Zito deserved a better ending

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — He deserved a better ending. Maybe not red-carpet, but not red-faced either.

Barry Zito should have been able to walk away with a smile, with the cheers of thousands ringing in his ears. That’s the way it happens in the movies. The way it happens in reality was played out on a depressing Wednesday at AT&T Park.

The guess is that the game Zito pitched against the Boston Red Sox, the game the Giants in this what-else-can-go-wrong season would lose 12-1, was his last start for San Francisco, his farewell in a year during which neither he nor his team fared well.

Zito wasn’t very effective, not that anyone expected him to be, and the Giants, who can’t field and can’t hit, were even less so. A franchise in search of itself, and reasons for the decline, surely will try someone, anyone, other than Zito from here on out — unless injury demands otherwise.

So it is time to acknowledge the man, as opposed to the player, because Barry Zito was always a man no matter how poorly he threw or how miserably he was treated by the media or the fans.

Good times — and he knew those — or bad times, Zito was mature and in control. If not always in control of a fastball or curve.

I’ve dealt with the best and the rudest in a half century of sports journalism, athletes whose response to even the most harmless of questions could be an obscenity or a quick rush to a hiding place.  

Barry Zito took the blows. What he didn’t take was the criticism as personal. He accepted it as part of the job.

Sure he had the big salary, but that’s the nature of the beast. If you had won a Cy Young Award, as did Zito with the Athletics, and you were in demand in a seller’s market, the dollars would be there.

The Giants wanted this Barry to be a softer, more kindly face of the team than the other Barry, Bonds, so they spent and acquired him.

Zito didn’t pay off. Not until last season, 2012, when needed most.

In the playoffs, in the World Series, he pitched with guile and grace. The Giants don’t win a championship without Zito. Nothing could be more apparent.

Other than the fact his days with the Giants are numbered. They sent him to the bullpen briefly, then Wednesday, gave him the opportunity to start. “He could have come out better,” said Bruce Bochy, the San Francisco manager, who is marvelously protective. “He hung a slider...”

That was smacked into the left field seats in the second inning by Will Middlebrooks. Only 2-0 at that point, but the demons were hovering.

The night before, Tuesday, the Giants won their only game of the series from Boston, a game that in itself might not have meant much but could have been seen as a small step toward the respectability that had flown with the wind.

“The season hasn’t gone the way we hoped,” Bochy had said, as if the fact had to be verbalized. It hasn’t gone the way he hoped, the front office hoped and most of all the way the fans hoped.

“But we have some pride,” Bochy said. 

And almost out of nowhere, they had a 3-2 victory over the Red Sox at AT&T Park, because Ryan Vogelsong became the pitcher he had been — and surely has a chance to be next season — and because Brayan Villarreal walked Marco Scutaro with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth on the only four pitches he threw.

Such a disaster, the defending World Series champion Giants, with a lousy defense, a pathetic offense and pitching that at best could be called erratic.

The way everything went right in 2012 is the way almost everything has gone wrong in 2013.

Except the attendance, the Giants now with 229 consecutive regular-season sellouts. The fans keep coming because the tickets were sold and — because, as on Tuesday — they may be rewarded.

“We have a huge fan base,” agreed Bochy. “I was disappointed in the way we played Monday night (losing 7-0).”

He was even more disappointed Wednesday. “We drifted mentally,” he said. “That shouldn’t happen playing a good team like Boston. We had played well the night before.”

So Zito will be gone in 2014. As will Tim Lincecum. Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner, as now, continue to be the main men of a franchise built around pitching. Vogelsong’s work Tuesday night indicates he should be No. 3. And then?

Maybe the Giants obtain another starter — without Zito or Lincecum’s salaries on the ledger, there will be room financially. More likely they go after a left fielder, someone with power.

Yet whoever is on the mound or in left, the fielding must improve. There are 30 teams in the majors. The Giants rank 29th in defense.

“It’s hard to explain,” said Bochy.

He didn’t need to explain his choice of Zito, who a month earlier had been pulled from the rotation.

“I think (Zito) has earned this,” Bochy said Tuesday. “He’s a guy who has done a lot for us. I know it’s been an up-and-down year. He’s been waiting for his turn, so he gets to go first. My hope is he goes out and throws the ball great and stays in the rotation.”

He didn’t. He won’t.

