A day after flirting with perfection, the Giants were perfectly inept at capitalizing on scoring opportunities.
In their 3-1 loss against the San Diego Padres, San Francisco bats went hitless in a baker’s dozen worth of at-bats, including three duds in the 9th inning after Osleivis Basabe’s lead-off triple. Tyler Fitzgerald’s sacrifice fly in the 7th accounted for the Giants’ solitary run, so “perfectly inept” isn’t exactly right — just near-perfect once again.
While it was a team effort in this regard, Luis Matos, a sub for Jung Hoo Lee in right in the 7th inning, particularly struggled. His two at-bats of the day each came with a runner in scoring position. With a man on first and second and one-out, he chased after an inside cutter and popped it up to short. In the 9th, he was called out on strikes on the sixth pitch of the at-bat: a four-seam fastball in the corner pocket that froze him completely. He had fouled off three previous pitches out of the zone to put him in the two-strike hole.
The spring slump continues for Matos and based on some of the swing decisions today, his eagerness to swing his way out of it is doing more harm than good.
All three of San Diego’s runs came against reliever Spencer Bivens in the 6th inning. Chalk this unseemly frame up to a 50/50 mix of tough-luck and self-inflicted trouble. The Padres peppered three singles off Bivens, two of them grounders finding holes, and two of them probably corralled by second baseman Casey Schmitt on a better day. What made those tough breaks hurt was the traffic supplied by Bivens by way of a walk, a hit batter, and a wild pitch. It also didn’t help that he didn’t properly back-up the catcher on Christian Koss’s overthrow home on Miguel Andujar’s sacrifice fly. The error was attributed to center fielder Koss, but if Bivens was positioned better, the runner on first would’ve been prevented from advancing into scoring position on the play.
But it wasn’t all bad!
Tyler Mahle went toe-to-toe with Padres starter Walker Buehler and Tyler Mahle through the early innings. Buehler scattered 3 hits and 2 walks over 5 innings pitched while bailing himself out of trouble by way of 7 strikeouts. Mahle had started the day with an unblemished ERA but struggled with command, having walked 7 batters against 6 strikeouts over his previous 6 innings of work. Over four innings against San Diego, Mahle doubled his K-total while allowing just one baserunner and preserving his scoreless Spring.
While the typical 1-2 punch of his four-seam and splitter were present today (accounting for 4 of his 6 strikeouts), Mahle evened out his mix on the day to focus on his slider.
Historically the offering has probably been his worst pitch. It’s an underwhelming specimen in regards to movement. The pitch is a little sluggish for a slider, nor does its glove-side run distinguish itself from his cutter, and only by virtue of being a couple of beats slower on the radar gun does the offering get more of vertical lilt.
Mahle tossed 13 of these sliders, about a quarter of his overall pitches, and most were offered to right-handed batters. Two of his six K’s came on the pitch. He threw four consecutive sliders in the 1st inning, and all of them were elevated in the upper-third of the zone or higher. While this feels like a location mistake for this pitch-type, because Mahle is such a north-south thrower, he seems to be able to get away with spotting his breaking ball at the belt. Xander Bogaerts, who spun around one on the 8th pitch of his at-bat in the 1st, was clearly timed-up for the fastball and thought he got one reading the ball out of Mahle’s hands. In their next match-up, Mahle served up a 2-1 slider (his last of the afternoon) to a similar spot that Bogaerts somewhat mis-hit, directing the pitch into the ground but striking it hard enough to coax a fielding error from shortstop Tyler Fitzgerald.
That belt-high slider should’ve been a souvenir for a fan sitting on the hill beyond left field. Instead a bad pitch in a bad location got drilled into the ground. A veteran hitter like Bogaerts still couldn’t square it up because Mahle mixed it in so well. He knows his stuff and knows how to squeeze the most out of each offering — this is the benefit of signing veteran arms. You can bet when those two meet in the regular season, that slider is going to be top of Bogaert’s mind. Mahle, in the middle of March, was pitching for outs in June.
