Bochy Time

Joe Sheehan of BP takes offense to Bruce Bochy's tactics:

Sum it up: Bochy cost himself two players, Davis and Lewis, for the benefit of having an inferior hitter bat in a game-critical situation, and made his defense worse in extra innings to boot. He gave Black an easy out–walking the best hitter Bochy had left–and a clear path out of the inning through the worst hitter on the roster. That’s terrible. I mean, that’s just this side of managing to lose. For Bochy to send up Lewis in that situation, and not be able to see what that would create, is incompetence. We can talk about managers being leaders of men, and barriers between the team and the front office, and liaisons with the media, but if you can’t avoid self-destructing in the ninth inning of a tied game, none of that other stuff matters.

Right. It's going to be tough enough for the Giants to win with the players they have without adding additional levels of difficulty.

Potential Pyrrhic Win

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

"In Tim Lincecum's first game of the season, the Giants made a very questionable gamble with their slight-framed, fireballing right-hander. They heated him up for 28 pitches in the fourth inning, and after a rain delay of one hour, 14 minutes, they sent him back to the mound to start the fifth."

The only caveat to the move, and I'm not enough of a medical expert to say whether this matters, but it is at least worth taking under consideration, is that Lincecum has never iced his arm... in his life. Seriously. For some bizarre reason the kid grew up not icing, heating or massaging his arm. In an anecdotal sense this makes his arm "nails," as Lenny Dykstra would say, but I don't know what that means regarding the elasticity of his elbow, shoulder and scapular joints and tendons.

Seeing Merkin Valdez pitch well to start the game was a definite good sign for the season. Maybe the one time top prospect can turn into a fourth or fifth starter over the next few years. Stay posted.

Cain's arm means the world

But, it's the top of the sixth inning. There's no doubt that after 114 pitches, especially early in the season that you should look out for your guy, but Cain had given up only 3 hits and Juan Pierre was at the plate, who was 0-2 and is a generally bad hitter. Bringing in Taschner not only forced him to come in with the bases loaded, but allowed Torre to pinch hit Kemp, a far better hitter than Pierre.

Kemp went down hacking for out number three, so it paid off, but this has to be considered a pretty bad decision in a 0-0 game.