Giants' Bochy manages in every possible way

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — They call him a manager, don’t they? Bruce Bochy manages, in every possible way. Manages his players with grace and skill. Manages his own emotions with superb calm.
  
Baseball will drive a man crazy, but only if he lets it.
  
The San Francisco Giants have done things the hard way for several seasons now. “Sweet Torture,” it was labeled by TV announcer Mike Krukow. Sweet because somehow the Giants make all the gnawed nails and deep breaths worth it.
   
As they did Wednesday at AT&T.
   
The Giants couldn’t hold a two-run lead in the ninth but as normal held their composure, and then won in the 10th, beating the Phillies, 4-3, and avoiding a sweep.
  
Not what Bochy desires, but almost what Bochy has come to expect.
   
“I’m used to it,” said Bochy. He looks more grizzled every game, but after this game, after the halt of a two-game losing streak, he also looked satisfied, a twinkle in his eyes.
   
What doesn’t break a man makes him laugh, right?
    
“These guys are entertainers,” Bochy said. If he was being sarcastic, and the possibility existed, it was hard to detect.
    
“I enjoy the game.”
    
He might have enjoyed it more if Sergio Romo didn’t give up a couple of runs in the ninth, but that’s baseball. Imperfection is everywhere. If you lose 62 times during a major league season, you’ll be a winner. It helps to be philosophical, maybe even fatalistic.
    
“Sergio’s been so good,” said Bochy. Which, certainly, he wasn’t on this afternoon by the Bay, but you’re not going to hear Bochy rip his players. You’re more likely to hear him credit the opposition, as he did with the Phils. “They’ve got a good club too,” he pointed out.
  
A club that beat the Giants on Monday and Tuesday.
    
What Bochy wanted was for his starting pitcher, Barry Zito, to get deep into the game, giving an overworked bullpen a rest. Zito responded, giving up only one run in seven plus innings and even adding a run-scoring single.
   
But Philly scoring twice in the next inning, off Romo, meant for a third straight game, after the Padres, after the Dodgers, Zito was not involved in the decision, even if in a larger sense, walking none, giving up only four hits and one run, he was very involved.
  
His control was a reason the Giants never trailed. It’s considerably easier when a team isn’t always playing from behind
  
“What a job Barry did,” Bochy said with emphasis. “He was throwing strikes. We’re not clicking on offense. It’s too bad he didn’t get the win, but it was a quality start.”
   
After the squandered lead, there also was a quality finish. Buster Posey was hauled out of the dugout on what was supposed to be his day of rest and opened the bottom of the 10th with a single. Then, after moving to second on a sacrifice and third on a wild pitch, he scored the winning run on a single by Andres Torres, who also had begun the game on the bench.
  
For Torres, who was with the Mets in 2012 before returning to San Francisco this season, it was the fourth walk-off hit of his career.  It also was the Giants fifth walk-off win of the season and — time to exhale — their third in the last six games.
  
“I just tried to be aggressive,” said Torres. “I was looking for a slider. I just reacted. I think it was a fastball.”
  
Torres was buried under celebrating teammates, as was Buster Posey on Friday night and then Guillermo Quiroz on Saturday night after game-winning home runs against the Dodgers.
   
“This type of win is a confidence booster to us,” said a magnanimous Zito, “to get it done in the bottom of the 9th or 10th when the other side battles back.”
   
Zito’s performance had to be a particular boost to a franchise built on starting pitching but in the past two weeks rarely getting the starting pitching it needed.
   
Matt Cain did achieve his first win of the season Sunday, and Tim Lincecum, after a wobbly beginning, lasted seven innings on Tuesday night, if in a loss.
   
“It was important for me to be aggressive,” said Zito, “to make those guys swing their bats so I could keep my pitch count down.”
   
He met that requirement, lasting 101 pitches, the last one smacked into left for a single by Carlos Ruiz. Santiago Casilla took over for Zito but hurt his knee and two batters later was replaced by Jeremy Affeldt.
   
“We’re going to have a hiccup now and then,” said Bochy.
     
The cure for hiccups is water sipped slowly, we’re advised. Or in a game as this one, a run-scoring single by Andres Torres.
    
Entertainment? Whatever Bochy wants to call it is fine with the fans if it’s a win.

