SF Giants Press Clips Monday, April 9, 2018
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SF Giants Press Clips Monday, April 9, 2018 San Francisco Chronicle Giants sidestep Clayton Kershaw but fall to Dodgers in 10 innings John Shea Before the Giants’ 2-1 loss on Sunday, they honored several players from their celebrated history with the Dodgers, and nary a boo was heard when they introduced Steve Garvey. What has this rivalry come to? “Different times,” kidded former Giants outfielder Jeffrey Leonard, who was part of the ceremony. Garvey recalled far more hostile receptions from the Candlestick Park folks: “Absolutely,” the old Dodgers first baseman said. “They were so cold, to get up and boo was a way to get warm. I wish I could’ve played here.” Rest assured, the rivalry is in good hands. The teams concluded a memorable, rain-shortened series at AT&T Park, and the finale featured a dominant Clayton Kershaw, a cameo by Buster Posey, another intense extra-inning game and, yes, some booing. That was reserved mostly for Yasiel Puig. Kershaw baffled the Giants into the eighth inning before his manager Dave Roberts, after 92 pitches, replaced him. Posey was coming up as a pinch-hitter with two on and no outs. It was the type of duel that Kershaw cherishes, and he has held Posey to a .238 average in 105 career at-bats. Roberts brought in a right-hander, J.T. Chargois, and Posey lined a single to right to tie the score 1-1. 1 The game went to the 10th inning before it was decided on Kyle Farmer’s double off Pierce Johnson. Hunter Pence singled in the bottom of the inning, but Kenley Jansen struck out Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt — who argued the final pitch was high — to end it. The Giants split the series, which lasted two games because Friday’s was rained out. Manager Bruce Bochy didn’t start Posey, who caught all 14 innings and 248 pitches Saturday, and also omitted two of his top left-handed batters, Belt (4-for-54 against Kershaw) and Crawford (5-for-38 against Kershaw). The Giants managed six hits off Kershaw, and the most promising sign belonged to Evan Longoria, who entered 0-for-7 with four strikeouts against the three-time Cy Young Award winner but doubled twice against him. A day after Andrew McCutchen stamped his name into the lore of the rivalry with a walk-off home run in the 14th, capping a six-hit performance, he went 0-for-4 with a strikeout, though he was robbed in the seventh inning by left fielder Joc Pederson. The Giants had a good opportunity in the sixth after singles by Gorkys Hernandez and Austin Jackson, but Hernandez was doubled off on Joe Panik’s fly to Puig in right. “Gorkys has to hold his ground a little bit more,” Bochy said. “Puig’s a pretty good outfielder. We’ve seen him make some great plays.” Another blown chance came in the eighth when Jackson, after the Posey single put runners at first and second, missed on two attempts to put down a sacrifice bunt, then bounced into a double play. “There were a couple of spots in that game that were the turning point,” Bochy said. “We didn’t execute the bunt there, and that didn’t help matters because we really did a good job battling back to tie the game.” Giants starter Ty Blach, who has a nice history against the Dodgers — especially when opposed by Kershaw — worked six innings before Hernandez hit for him. The only damage off Blach was Matt Kemp’s fourth-inning single that scored Puig. Blach got the Opening Day nod because of Madison Bumgarner’s broken pinkie and went against Kershaw, throwing five scoreless innings. Blach’s ERA in six starts against the Dodgers, four on Kershaw’s watch, is 1.42. “Anytime you get an opportunity to compete against some of the best in the world, that’s what you dream of,” Blach said. 2 San Francisco Chronicle Giants’ Bruce Bochy, Brandon Belt dispute final pitch: ‘It wasn’t a strike’ John Shea The Giants blew opportunities before Brandon Belt struck out looking to end Sunday’s 10-inning loss to the Dodgers, but it still wasn’t easy to take. Especially because the Giants thought umpire Bruce Dreckman got the call wrong. “Tough call in the end. It’s a ball,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “That’s the way the game goes sometimes: The call goes against you, the ball doesn’t bounce your way. Certainly, it wasn’t a strike.” Belt vehemently objected to Dreckman. “I said it wasn’t close. He said it was close,” Belt said. “Even if it was