A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball

That game must have made the Nats happy. And Sanchez gets a W against his former team. No Stix email today so I can’t fill up the thread with his melodious mutterings.

Hopefully that’s the only Apple TV game of the year.

Dubs get a nice long layoff. Giants get Washington who they should handle at home. Derby next weekend got my attention. And The Oaks on Friday may be even more exciting. This is my time of year. Reveling.

Dubs advance but the waters are going to get deeper. They got lucky getting to play a team that basically had one true thread throughout the game. I just don’t think they’re going to get to the Finals, but having to play the Celtics and that D would be embarrassing.

Giants with a quiet-bat game, no surprise really.

Check out The D-backs yesterday. They’ve beaten LA two in a row and look at those batting averages. I know it’s early, but still….

I’m not sure if I could hate those red Giants uniforms more. I’m not posting a pic because you know what they look like and not posting a pic is one less time I have to look at them. Everything MLB does is for money and yet I’ve never seen a single person walking around with one of those on. Who’s buying them?

There was a hilarious tweet someone sent out about those uni’s last year I wish I could find it. It went something like: “those new Giant uniforms look like if a minor league team bus broke down in a Disney movie” –it was something like that only much funnier.

I’m all for shit talking at a game but it’s got to be funny and clever. Good natured. It can’t cross a line. If you wouldn’t say it to the player’s face on the street then you shouldn’t say it from your seats. I’ve always supported the Joc pick up even suggesting they make the move a week before it happened. And the bombs have been easy to like. But yesterday was the first time I’ve ever actually liked that ass hat. Having to listen to vile shit about your family spewed from some Milwaukee country bumpkin is not something any ball player should have to put up with.

“And now, time for something competely different….”

Carstie Clausen	Mon, Apr 25, 9:37 PM (9 hours ago)
to me

                                                                                                                                Wrapping It

 Down by a run and one measly single against one of the best five, or certainly ten pitchers in MLB, the Giants did what they do best…hang on in there, fouling off pitch after pitch and getting the opposing starter to throw so many pitches that a bunch of them were off the plate.  At a bit past a hundred pitches Burnes started to flag.  Bottom of the order guy gets on with two down and up to the plate steps Joctivities, who promptly gets heckled by a Brewed up homeboy and promptly eJoculates a hard and long one.  Giants up 2-1.  Yeah, it can happen that fast.  Bottom of the inning with McGee having retired the first two, Adames hits a mistake and the game gets tied.

 Top of the 9th and two outs and Milwaukee’s reliever makes his first mistake.  Runner on first.  Up to the plate strides yet another of Zaidi’s dumpster-dives and Luis crushes one…4-2 Giants.  They sometimes have a habit of coming at you totally out of no-where.  Were the game being held in SF, it would have been a walk-off.  But the game-winning hit being your first homer in MLB is even more special than than your traditional walk-off.  Style, baby.  This one looks like a keeper.  Seems like Gonzales has found his home.  He may be no Suzuki, but he got the job done, enabling an almost incredible 8-3 road-trip.

 LaBumbos are looking over their shoulders again.  All the money in the world cannot top all for one and one for all team spirit.  Giants now have the distinction of being in the highest brackets in both homers and RBI’s. Offense today simply hung tough against one very formidable starter.  Burnes vs. Long looked like a total no-brainer…on paper.

 At this point of the young season SF has the most effective bullpen in the game…intriguingly, a lot of them being dumpster-dives.  They were air-tight before McGee gave up that dinger in the bottom of the 8th.  When the Giants offense got at their set-up man, the Brewskis were left hanging there down by two and our hitters never had to face Josh Hader, their closer.  Ours, still a bit green, but with tons of promise, simply got the job done. Face their ace with a succession of relievers, who were with one exception, simply air-tight, may well become yet another template installed by Mr. Z and his many able enablers.  Jeeze, down two-fifths of the rotation and a third of the projected position-players; San Francisco’s Giants are proving that being the NLW champs may not have been a fluke.