The waiting ends for Tim Lincecum

By Art Spander
 
GLENDALE, Ariz. –- It was baseball with a history, out here in the suburbs of Phoenix, Giants vs. Dodgers. An exhibition, but for Tim Lincecum, seeking reassurance, more like an exhibit, of himself.

He had to show us, show baseball, that he wouldn’t be the same as last year.
   
Tim had been the man for the Giants, two Cy Young Awards, a World Series win. Then things went haywire in 2012, until the postseason when, as a reliever, he came through. Still, he had to be a starter, not a reliever, not at $20 million per.
    
Giants against Dodgers, Lincecum against his fears. His first start of spring training on Tuesday. More acutely, the first time he would face live batters, even in practice. A rainout prevented even that bit of normal preparation.
   
He was waiting. Giants Nation was waiting.
   
Lincecum threw 38 pitches in 1 1/3 innings, as stiff a workout as allowed in his situation. Though he would be charged with three runs in a game that would end tied, 8-8, after San Francisco got consecutive two-run homers in the ninth from Brock Bond and Brett Pill, Timmy was not at all displeased.
   
On the contrary. The doubts have fled.
   
No worries about mechanics. No thoughts about what had been, only what is.
   
“It wasn’t a question of whether I was going to throw strikes,”  said Lincecum, who at times last season could not. “It was a question of how I was going to throw those strikes. I didn’t feel out of whack.”
    
Camelback Ranch, the complex that serves as home for the Dodgers — “Whole new team. Whole new 'Tude” — and Chicago White Sox, has a beautiful stadium of rust-colored steel that blends perfectly with the desert. It seemed a proper place for a renaissance, if only partly filled — attendance, 5,019, and of that total numerous Giants fans.
    
The afternoon began long before the first pitch with a recording over the public address system of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” hardly inappropriate with the state’s two National League powers about to face each other. Then, came one of the Giants’ AT&T Park anthems, Journey and “Don’t Stop Believing.”
    
Which, through his season of 2012, when Lincecum was 10-15 with a 5.18 earned run average, he never did. He had lost too much weight, which observers said led to him losing his fastball and all those games.
  
For 2013, he gained pounds and trimmed his shoulder-length locks. Hard to know if the hair style had any effect, but Lincecum was effective.
 
“I missed only a couple pitches high,” said Lincecum. “I was thinking about a spot and hitting it, My timing was good.”
  
He will be 29 in June, an age when a pitcher should be at his best, still youthfully strong but also well experienced. His No. 1 place in the rotation has been ceded, unintentionally, to Matt Cain, who emphasized his brilliance with a perfect game. Add Madison Bumgarner, Ryan Vogelsong and the comeback of Barry Zito, and Lincecum may have to battle for a start.
   
Unless he’s back to 2008 or 2009, and those Cys.
  
“It was really good to have the atmosphere of being in a game again,” said Lincecum. “It was nice to face hitters again. I was kind of locked in. Other than the slider to (Jeremy) Moore (resulting in a two-run double in the second, Lincecum’s last pitch) I wasn’t too bad.”
   
For manager Bruce Bochy, still laughing about playing a second straight tie — it was 9-9 against the White Sox at Scottsdale on Monday — “wasn’t too bad” is an understatement. Bochy was more than satisfied.
  
“I thought Timmy did real well,” said Bochy. “He had good rhythm with his pitches and threw strikes. He looked very comfortable, and I thought he had good stuff.”
   
A former catcher, Bochy offers a keen eye on pitching, one of the reasons the Giants’ staff has been so strong — and one of the reasons San Francisco has won the World Series twice the last three years. He and general manager Brian Sabean fully understand that pitching dominates a game.
  
“What I saw,” Bochy said of Lincecum’s performance, “was a consistent delivery and good rhythm. Last year, he got out of sync. He knows it. He fought hard to get it back.”
   
Last year, with fans and teammates watching nervously and expecting the worst, which too often came, Lincecum would do well for three or four, or maybe five, innings, and then, bam. A walk, a double, a single, another double. So quickly it would come apart, and there would come Bochy taking the ball to hand to a reliever.
    
“Today was different,” said Bochy. “He looked very consistent.”
   
What the manager nearly said, but did not, was that Tim Lincecum looked very much as we expected Tim Lincecum to look: a great pitcher.

