Posted By Jeff Fletcher on October 27, 2010 10:25 pm

The Giants just beat the snot out of Cliff Lee, just like everyone thought. Ha. Just kidding. Seriously, though, let’s look back at something I wrote in my prediction earlier today, about the Giants’ chances against Lee…

Cliff Lee is going to be a handful, but the optimistic way to look at it is the Giants are going to be hacking (as they always do), so they may actually fare a little better against him than the work-the-count Yankees, who got behind a lot.

So after the game, someone asked Cody Ross about how the Giants were able to do what the Yankees couldn’t to Lee…

“The thing about our team is we’re a free-swinging team and the Yankees take a lot of pitches. We’re aggressive and we knew he was going to be aggressive. Even when we were 0-2 or behind, we knew he’d still come right at us. Rarely is he ever out of the zone. It works to our advantage. I think that’s what happened.”

Wow, it’s like I’m some sort of genius. Seriously, I think this is a fine approach to have against Lee, but it still wouldn’t have worked if Lee had his command. He’d have just thrown all his pitches two inches further away from the zone and the Giants still would have swung and they’d have hit weak groundouts or popouts. Thing is, when the Giants are hacking and he’s throwing meatballs over the plate, well, you saw it.

I hate to say it, but the Giants are looking pretty good to win the dang World Series. There is a loooooong way to go, but I think this loss hurt the Rangers more than it would have hurt the Giants. Lee was their unhittable guy, the guy whose team had never lost a playoff game he started. Now, they put their best arm out there, and they lost. Now, they have to deal with Matt Cain, who hasn’t allowed an earned run in the postseason, who had a better ERA during the regular season than Tim Lincecum.

The Giants still may lose Game 2 and they may lose the Series, but they took a pretty big step tonight, I think.

All of this just goes to show that us “experts” who do all this analysis and make all the predictions are all just full of crap. Baseball is a funny game, and no matter how much you think you know what’s going to happen, you don’t know anything.