It always ends in disappointment. But I keep returning. I'm stupid like that.
The reason for this maudlin tone: Baron Davis. The roster machinations of a basketball franchise are much different than those of a baseball franchise, so it isn't as if there's some grand point to make that relates to the Giants losing Barry Bonds or something. It's just another example of a franchise I love emerging from the muck, almost achieving something amazing, and unceremoniously tumbling back down to join the rest of the unwashed heathens. It's like when Icarus kept pushing that big ball of wax up a hill, only to have the ball roll back down to the bottom, where the minotaur, who used a ball of twine to follow him, is waiting to eat him for all of eternity because he stole fire from the gods. It will never end.
Then Matt Cain throws a great game. He had a hopping fastball...disappearing change...tight slider...it was fantastic. And I realize that I'm a weenie for thinking that anything that doesn't result in a championship isn't valid. I'll always have Cain's game last night, or Lincecum's game against Oakland. I'll always have Baron Davis going nutty against Dallas, which was directly responsible for me hopping around my apartment like some sort of coked up gibbon.
Sometimes I get too caught up with the whole championship thing. The Giants are probably a few years from ever getting those hopes up again. The Warriors probably are too. So it makes absolutely no sense to dwell on championships right now, if ever. In the meantime: huzzah for Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Monta Ellis, Fred Lewis, Brandan Wright, Andris Biedrins, Jonathan Sanchez, Anthony Randolph, Madison Bumgarner, et al. I'll be thrilled to watch them about 40% of the time in a bad year, and thrilled to watch them about 60% of the time in a good year. And the odds are excellent that the season will end in agony every time. I just have to be less of a weenie about it.
So to sum up: Baron Davis made me sad, but then Matt Cain made me happy! I like Matt Cain.
Well it looks like the ads I put out on milk cartons worked. Here I thought that Real Matt Cain had run away from home, but as it turns out he really was just taking an extended leave of absence. After getting roughed up for four runs in 5 innings on 8 hits [...] - [Read more]
Ladies and gentlemen, you have been deceived. Like myself, you’ve been given false hope, lied to, and had your dreams and aspirations crushed. I’m speaking of course, of Barry Zito’s latest outing, in which he surrendered 5 runs (4 earned) in 5 innings with 5 walks, and a whopping 6 K’s. As the game progressed [...] - [Read more]
Before the season started, we had some kind of indication that the offense would be bad. That's still true, even though it’s much, much better than expected. Heck, almost every non-shortstop is a league-average hitter. We also had some kind of indication that the young pitching would determine if a sub-.500 season would be considered a "success." That's still the cases, and the fine pitching of Jonathan Sanchez has made the expected success even successier. The season has gone as we expected, more or less. We are who we thought we were.
So there weren’t too many sabers to rattle in the winter or spring. There was only the redundancy of Dave Roberts. The crusade started here, and the theme was repeated ad nauseum after that. In an organization with two veteran starting-quality outfielders and two outfield prospects with nothing left to prove in the minors, the last thing the team needed was a non-starting-quality veteran outfielder to gobble up at-bats.
The crusade was postponed, however, when Dave Roberts was injured. Note that this was never something I wished for – it’s beyond ghoulish to hope a player gets injured – but it sure was the simplest solution. Roberts went down, which forced Fred Lewis to get the bulk of the at-bats in left field. Lewis has been a league-average left fielder, and it sure seems like there’s room for improvement in his game. With the emergence of Lewis, the Giants have one less roster spot to worry about when trying to put together a winning team for the future.
Roberts is about to start a minor-league rehab assignment. He’ll be back soon, and this will present the biggest test of Bruce Bochy’s Giants career. With the other veteran v. whippersnapper debates, Bochy could always hide behind the "we’re trying to win ballgames"-argument. As in, yeah, I could get Bowker some at-bats against lefties, but Rich Aurilia is probably the better hitter against lefties, so I’ll start Aurilia in those situations. He really believed that, and, heck, he’s been right for the most part. Ray Durham, Rich Aurilia, and Randy Winn have been assets to the 2008 Giants.
With Lewis and Roberts, though, things are easy:
Fred Lewis is currently hitting better than Roberts has ever hit in his career.
Fred Lewis is a left-handed hitter. Roberts is too. There is no reason to sit one in favor of the other because of platoon considerations.
Fred Lewis is part of the Giants’ future, and Roberts isn’t.