The Giants, the Team That Knew How

SAN FRANCISCO – The city that knows how. That’s the slogan of this town, the one of little cable cars and World Series titles. A little too much, perhaps. Or maybe not enough.

This is a city in love with its hills, its food, its views, its bridges, even its fog.

A city of diversity and lunacy, where a century ago a man named Norton declared himself Emperor and the hallowed Rudyard Kipling described the citizens as mad.

A city of hippies and gays and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. And the latest vintages from Napa.

And, now, maybe most of all, of the San Francisco Giants.

The once-again-champion San Francisco Giants.

They weren’t supposed to be there, on top of the baseball world. The Detroit Tigers were the favorites, the overwhelming choice.

The Tigers had – have – Miguel Cabrera, the first Triple Crown winner in 47 years. They had Justin Verlander, arguably the best pitcher in baseball. What they also have now are the blues.

How did it happen? The sporting mavens will spend the winter trying to explain. They’ll decide the Tigers again were burdened with too many off days between the league championship series and the World Series.

Or the baseball gods were totally on the side of the Giants, pointing out Angel Pagan’s ball, which ricocheted off third for a double, or those Tiger line drives that kept ending up in Pablo Sandoval’s glove.

The Giants, we’ll be told, caught lightning in a bottle, and if the teams played again next week, Detroit would win, instead of – how embarrassing – getting swept by a team that hit the fewest home runs in baseball during the regular season.

It’s all true, and who cares? In 2010 it was Brian Wilson closing things out in Texas. This time – with Wilson missing almost from the start of the season because of arm surgery – it was his doppelganger, Sergio Romo.

This team lost Wilson. This team lost Melky Cabrera – and for a while Guillermo Mota. Pablo Sandoval underwent surgery on a hamate bone. Freddy Sanchez never made it out of spring training. Tim Lincecum went from Cy Young winner to Mystery Man, although in the postseason some of that mystery was solved.

But it wasn’t what the Giants didn’t have, it’s what they did have. Which, as that song from the musical “Damn Yankees’’ told us, was heart. Along with some wise thinking just before the World Series by manager Bruce Bochy’s wife, Kim.

Remembering that the Bochys attended the pre-series gala in San Francisco two years ago, and the Giants won, she persuaded him, a bit superstitiously, to take her to this year’s gala, last Tuesday at the Fairmont Hotel, the one night off between the NLCS win and the start of the World Series.

Watching him for a few minutes, you sensed Bochy would rather be somewhere else, but she thought he shouldn’t change the routine from 2010. He didn’t. In the end his team didn’t.

In four games the Tigers, so powerful on offense, scored a total of six runs, three in the first game, three in the second, which the Giants won, 4-3 in 10 innings. Good pitching always will beat good hitting. The Giants’ pitching wasn’t good, it was great.

Add the 27 innings from the last three games against the Cardinals in the NLCS, a total of 64 innings, and the Giants allowed only seven runs.

“Unbelievable,” Vida Blue, the pitching great of the 1970s, said on CSN Bay Area.

“You don’t need a superstar at every position. Just tell a guy, you’re my shortstop, you’re my first baseman and go out and play.”

When you’re playing for Bruce Bochy, who treats everyone with respect, it’s easier.

“Our guys had a date with destiny,” Bochy said on postgame TV. “What made them special was they were such an unselfish group. They played for each other and the fans.”

The fans. San Francisco had its virtues, but one of them wasn’t the way it went about supporting teams. We were blasé, unemotional.   

The 49ers helped change the image. Winning five Super Bowls will get attention. Then two years ago, Giants general manager Brian Sabean, whose handiwork can be seen on the roster, said, “This is a baseball town.”

It hasn’t stopped being one. The Giants sold out every game the last two seasons. On Sunday night, an estimated 10,000 people showed up at Civic Center Plaza to watch Game 4 on a very big-screen TV.

You have to be happy for all of them, in their orange and black, in their Panda outfits – fittingly, deservingly, Sandoval was the Series MVP.

You have to be happy for Barry Zito, who stoically accepted many seasons of boos.

You have to be happy for Ryan Vogelsong, who two years ago seemed at the end of a career that was spent mostly in the minors or in Japan.

You have to be happy for San Francisco, for the whole Bay Area.  

The good guys won. Great Unexpectations.

Giants outplaying, outpitching the Tigers

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO – Jim Leyland took exception to the question. “Breaks?’’ he responded rhetorically. “I don’t think the Giants are getting any breaks. They’re outplaying us.”

