Marty Lurie Talks San Francisco Giants Baseball
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Are the Giants Remaking the Traditional Pitching Staff?


Marty; The Giants once had a pitcher named Juan Marichal. He ended his career with more complete games than victories—and he had well over two hundred victories before he suffered an arm injury. There was an occasion when Alvin Dark was his manager. Juan was in the midst of one of his rare series of outings where nothing he threw seemed capable of getting batters out. As a result, Dark had to pull him before he pitched into his customary late innings. On this occasion, as Marichal was warming up on the mound Dark walked out and told him to look at the bullpen in deep right field. The bullpen was empty. Dark said to him, “You’re going nine innings today. I don’t care how many runs they get off you.” Marichal pitched a complete winning game.

Tempus fugit!

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Taking a good, hard,look at yesterday’s box score and thinking back over the past month’s history of losing efforts, one is struck by the thought that the Giants may be giving consideration to a complete overhaul of the traditional role of starting pitchers going seven or eight innings, even completing a game once in a while, and a supporting bullpen.

In yesterday’s game Tomko started, went five innings, gave up six hits, two walks and one run. He proceeded to put a runner on every base in the sixth inning, getting no one out while doing so. To complete the remaining four innings, in came Christiansen, Munter, Eyre, Hawkins and Walker. The Reds failed to score in the sixth. Nor did they score in the seventh, eighth or ninth. In these four innings the bullpen gave up two hits, no walks and no runs. The Giants won, five to one.

The starting rotation, irrespective of who is pitching, doesn’t seem capable of getting through the sixth inning successsfully. Rueter can’t make it out of the third. Schmidt has had similar problems with the third inning in a few of his starts. We’ve described Tomko’s effort yesterday. Lowry struggles to get past the fifth. Correia has gone five in each of his recent starts. Rueter has been taken out of the rotation; we are still in the dark respecting who will be brought up to replace him. Anticipating more than five innings from this unknown is overly optimistic.

While the rotation has been described here as being in a shambles, the bullpen, on the other hand, has undergone a revitalization. Brower and Herges are gone, unceremoniously. Munter, the only unexpected shining light in this woeful season, has provided Alou with a few moments of solace. Christiansen, in his last few appearances has pitched well. Eyre has been a consistent stopper the entire year. Walker, taking on the role of closer in Benitez’ absence, has twelve saves and the fearless look a good closer must have. Lastly, Hawkins, a disaster in Chicago and not much better in his initial appearances here, has been getting batters out since coming off the DL.

Is this what we are to look forward to in the last half of this year? The Giants throw out a starter. Unlike Dark, their instructions are, “go out there and throw as hard as you can for five innings. Then we’ll bail you out with a bullpen which doesn’t give up runs.”

Unfortunately, this will necessitate the aforesaid denizens of the bullpen to pitch in almost every game. Before the season ends Eyre’s arm will, in all likelihood, fall off. He has already pitched in forty-seven games. They have three left with the Cards before mid-season and there is the distict probability that Eyre will appear in each of them. That adds up to a nice round figure of one hundred games by the end of the year, if he survives that long.

Perhaps a better solution would be to stumble on a pitcher or two who can pitch into the late innings. Is it possible that Dusty might be willing to part with Williams? He might still have a warm spot in his heart for the Giants.

Ed

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