 Lurking on the Flap, I noted the shot from  Mel’s Diner.  So we get Theiro and Luis combining for an excellent diving catch and the game-winner.  Hollywood could not have come up with today’s script.  With eJoculation Grande having premiered with the LaBumbos; they gotta be shaking their heads about letting that one go.  High drama and a bit of ironic comedy and the Giants win again.

 Gotta love em.  Here’s the kicker:  Check out the stats on the MLB site.  Only Rodon is in the top brackets among individual players.  But when it comes to team stats, the pitchers are at the pinnacle for giving up fewest home-runs and the batters are peaking for both homers and RBI’s.  Teamwork.  That’s the formula.  With all those Googenheimer bucks; the LaLaLanders are already sweating little green B-B’s.

My buddies have been consumed lately with how they feel about Joc Pederson. On the one hand, he is a confirmed asshat who grew up hating the Giants and who we hated when he was a Dodger. On the other hand, eh, he hits that damn ball. My feeling is straight forward: if you are wearing that Giants uni than I am in your foxhole. When he leaves after this year we can all get back to hating him.

Nice take:

Carstie Clausen	12:46 AM (4 hours ago)
to me

Flav:  This one’s a bit shorter than usual.  The sweep of a faltering Nats team speaks for itself.

   Not this soon anyway, I did not expect respect.  MLB.com just released its power-rankings and the Giants now stand at #4 among the top ten.  So why that sudden respect?  Two sweeps, one over a good Cleveland team—that despite their being the Gardenias. The second over a tatterdemalion squad representing urination’s capital.  That’s enough for the politics.  Here are two more items which loom significant:  Giants pitchers, despite 2.5 starters being on the injured list—the .5 being Matthew Boyd, who though yet to pitch an inning for SF, got a nice chunk of cash for anticipated performance beginning some time in June—have given up the fewest number of home-runs in the NL.  Secondly, Los Gigantes top MLB in run differential at +37, if memory serves.

 Facing relatively weak pitching the Giants are becoming a monster—24 runs in three games vs. Washington.  Joctivities gets the highlights with his pair of dingers, but the big news is that up and down the lineup the offense is getting base-hits.  Those singles just keep adding up.  Timely hitting AND with men on base.  Hope it becomes a habit.  Perhaps they are coming into synch.  So the offense is not just one big bat anymore and neither is it the long ball, as was the case vs the Dagos in the Opener.  Sorta like hitting on all cylinders.

 Bullpen has been stout and steady.  Nice to see guys like Littell coming around and Junis sure was a pleasant surprise.  Depth.  Success in the assigned roles.  Rotation guys can relax a bit, knowing that the Bullies waaay more often than not have got their backs.

Acid tests will come in a couple weeks when the team faces the LaBumbos and the baseball Cards and then looking for vengeance at home vs the Mutts.  Three very tough teams.  If SF gets a split in those three series they will have achieved full respect.

While I think everyone should play hard until the game is over it does appear this type of *attitude* is going to cause more problems than it’s worth. Baseball players are inherently little bitches so Kap might want to re-think this team wide approach he’s pushing.

Sad note for my buddy The Mudman who had a nice 3 team parlay going of *Yaz gets a hit, SF wins, over 8.5 runs scored* until Estrada got thrown out at home on that hustle play dooming the run line to die at the under….

Carstie Clausen	Thu, Apr 21, 7:21 PM (9 hours ago)
to me

Flav:  My preference is to analyze Giants victories.  This one is different.

   Are Giants fans ready for torches and pitchforks yet?  No, it’s not on the players.  They are who they are.  Then there’s the injuries.  Hope that Wade is back for the next homestand.  Yeah, so who’s the target for fan dissatisfaction ?  The friggen owners, of course.  Wonder how many flappers wanted See-Ya Suzuki.  Five years, he got from the Cubs.  Buncha tightwads counting their shekels owning this team.  They could have cut a better deal with him that Chicago did.  Only caveat would be the absence of any No -Trade clause.  Give it a couple years and the pipeline may swell the outfield with talent.  Ain’t highly likely this year.  So maybe a fan boycott of the games, souvenirs, food, drinks, parking for a few weeks would send the only message those rich bass-turds know: Messing with their precious bottom line.