Poof. Self-created problem solved in three bulletpoints. Roberts deserves the same amount of playing time that Brian Horwitz has received. Fourth- or fifth-outfielder at-bats, at best. It makes sense in the present, and it makes sense for the future.
So let’s see how deep Bruce Bochy’s veteran appreciation runs. Will he split time evenly between Lewis and Roberts? Or has Roberts been pipped past the point of no return, even by Giant-standards?
I’m curiously optimistic. I think Roberts starts once a week – spotting Randy Winn and Aaron Rowand just as much as Lewis – while popping up mostly as a pinch-hitter or runner. I wouldn’t be surprised to be wrong, though.
With the vanquishing of the Athletics, the Giants cap off a nine game roadtrip with a blow-out in which they score 11 times as many runs as they did on Saturday. Color me optimistic about the Giants’ chances in the NL West, as they pulled within five games of the .500 D-Backs. In [...] - [Read more]
If God were a pitcher, he would want half the talent Tim Lincecum has. Call it hyperbole but…well you’d be right it’s hyperbole, but the point here is that Tim Lincecum is very good. So good in fact, that in just his second season in the Majors he’s mowing hitters down like a John Deere [...] - [Read more]
Pre-game trivia time on this sunny and smoky Lincecum Day.
The Best Damn Sports Show recently aired a show of the 50 most bizarre sports plays in history. The Giants figured prominently in four of the 50 entries, including two of the top ten.
Name those plays. Bonus points for singling out the two that were in the top ten.
After last night’s snooze-fest, Comcast Sports Net Bay Area Net Sports Cast aired this game from 2000, and danged if I didn’t get a little misty-eyed. The team had just started their ridiculous post-June run of ’27 Yankees-esque domination, and Armando Rios kept the magic going with a walk-off against John Wetteland. It all made me realize how much I loved that team. Examples:
Even though Barry Bonds was 0-4 in the game that Comcast just aired, it was so comforting to watch him swing a bat. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed that this season. Another thing I’ve missed: an actual lineup. It’ll be a long time until we see anything approach the production of the Bonds-Kent-Burks combo. The two biggest lineup problems were Marvin Benard (.342 OBP) and Bill Mueller (.333 OBP), both of whom would have been among the team leaders last year.
The pitching staff was young and effective. There was reason to be excited for the present and reason to be giddy about the future. Russ Ortiz would continue to pitch like he did in the second half! Shawn Estes was maddening but good! Livan Hernandez was an innings-eating ace! Kirk Rueter was Kirk Rueter, which used to be a very nice thing! There weren’t any stars, but it was a solid rotation 1-5.
Ye gods, what a bench. Everyone had a specific purpose, and they all filled their roles perfectly. Calvin Murray was a right-handed hitter who could cover center and steal a base. Armando Rios was the lefty with power who could spot Ellis Burks’s knees of scientific wonder and pinch-hit late in the game. Ramon Martinez was good enough to handle the middle infield, and, for that season at least, he was a hitter worthy of a starting job somewhere. Felipe Crespo was the greatest weapon of all: a switch-hitter with cove power and defensive versatility.
Of course, they were probably all roided up to the gills, but that’s a post for another time.
The park was still brick-and-mortar euphoria for anyone who had ever been to Candlestick. It’s still one of the best ballparks ever, but there was something about that first season. Not only that, but the funky dimensions probably had something to do with the absurd home/road splits (55-26). The Giants figured out how to cover the outfield before the rest of the NL, and it wasn’t really fair.
Barry Bonds’s homer in the 13th-inning of Game 3 against Rick White was a monster, and it was nice to watch the Giants slap 13 hits off of Bobby Jones in Game 4 to move to the NLCS. The sweep of the Cardinals was simple poetry, but the Derek Jeter lineout to Kent in Game 7 of the World Series was poetic justice. The parade down Market Street was like a dream. I made out with Cameron Diaz the whole time. Aquaman was there, too.
Just a few of the reasons why the 2000 team was my favorite of my lifetime. Open Favorite Giants Team of Your Lifetime Thread.
Here at McCovey Chronicles, we're committed to a ecologically sound operation. When intros are used once for a gameday thread and discarded, they invariably end up washing out to sea, where they could damage a coral reef or poison an otter hut. Wait, otter den. Otter hole. Whatever it is that otters live in.
With this in mind, we at McCovey Chronicles strive to recycle our gameday intros over and over and over again, even if we have great new ideas that would absolutely blow you away.
