Jeff Fletcher | September 29, 2009

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how we had an issue with our record-keeping on the Giants Good Guy Award, which goes to one player for his cooperation with the print media. Rich Aurilia insisted that he had won the award twice, but our perpetual plaque only had him down once, in 2003.

Aurilia insisted that he could come up with the proof, emailing a photo of the two awards in his office back at home in Arizona. Not necessary, I believe him. Besides, anyone who feels that the validation of reporters is worth enough to lie to get it, probably ought to get it.

Also, the guy who we thought won in 2000 was Jeff Kent. Honestly. As I wrote before, Kent could often be prickly, but he was better with the beat writers than people just passing through. Also, in the 2000 playoffs, he was the stand-up team spokesman when the Giants lost to the Mets.

However, when we were debating it recently, Aurilia was there to plead his case, and Kent wasn’t. Good enough for me. Today I removed Kent’s name from the plaque and replaced it with Aurilia’s.

I’ll keep the Kent one, just in case.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 23, 2009

It seems whenever things start to go badly for the Giants, someone brings up the idea of trading Matt Cain, and the question was posed by the Chronicle Live Tweeter this morning. I’ve weighed in on this in the past. About a year ago, when the Giants were finishing up a 72-win season, I felt like the Giants should trade him. In May, when I was still skeptical of how good the Giants were,  I still believed that, if the Giants were to trade him, it would be better to trade him for multiple players, not one big one, a la the Dan Haren trade, the Erik Bedard trade, the Cliff Lee trade, etc.

How do I feel about it now? Well, I started to write a post about how the Giants actually have a pretty fair amount of money coming off the books, so they ought to be able to find a bat or two on the free agent market, then I looked at the list of free agents.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 21, 2009

When Randy Johnson pitched in relief for the Giants on Saturday, it marked his first regular season relief outing since July 18, 2001. (Of course, we all remember him pitching in relief in the 2001 World Series, and less of us remember him pitching in relief for the Yankees in the ‘05 playoffs, but that’s another story.) Anyway, if you happened to check out the box score for Johnson’s July ‘01 relief outing, you might have been scratching  your head.

Seven innings of relief? One hit? Seventeen strikeouts?

Well, there’s a story behind that, which I learned with the help of my FanHouse colleague, Ed Price, who covered the ‘01 Diamondbacks for the now-defunct East Valley Tribune.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 21, 2009

I’m sure we were all shocked by the news that Giants prospect Angel Villalona is a suspect in a murder. However, the incident caused me to stumble into this blog by Giants minor leaguer Garrett Broshuis. In his most recent entry, he describes his shock at the news about Villalona, as well as telling some stories he’s heard from teammates about how tough life can be in the Dominican.

While I was reading, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the writing of young Mr. Broshuis. Frankly, I’ve never heard of him as a pitcher, but the guy clearly has a good head on his shoulders, and he’ll have no problem finding something if this baseball thing doesn’t work out. Heck, he could be a sports writer.

This entry about pitching in situations is very interesting. Apparently he’s also a blogger for Baseball America, where he wrote this post about missing his wife during the season. Heartwarming stuff.

Now that I know who this kid is, I’m going to root for him to make the big leagues. If for no other reason than it will prevent him from taking another job as a sports writer.

Just kidding.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 15, 2009

The Giants didn’t bother to email me their schedule, so I had to get it off mlb.com, like everyone else.

Chris Haft has the whole breakdown at the link above, but it looks like the highlight is that the Red Sox are coming back to San Francisco. The Giants are also hosting Baltimore, and they go to Toronto, along with the usual games against the A’s.

No sign of the Dodgers at AT&T Park till the end of June. Weird.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 14, 2009

Today the writers presented Randy Winn with the Bill Rigney Good Guy Award, which goes annually to one player on the Giants and one on the A’s for his cooperation with the print media. The voting is done by Bay Area writers.

Funny thing about Winn is that he had always joked that he didn’t want to win the award, which we’d threatened to give him each of the past few years. In fact, last year we deked him by walking toward him with the award, only to do a quick turn toward Aaron Rowand.

Winn is one of our favorites because he’s always accomodating and usually pretty quotable. He knows what you are looking for when you come to him and he usually delivers. He won’t just give you a canned answer, though. He’s honest.

Past winners include Matt Cain, Rowand and Rich Aurilia. Oddly enough, Aurilia may be a two-time winner. I say “may be” because there’s a little controversy over that. See, we weren’t that great about record-keeping on this award for the first few years we gave it out. When we tried to recreate the winners a few years ago to put them all on a perpetual plaque, the best we could come up with was that Jeff Kent had won in 2000. (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but Kent was actually a pretty good guy with the writers earlier in his career.) Aurilia, though, claims that he won in 2000 an d 20003, and he’s got the trophies at home. Heck, the fact that even kept them, rather than throwing them in the trash, tells me that he’s really a good guy.

Anyway, he says he’s going to send a picture of the 2000 award. We’ll get it straightened out.

I’ll post the A’s winner after we present the award to him, probably next week.

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Jeff Fletcher | September 14, 2009

Did a little research yesterday on teams that have very good pitching and very bad hitting. Turns out it’s a pretty rare combo. Right now the Giants are scoring 3.97 runs per game and they are allowing 3.76.

The only other team since 1993 to finish a season averaging fewer than four runs scored and allowed was the 2003 Dodgers. Kevin Brown, odalis Perez, Hideo Nomo and Eric Gagne were the studs of that pitching staff, while the lineup was led by Shawn Green and Adrian Beltre.

They finished 85-77.

The Giants are on pace to go 87-65.

There are a lot more teams that have good hitting and bad pitching, and those teams don’t tend to do as well (see the Texas Rangers, 2000-2008). The moral of the story is if you are going to be a one-dimensional team, it’s better if that one dimension is pitching. However, you still aren’t going to the playoffs. You gotta score runs.

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