 When Belt isn’t on his game, the whole lineup seems to go into a collective slump.  Team needs more than a single primary spark plug.  How many do the LaLaLanders have?  One might need both fingers and toes to count them.  Baseball is the shits for not maintaining balanced salary caps as is the case with the NFL.  Fuggin Googies think they can consistently buy their way to heaven.  A couple of strategic investments and SF could match them.

 So how come mid-30’s Carrasco—who did not have a particularly brilliant season last year—made the Giants hitters look like a bunch of whipped puppies:  Not only did Belt have a bad day, but so did Ruf—who has consistently looked clueless to date, passing on balls right down the pike like he did this afternoon.  Pederson couldn’t apply the magic and Crawdaddy looked like a Crawbaby today with his three strikeouts.  Casali: Meh.  Only good performances came from Estrada, Flores and Yaz, who appears to be coming out of his early doldrums.  But unless all three had slammed dingers with men on base—another sore spot—that trio certainly wasn’t enough.

 Now it’s rotation rumblings.  Once again Disco was off his game, giving up two HRs to two pretty good hitters.  Last year he did not sin that much.  So with Cobb out for ten, the rotation is looking a bit ratty.  Maybe Webb can get back on his game facing the currently hapless Nats.  At least the temp in the Di$trict of Corruption should be a bit comfier than 48 degrees at game-time.  That happens and SF has a great one-two lockdown once again.  Yunior escaped danger and Beede was not terrible over two IP, with one run on 3 hits, with a walk and a strikeout.  Pen seems to be basically sound and with more in the upper pipeline.  Boyd should join the team by sometime in June.  So pitching is in a short-term dip, but correctable.  Not so the offense.  Zaidi does the best he can, picking up another starter for Sac-town just today.  But it could be just another dumpster-dive, unless the “tweaking” does miracles once again.

 So, consider a fan boycott with plenty of protest signs and media comments.  If the owners were not such misers, the team could at least have got the split I was projecting.  It’s on the moneybags.

Despite Yaz, Ruf, Slater, Crawford, Estrada, Grave Duggar and Bart all hitting under .221 we are still managing to cobble together wins.

Some how the A’s, who gave up before the season started, are also winning. Speaking of the A’s, this is what it looked like at the Mausoleum yesterday at first pitch:

I strongly support their fans and the boycott they are engaged in.

SPring training, the biggest question about Cobb and Rondon was whether they could stay healthy. One down.

Driving in to work today, the KNBR morning show interviewed Ronnie Lott then Will the Thrill. I’m not sure if you could put an exacta like that together from my youth that would be any better…..

Weather looks much better today. Any Flappers hitting either of these games? Second game is Webb v Sherzer, wow.

Dubs got it done. “Four and a Poole” is gonna be quite the gimmicky conundrum for teams this year.

Smoking a hot hitting Cleveland team like they were a traveling cartoon show was not how I saw that series going. But if all he does is win then I must defer to that (and Kap) and enjoy this (long) ride we’re on.

As usual, we have the best record in MLB. Bring on the Mets I’m sure we’ll smoke them too. Weather note: looks like this game starts dry and then lots of rain coming mid-game so not sure if this one is gonna get finished today….

Any east coast hall of fame Flappers hitting any of those games? Send me pics if you do

Well, I don’t particularly like his methods but there’s no arguing with the results. At 6-2 that translates to a cool 121 wins at end of regular season. Kap looking to improve on the 107 from 2021. Lol. Whatever, he gets er done, don’t he?

Wood today.

Fun little series with Cleveland. I like that we no longer stack all the interleague games at the same time. Although with the uni DH there’s not much difference between the leagues except general style of play/pitching. I’m also enjoying the uni DH, as I suspected we’d get used to it very quickly.

Seriously what did we do to deserve Logan Webb? And where would we be this year (or last year without him)?

