3 Up, 3 Down: A tough first impression for the ’24 SF Giants [Kurtenbach]
First impressions matter, and for the 2024 San Francisco Giants, it was not a good first impression.
The Giants lost their season opener 6-4 to the Padres on Thursday despite Logan Webb’s strong start and a 3-2 lead in the seventh inning.
Still, it wasn’t all bad.
Let’s go over three positives and dwell on three negatives from the Giants’ Opening Day loss.
UP: Logan Webb was fantastic
» It wasn’t perfect, but it was the kind of performance we’ve come to expect from the Giants ace.
All those worries about his wickedly poor spring training were put to bed early as Webb was moving his sinker around the zone and throwing sharp sliders to go with his sandbag of a changeup.
Sure, he gave up two runs, but the sequence that brought those two runs home was a leadoff walk, an inside-out single, a seeing-eye single, a two-strike bloop single, and a dribbler to first base.
If Webb didn’t have some bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.
Webb threw 97 pitches on Thursday and deserved better.
DOWN: The seventh-inning crew
» It was a bold move by Bob Melvin to go to Jackson as the man to take the seventh with a one-run lead, and it backfired.
And while it’s hard to say if that was the result of Jackson’s back firing or just poor execution, the result was two hits, three earned runs, and no outs. Jackson said his lower back flared up, bringing about his early exit from the game.
Ryan Walker came in to salvage the inning but gave up an RBI single and a 109-mile-per-hour exit velocity double.
It wasn’t their day in a game where both Rogers brothers stayed on the bench. Jackson could be sidelined for a while, so it’s a double whammy for a team that still needs to figure out its sixth—and seventh-inning options.
UP: Nick Ahmed
» I won’t blame Ahmed for the little-league steal of home the Padres pulled off the seventh. That was a terrible throw to second by catcher Patrick Bailey.
I will, however, credit Ahmed for his two tomahawk RBIs in the game.
Great teams get production from the bottom of their order. One game in, Ahmed has provided some serious value at the No. 9 spot in the lineup. Keep it up and the Giants will win more than they lose.
DOWN: Mike Yastrzemski
» You can forgive Yaz if his mind was somewhere else Thursday, as his wife is scheduled to be induced for the birth of their second child on Friday. Congratulations to the Yastrzemski family.
But if we’re coldly ignoring the human element of it all, Yaz did go 0-for-4 with three strikeouts Thursday. And a strikeout might have been an improvement over the ball he put in play — a 48-mile-per-hour exit velocity might as well be a bunt.
UP: Erik Miller
» Why did the Giants option this guy down to the minors during spring training?
Oh well, it all worked out. And on Thursday, we could see why they brought him back up.
Throwing a mid-to-high-90s, high-spin fastball with a nasty changeup (each had two whiffs against it) is downright nasty. To do it from the left side is perhaps unfair.
Miller’s issue has never been stuff; it’s been control. He sure looked in control on Thursday. I’d keep riding him until that control is no longer there.
DOWN: The new jerseys
» Finally, an important issue.
We saw the Giants’ new alternate jerseys in Arizona, and the new Fanatics-made duds looked awful.
But Major League Baseball was saving the worst for the regular season.
The Giants’ away grays — a classic jersey if there ever was one — debuted on Thursday and looked like cheap Alibaba knockoffs. Seriously, the Giants have done giveaway jerseys for the first 20,000 fans at the gate with higher quality.
The league decided not to do anything about all the preseason jersey complaints, deciding to let the issue “blow over.”
But it’s pretty hard to forget how cheap the jerseys look when you have to watch them for nearly three hours, every night. What an embarrassment for baseball. It’s a shame commissioner Rob Manfred doesn’t care about things like “the league’s image.”
On the plus side, though, the grey pants aren’t see-through.