close, close is not a strike.” Belt pinch hit with Hunter Pence at second and two outs in a one-run game. Belt fouled off the first two offerings and worked the count to 2-2 before Kenley Jansen ended the game on a 91- mph cutter. Belt was asked about fans who might have wondered if he should have swung at anything close with two strikes. “It wasn’t close, though,” Belt said. “I understand. They can say that all they want to, but a ball’s a ball. If I’m going to swing at a ball, everyone’s going to be a lot more mad if I swing at a ball and miss it.” McCutchen numbers: Andrew McCutchen will go down in elite company for Saturday’s 14th- inning walk-off homer. He became the eighth Giant with a walk-off homer in the 14th inning or beyond. Nobody did it later in a game than Buster Posey, who beat the Reds in May with a 17th-inning homer. The only time in the Giants-Dodgers rivalry that someone hit a walk-off homer later than McCutchen? Valmy Thomas of the 1957 Giants, 15th inning. McCutchen is the second player with six hits in a game, including a walk-off homer, following Detroit’s Jim Northrup against the A’s in 1969. Three other Giants in the San Francisco era have had six-hit games: Jesus Alou (1964), Mike Benjamin (1995) and Brandon Crawford (2016). McCutchen is the first player with a walk-off homer in the 14th inning or later since ... himself, 3 on July 11, 2015. First win: Nearly lost in Saturday’s hubbub was the fact that Roberto Gomez earned his first career win. He threw 25 pitches and gave up a run on three hits in the top of the 14th. “A lot of emotions,” Gomez said. “It was my first win, and it was against the Dodgers.” How much longer could he have pitched? “Whatever was necessary,” Gomez said. Bochy was out of relievers and said the next pitcher he would have used was Derek Holland, Monday’s starter. San Francisco Chronicle Andrew McCutchen’s big night for Giants was cologne-fueled Scott Ostler You know what Andrew McCutchen’s big Saturday night looked like: his six hits, including the walk-off, three-run jack in the 14th inning. But do you know what it smelled like? It had the aroma of “212 VIP” cologne by Carolina Herrera. That’s the fragrance McCutchen was rocking when he rocked the Dodgers’ world, and gave the Giants and their fans a reason to believe. In the clubhouse before that instant-classic game, Pablo Sandoval offered his new teammate a shot of cologne. “The cologne’s the difference,” McCutchen said Sunday morning, with a laugh. “He said, ‘I got something for you,’ and I said, ‘All right.’ He was like, ‘You’re my pick today.’ I said, ‘OK, cool.’ “So after the first hit, he kept coming down (to McCutchen in the dugout), looking at me, like, ‘Smell my shirt.’ ... We kind of like kept joking about it as the game went on. Every hit, he’d come down.” This means that VIP 212 is now classified as a PED — a legal one, fortunately, because McCutchen said Sandoval uses it quite liberally. On Sunday morning, Saturday’s win still smelled sweet. Baseball players do blase better than anyone. It was just one game. It’s a long season. Blah-blah-blase. So I was not prepared to hear McCutchen go deep with what that game and that home run meant to him. That last at-bat was a five-minute drama — 12 pitches, seven foul balls — and McCutchen relived it three hours before Sunday’s game, with a small group of reporters at his locker. 4 After nine seasons as a beloved Pirate, McCutchen is the new guy in town, on a team desperate for help, and he was not off to a very good start. So his obviously emotional reaction to that home run wasn’t about the rivalry with the Dodgers, it was about his connection with his new team and its fans. “Yeah, it didn’t have anything really to do with who we were playing. It had to do with just the game in itself, and just everything in general, everything — everything’s that’s happened in the past offseason, you know, from getting traded, to having a newborn, having a kid, to my family being here, to everything. “There’s a lot that transpired, a lot that has happened in my lifetime that created that one moment. It didn’t have anything to do with the Dodgers, honestly.” McCutchen said he had a similar experience when he was called up to the Pirates, taking the place of fan favorite Nate McLouth. Early in the season, McCutchen had a three-homer game and, “That is when I felt like I was kind of cemented there, to where fans could kind of like breathe a little bit.