Hmmmmm I don’t get it. Knight2KingIdiot promised this: “I predict we’ll see a few old-timey avatars resurrected today.”

And yet I checked and it was all just the same guys who post every day.

Could he be……full of shit?

Lots of wild, unusual stuff from last night’s win. We saw Darvish get completely lit up by a team that previously couldn’t light up a Christmas tree. We saw a shocking accusation of racism lead to the first woman ever getting to coach on the field. And we saw the Padres get their panties bunched up about *unwritten rules* without question the dumbest of all the rules (mostly because they aren’t rules at all).

After the dust settled we saw what we usually see when we face the Padres: them being face down, ass up.

Cobb with the 10k’s in 5 innings, too. Very nice.

Ironically, it seems that the grave he’s been digging for 2 years has actually been his own. It pains me to say this but it’s time for him to go. Yaz, too. Neither can hit a lick. I guess not having Posey, Bryant or Wade turns out to not be great for the offense, eh?

With only one of those dudes coming back I fear we are going to see a lot of games like last night’s.

Woke up, went outside and all of a sudden it’s December again. Freezing cold, wind, where’d the sun go?

Glad to have the Marlins gone, they just don’t do it for me. Boring.

Hopefully facing the Padres will juice this season up a little….

Honestly, with the Masters and all the Derby preps from yesterday, I didn’t see or hear much of the game. The box score looks underwhelming.

Taiba was the most impressive winner to me yesterday. Coming off a single 6F race to pass the Great Messier like that in the stretch? I almost couldn’t believe what I was watching. One thing is clear: this is a STRONG cast of 3 year olds heading to the Derby.

I’ve got Cam Smith at 15-1 to win it all so let’s have a little sweat this afternoon and hope he can some how catch Sheffy.

……he’s earned it.

Carstie Clausen	Fri, Apr 8, 6:28 PM (10 hours ago)
to me

Flav:  Still have some kinda WordPress account and it all looked good as I typed and posted.  No go.  So it’s back to El Flapmeister once again.

 To quote a well-known English Playwright:  “All’’s well that ends well”.  It was a wild, wooly and wacky afternoon at #1 Willie Mays Plaza. Almost six full I.P. by the indomitable Webb-spinner and then he walked a batter and had a fairly high pitch-count, so Kapler got the bright idea to bring in Leone.  Wasn’t he keeping up with the two bad outings our spaghetti slinger had during spring training?  So a tater later and Webb’s shutout turned into a 3-2 affair with the icing on the cake being an earnie charged to him over Leone (and Kapler’s fuckup).

 Heroics by the offense:  Three dingers.  El Capitan proving that his S.T. rustiness was no more than a passing fancy, as he sliced one to deep left.  Next, a first.  Bartbomb.  First time in The Show.  Buster will be desperately missed, but just maybe not as much for his pyroclastics at the plate, but even more for his nonpareil ability to handle pitchers and to pretty much run the whole show on the field.  Joey has a learning-curve ahead of him and I’m sure the coaches will be all over him.  Maybe we could hope that Posey would fly in now and again for some one on one tutoring.  You never know, asking might not hurt.  Anyhoo, Bart is on board in game one of the season and my take is that he will not for long be batting 9th.  He’s no longer a green rookie, as he made a solid statement in his first A.B.  He was a bit too hyped and overanxious in his next plate appearances, but that too should pass.

  Last word on homer heroics?  Estrada, of course.  His solid Spring Training proved to several of us that he just could be that diamond in the rough, that Zaidi snagged from the YankMees.  Theiro just could be the real-deal, as he proved today with Los Gigantes being down by one in the bottom of the 9th.  Tied it up at five-even, ultimately leading to that big “W”.

 Doval?  Major-league fuckup there.  Slider after slider and little velocity differentiation.  Where the hell was his fastball, I kept thinking while watching the gameday thread.  With enough heat to turn heaven as toasty as hell, one would have thought he would pound one in here and there to keep them off-balance anyway.  He’s gonna need a good talking-to by the coaches.  Needs to trust his stuff.  Confidence, it’s called.  Today, he sure didn’t look like a closer.  Needs to mature into the role.