Most of all, they’re outpitching the Detroit Tigers. Which in baseball is where it all begins. And ends. The adage can be repeated forever: If the other team doesn’t score, you can’t lose.

The other team, the Detroit Tigers, managed by Jim Leyland, didn’t score Thursday night. And so beaten, 2-0, by a team that barely scored, Detroit has lost the first two games of the 2012 World Series.

Defense wins. In baseball, defense begins with pitching. And ends with pitching.

With Barry Zito fooling the Tigers on Wednesday night. With Madison Bumgarner, who had been fighting himself, who had been getting chased from games in the fourth inning, stunning them Thursday night.

These are the Giants we’ve come to expect, the Giants who throw strikes and make big plays, such as Gregor Blanco firing to Marco Scutaro, whose relay cut down Prince Fielder at the plate. And make scoring against them almost an impossibility.

In the last five postseason games, the closing three against St. Louis in the National League Championship Series and the first two in the World Series, Giant pitching has given up runs in only three different innings. Three of 45.

A run in 27 innings to the Cards. Three runs in 18 innings to the Tigers, who were shut out only twice during the regular season. One run in the sixth on Wednesday, then, almost as a gift, two runs in the ninth. And none Thursday on an evening at AT&T so full of noise and tension that 42,855 fans at AT&T Park may never unwind.

The way they were starting to think the Tigers would never score.

“This was a really good World Series game,’’ said Leyland. “It didn’t turn out right for us . . . I don’t have any perspective. We got two hits tonight. I’m certainly not going to sit here and rip my offense. I think our offense is fine . . .”

It’s just that the Giants’ pitching has been better.

Santiago Casillla took over for Bumgarner in the eighth. Sergio Romo took over for Casilla in the ninth. “Those fans,’’ said Casilla of the crowd, “I’m 5-feet-10. The way they cheer when I’m on the mound, I feel about 6-feet-10. They’re unbelievable.”

A word some might apply to the Giants’ pitching. Zito overcame his demons of the past. Bumgarner overcame his struggles of the present. San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy even took Bumgarner out of the rotation after he couldn’t make it through the fourth inning of the NLCS opener against St. Louis.

“I thought the first inning would be critical for him, for his confidence,” Bochy said of Bumgarner’s opportunity Thursday night. “Also to see where he was at.”

Where he was at was back in 2010, when as a rookie Bumgarner was so impressive in a World Series start against the Texas Rangers.

“I mean,” said Bochy, after Bumgarner allowed only two hits and two walks to the Tigers, “what a job he did. Dave Righetti, our pitching coach, did a great job getting him back on track. He had great poise out there with a great delivery, and he stayed on it for seven innings.

“He needed a break, and I thought he benefited from it, both mentally and physically.”

No question everything so far has gone the way of the Giants, who, along with the nightly sellout crowds, waving their “rally rags,” singing along with the music of Journey, dressing in all sorts of loony attire of orange and black, have turned AT&T into a magical place.

On Wednesday night, Angel Pagan’s bouncer hit third, spun crazily and bounced into left for a double. On Thursday night, Gregor Blanco’s sacrifice bunt virtually dug a hole inches inside the third base line, loading the bases with nobody out in the seventh.

When Brandon Crawford grounded to second, the Tigers chose to go after the double play – which they got – instead of throwing home, and the Giants went in front, 1-0.

“It’s not debatable,” Leyland said of the decision, “because if we don’t score it doesn’t make any difference anyway. I can’t let them open the game up.”

Bochy said the difference in Bumgarner from his last few games was the delivery. “It was simpler, more compact,” he said, “and I think he was able to get the ball where he wanted to because of that.”

Asked if there was a different feel, Bumgarner, a laconic sort, but not without a sense of humor, answered, “Yeah, I went into the seventh inning instead of getting took out in the third.”

OK, his English isn’t perfect, but his fastball was.

“I think the only difference,” Bumgarner added, “was being able to make pitches. I hadn’t been able to do that this postseason, and tonight Buster (Posey) caught a great game, the defense did great.“I wanted to go out there and pitch well for our guys and the fans.”

He, Casilla and Romo couldn’t have pitched any better. If the other team doesn’t score you can’t lose. And the Giants didn’t.