Giants’ unlikely strategy leads to victory in Game 1 of NLDS
WASHINGTON – Inside the San Francisco Giants hitters’ meetings, the same words come up again and again. Be short. Put the ball in play. Make contact. Compete. It all sounds so antiquated, the antithesis of baseball in 2014, where contact is but a construct and not something that can, you know, help win World Series.
And yet here the Giants are, again, a team that doesn’t just emphasize putting the ball in play but relishes it. Take Game 1 of the National League Division Series, a 3-2 Giants victory over a Washington Nationals team larded with talent and featuring Stephen Strasburg, who happens to be one of the toughest pitchers in the major leagues to square up. Over five harried innings, Strasburg threw 89 pitches. The Giants swung and missed on just seven. Only four times this season did Strasburg generate fewer whiffs – including an Aug. 24 game with just four. Against the Giants, of course.
Strasburg struck out only two Giants hitters Friday, his lowest total ever among the 94 games in which he’s gone at least five innings, and the Nationals bullpen managed just two more strikeouts. It was the second consecutive game in which Giants position players had struck out just four times, and considering major league teams struck out on average 7.7 times per game this season, it’s the sort of advantage that allows the Giants to ignore whatever sort of talent deficit they do have and outfox opponents.
“It seems to be a formula that works,” Giants hitting coach Hensley Meulens said. “That was our approach. Not to be too big. Not to try to do too much. Just put the ball in play and see what happens.”
What happened was line drives and ground balls up the middle, the Nationals’ Area 51, because their range-deficient keystone combination of Ian Desmond and Asdrubal Cabrera might as well not exist there. Six of the eight hits off Strasburg went into center field, and they weren’t off mediocre pitches, either: five on fastballs that registered 97, 96, 96, 95 and 95 mph on the radar gun, and one on a 91-mph changeup. San Francisco understood that Strasburg dislikes going to his filthy curveball against left-handers, so it stacked a lineup with six lefties and saw him throw the fastball nearly 78 percent of the time.
“You can’t say, ‘Hey, if you take this approach, you’re gonna not strike out on Strasburg,’ ” Giants outfielder Hunter Pence said. “It just happened.”
To say it just happened undersells Meulens’ emphasis, though Pence does have a point. These Giants aren’t exactly swing-shortening, contact-making, ball-in-play-putting paragons. During the regular season, they ranked 24th in baseball on swing-and-miss percentage, with more than one every 10 pitches. And patience is no virtue with them: The Giants swung at the third-highest rate in baseball, 49.6 percent of all pitches seen.
“This is definitely a team that likes to swing the bat,” Giants utility man Matt Duffy said. “Not necessarily a team that’s going to work the count. We’d rather hit a guy out of the game than get his pitch count up and run him out. I think that was somewhat of the plan, and if he makes a mistake, something you feel you can hit, whether it’s first or second pitch or you have to work the count to get it, make sure you’re aggressive.”
As the season wore on, the Giants rid themselves of their most hacktastic players. Contactphile Joe Panik took the second base job from contactphobe Brandon Hicks. Michael Morse, their early-season bopper, didn’t even make the NLDS roster. With Panik, Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval occupying the Nos. 2-4 slots in their lineup, even the toughest-to-hit pitchers find themselves assaulted with all sorts of bat-to-ball annoyance.
“We don’t just go up there free hacking,” Giants reliever Sergio Romo said. “Taking what the other guy gives them is exactly what they did today against Stras. He’s got overpowering stuff to strike everyone out, but you look at what they did today, and they didn’t do too much with it.”
Getting singled to death is the pitcher’s version of Chinese water torture, and that’s exactly what the Giants did to Strasburg. Drip. Travis Ishikawa single to center in the second. Drip. Panik RBI single to center. Drip. Sandoval single to center. Drip. Brandon Belt RBI single to right. Panik’s triple to left off Craig Stammen was more like waterboarding, particularly after Posey followed with another single up the middle to give San Francisco a three-run cushion.
It was enough to mitigate the home run swings of Bryce Harper and Asdrubal Cabrera, give home-field advantage to the Giants and prompt Harper to tell the Washington Post that Game 2 on Saturday is “a must-win.”
Jordan Zimmermann starts for Washington, and his stuff doesn’t match the electricity of Strasburg’s, nor, for that matter, that of Edinson Volquez, whom San Francisco beat in the NL wild-card game. Zimmermann does command his pitches better than just about anyone, and perhaps that’s the key to foiling the Giants’ plans: mix pitches and locate, something neither Strasburg nor Volquez managed.
“For the most part, we do a nice job of putting pressure on the defense, and, yeah, I think it’s big,” Posey said. “I think it probably isn’t talked about much until this time of the year.”
Nor is it exactly a necessity. After Giants position players struck out nine times in Game 1 of the 2012 World Series and five times in Game 2, they put up 12 and 13 strikeouts in Games 3 and 4. San Francisco swept the series. Similarly, the Giants struck out on nearly 33 percent of at-bats in the 2010 NLDS, and they managed to escape it and win the World Series then, too.
For now, they’ll take strikeouts on just 11.8 percent of at-bats, as they’ve done so far. They’re 2-0 this postseason because of it. Apparently, being short does have its advantages.