 Brebbia:  Maybe he made the roster due to the uptick in his F.B.. McGee—solid. Rogers:  Pleasant surprise.  Kinda expected his S.T. woes were due to that hot, dry Arid-Zona air messing with his frisbees.  Alvarez:  Got the job done.  Mentioned it in some recent postings (thanks to Craig listing them):  The bullies are gonna have their ups and downs in this April shakedown cruise.  It should be mostly sorted out by May and there are plenty of options in AAA and AA.  The Pen should closely resemble last year’s outstanding relief corps, at least by the Break.  Down the line, the staff will be the bulwark for the team.

 Lovin Mauricio for his positive attitude and his energy but hating him for his perpetual fuckups on the base paths.  Nobody but Dubon could have lost track of reality when Belt hit that fly into R.F.  He committed the greatest sin by letting his enthusiasm overcome his sense of the occasion.

 So with two down on that crazy-assed D.P., Miami’s pitcher, Bass, did not think it a wise idea of facing Ruf—a major power-threat—and gave him a half-intentional free-pass.  Like the Scots poet, Bobby Burns, admonished:  “The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley and leave us not but grief and toil for promised joy”.

 Enter THE MAN of the hour.  Having not had a particularly great day at the plate to date, Austin Slater capped it with a booming double to left, enabling “speedster” Ruf the Magic Dragon, to score the winnah chugging all the way from first to post the grand finale as S.F. six to five for the breath-taking Home Opener in perfectly dramatic fashion.

It doesn’t get much more American than some dude named Beer hitting a walk off bomb on National Beer Day. And yet that’s what happened last night in Arizona. You know what else is American? Baseball. The Masters. The Derby. Lots of other stuff…

As I’ve gotten older I find myself not as emotionally tied in to how my favorite teams do. We’ve won so much in the last 12 years or so, hell, the last 40….I just can’t get too bummed if we suck or don’t win it all. I’ve gotten way more in to the global level of the sports I’m interested in. With social media and video re-tweets and daily fantasy sports, it’s just too easy to know who all the players are and how they are doing in real time. And what I’ve realized is that I just love watching exciting things happen in sports.

The stupid pandemic also changed my perspective on a lot of stuff. As it relates to entertainment, I’m just thankful to have it back. I never realized how much I need that *distraction* in my life before until we started coming out of the pandemic.

Anyway, it’s opening day! And I have mediocre hopes for the team this season, at best. And I hope I’m wrong. But if not, that’s ok too. I will appreciate the moments as they come and go. I will appreciate this being the final season of The Flap.

I hope you guys do, too….

Both the Masters AND MLB starts tomorrow? Oh my. And multiple major Derby preps this Sat? Double Oh My! Glad the Giants start Friday just to spread this shit out a little. This is without question my favorite time of the sports season. Big Flavor has awakened from his slumber and is venturing out of the cave. Chi, stop looking through that window. Let’s fucking go!!!!!!!!!!!

Take a minute to soak up the glory of this picture. Names like Bench, Garvey, Morgan, Foster, Candeleria, Luzinski….and Gary Lavelle going full-pimp with those shades….Don’t tell me baseball is better today. This pic says otherwise.

18 wins. 2.96 ERA. 1.09 WHIP. 219 innings. Man, that was an incredible year we got from Cueto. Sadly, that was the only year we got from Cueto. Not gonna hate on the guy, he got hurt and that’s nobody’s fault. But we gave him 125 million dollars for essentially one useful season.

Good luck in Chicago, I guess.

Am I reading this right? The Giants start the season at home for once? Against our “arch rivals” the Marlins no less. Oh well, can’t play an exciting team every series. I am still ramping up interest for the season but it’s coming, oh it’s coming…..

How much NCAA tourney have you guys watched? I have seen exactly zero seconds of it. Is it good?

Trivia time. Besides being a pretty bizarre transaction line….who was this?

Today’s retro post of the day. 7 years ago….

How bout another retro post?

ten years ago today…..