Newsday (N.Y.): Don Mattingly finally comfortable with second storied franchise

By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

GLENDALE, Ariz. — For Don Mattingly, in Dodgers blue, the present remains linked with the past, when he wore Yankees pinstripes.

"I was around quality people,'' said Mattingly, whose entire 14-year playing career from 1982-95 was with the Yankees. "People that tried to play the game the right way and tried to be excellent in everything they did."

Read the full story here.

Copyright © 2014 Newsday. All rights reserved.

Sad September song for the Giants

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — A sad September song at AT&T Park. An autumn with nothing but memories, an autumn of dreams as faded as the leaves.

Something new for the San Francisco Giants and their fans, a final week of a season that went so awkwardly wrong that on Tuesday night the Giants again had to face the pitcher who once was their savior.

Brian Wilson out there on the mound in a Dodger uniform, throwing against the Giants the crackling, snapping, unhittable balls he once threw for them. The Dodgers, the division-champion Dodgers, getting a couple of home runs and beating the Giants, 2-1. How mortifying. How depressing.

Two of Matt Cain’s pitches were driven halfway to Oakland, one by Yasiel Puig, a couple of innings after Cain presumably hit Puig intentionally, and another by Matt Kemp. And the way the Giants can’t hit — they scored only three runs in three runs against the Yankees over the weekend — that was enough.

They’re playing for pride now, and nostalgia. Barry Zito, for the last time, was to pitch Wednesday for San Francisco. A reward. A farewell. A what-the-heck, why not?

It was supposed to be Madison Bumgarner’s turn, but Giants manager Bruce Bochy was thinking of the future — and the past. MadBum will sit out the rest of this disappointing year, having pitched one inning short of 200, while Zito gets his final chance before heading into the sunset. Or onto the roster of another team.

A seven-year contract of $127 million, which became bigger than anything Zito did or couldn’t do with a baseball. A contract of hope and controversy. Boos and jibes, but through it all Zito stood tall, acted the gentleman until the end, and in 2012 helped pitched the Giants to their World Series win.

"There were a lot of things I would have liked to go better,” Zito told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but when it's all said and done, I'll always know I helped the team win a World Series. That's huge for me."

And it remains huge for Bochy and the front office. They’re bringing Zito on stage once more, a victory lap if you will in a year when victories have been rare, for Zito (4-11 record, 5.91 ERA) and the Giants (72-85 after Tuesday night).

“I wanted to see him have one more start,” said Bochy, who deals in sentiment as well as anyone in baseball. “This is the best time. He’s done a lot. We know what he did last year for us. He has done everything we asked.”

The days dwindle down to a precious few. Such poignant lyrics. It is up to the Oakland Athletics alone to play October baseball by the bay this year. The A’s came through. The Giants are through.

There was a sequence in the top of the eighth on Tuesday night that was perfectly representative of this imperfect year for the Giants. With Kemp on first for the Dodgers and two out, reliever Jean Machi struck out A.J. Ellis. Buster Posey, the MVP, dropped the ball, which happens, but his routine throw to first for the out was short of Brandon Belt, and Ellis was on first and Kemp on third with the error.        

That rarely happens. Fortunately, for the Giants, Mark Ellis grounded out.

The Giants’ defense has been terrible this season, devastating for a team that has trouble scoring runs. The middle of the order, the big guns offensively, have failed with men on base. In the three games against the Yankees and one against L.A., the Giants got four runs total.

“We’re cold right now,” affirmed Bochy, talking as if San Francisco had a few months remaining rather than only a few games. “The series in New York, we didn’t swing the bats very well either.”

Zito will pitch then depart. That’s a given. What then happens to Tim Lincecum, who has been occasionally brilliant — the no-hitter — and frequently erratic. Do the Giants re-sign him?

What they must do is sign a power hitter, presumably to play left. What they must do is somehow persuade or order Pablo Sandoval to get into shape. He will be in his contract year in 2014. Pablo has only 13 home runs — and three were game in one game.

What they absolutely must do is pick up ground balls and throw them into a glove, not into right field or center field.

Bochy, not unexpectedly, insisted Cain pitched well, and Cain did pitch well. But the slightest mistakes, the two balls hit for home runs, are critical when a team can’t get runners home — and except for a solo homer by Tony Abreu in the fifth, the Giants couldn’t get runners home.

“We couldn’t get much going,” said Bochy.

When have they ever in this 2013 season?

Finally able, Cain gets that first win

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — The game wasn’t merely about Matt Cain and his vexing month of winless pitching. Then again, it was mostly about Matt Cain.
   
