A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball

This is really a fascinating 2 game series vs Toronto if you just look at the pitching match ups. Tonight it’s Josh Johnson vs Timmy. JJ was 15-5 in 2009 and then led the league with a 2.30 ERA in 2010. Alas, he couldn’t keep his arm healthy. If I’m not mistaken, he took the *rest-route* instead of surgery. Anyway, if this were 2009 you’d be seeing a real showdown……

Dickey goes against Zito on Wednesday. Dickey is probably the weirdest pitching phenomenon to literally come out of nowhere only to flame out nearly as fast as he arrived. Last year, at age 37 and after pitching since 2001, he won 20 games and the NL Cy Young. I watched a couple of his games last year and was like “how has he not been doing this since the beginning of his career?” Last year he had an ERA of 2.73. This year it’s 5.18. Has it all been due to the move to the big, bad AL East? He’s had a couple of nagging injuries but nothing that would explain the drop off from last year. Although nothing really explained last year so who knows what’s going on with him.

Barry Zito pitching at ATT is clearly the most likely pitcher of the four to pitch a great game in this series. Although I do think Dickey getting back to an NL park might energize him a bit. JJ is +120 to get injured before the 4th inning. And Lincecum will do the things he normally does to *buffalo* his coaches.

And The Melkman returns to SF. How will he be received? My guess is that he’ll get a nice, polite applause. He contributed to last year’s title. We won the World Series and he’s moved on to what he was before he took steroids: a journeyman outfielder. I don’t wish him well but I’m not pissed off at him the way I was last year. Time to let all that go…….