When a guy is your ace, throws a perfect game, is the All-Star starter and then has zero for April in the victory column, he is the central character in the mystery.
    
Dodgers-Giants remains the essential component of San Francisco baseball, as the unrelenting chants of “Beat L.A., Beat L.A.” bear witness. The final score means everything.
   
Sunday night’s final score, 4-3 in favor the franchise that carried “GIGANTES’’ on its uniforms for Cinco de Mayo, meant those Gigantes had swept the three-game series from Los Angeles.
  
Yet the Cain performance was not to be underestimated. To the Giants, who knew once more Matt was the rock of a pitching staff that is the team’s strength, and yes, to Cain himself.
   
No matter how much success a player has experienced, an 0-2 record with a 6.49 earned run average in six games must be bewildering at the least.
   
He and probably everyone else knew sooner or later the wrongs would be corrected, but the issue was when. The response was delivered by Cain along with his fastballs and breaking pitches in 7 1/3 reassuring innings.
  
“It was a solid effort,” said Giants manager Bruce Bochy of Cain. “A great job. No runs.”
   
Until an eighth inning Bochy said has become all too familiar for the Giants, when a 4-0 lead ebbed, relievers entered and departed and the normal sellout crowd of 41,000-plus at AT&T Park wondered why it always had to be so nerve-wracking.
  
“Our boys made it entertaining,” said Bochy, who by his subsequent smile made us understand he’d accept something less so. “It’s our nature. We made it close.”
  
But close or not, it was the Giants’ sixth straight win, three over the Dodgers, each by a run, after three over Arizona, following five straight defeats. Some chewed fingernails, some beautiful hitting — Sunday night Hunter Pence drove in all the San Francisco runs — and a lot of happy patrons.
   
The mini-achievement, Cain getting off the schneid for 2013 and also becoming the first Giant starter in 12 games to get a victory — oh, that bullpen has been spectacular — was simple enough.
   
“I didn’t make as many mistakes,” said Cain, “and some of the mistakes I was making were hit at guys.”
   
It is a baseball truism that nothing in the game is fair. Line drives are caught — as three line drives, or at least deep flies, off Sergio Romo were caught in the top of the ninth — while bloops and dribblers fall for hits.
   
“A couple ground balls go through,” Bochy said of the Dodgers' eighth. “Then in the (top of) ninth, hard-hit balls right at them.”
    
Still, it isn’t only a matter of fortune. When a pitcher is sharp, the breaks, good or bad, don’t have that much of an effect. Twice this season, Cain had given up three home runs in a single game. Sunday night he allowed nothing more destructive than a first-inning double by Matt Kemp, who never moved from second.
 
“All of the starters hadn’t been doing what we wanted to do,” said Cain. “To get off that skid, it just took some time.
  
“I had those bits where I was giving up home runs while ahead in the count. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about that, but about bearing down and just thinking about pitching. (Catcher Guillermo) Quiroz did a good job keeping me focused.”
   
Cain gave up five hits and three walks and, although charged only with one of the Dodger runs, still has an ERA 5.57. It will decline.
    
There was a report on ESPN, which televised the game nationally, that the Giants felt Cain’s problems were physical, he had dropped the angle of his delivery, causing his balls to flatten out. Bochy was in full denial about that or any other issue with Cain’s body.
  
“I never thought something was wrong with Matt,” said the manager. “I said along he was healthy, his arm was fine. And tonight he showed it.”
  
Cain was not one to disagree,
  
“My arm always felt good,” Cain said. “I was just making bad pitches. I didn’t pitch well. Tonight I made better pitches at times. Yes, sometimes when you make a bad pitch they’ll pop it up, but that wasn’t what happened.”
   
The Giants continued a remarkable record. Never in their 56 years in San Francisco have they lost a home game to the Dodgers when they built a lead of three runs or more.
   
That beat goes on. Matt Cain’s beating finally has changed.
  
“The most encouraging part,” answered Cain when asked, “was I got kind of better as the game went along.”
     
He’s a winner now. Of course, he always has been.

Giants are heads, and hats, above the rest of the West

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO – Hats off. No, hats on. Alex Smith of the 49ers wearing one from the Giants, a dastardly, fineable act according to the uniform police of the NFL. And, in response, Bruce Bochy sitting pre-game in the Giants’ dugout topped by a 49er hat.

Tit for tat. Or, literally, hat for hat.

"Our way of saying thanks,’’ Bochy would point out. “And we’re 1-0 with that hat.’’

The Giants were sending a message. Specifically, two messages: One, we’ve got your back, 49ers. (Or should that be we’ve got your hat?) And two, we’ve almost got the division, Dodgers.

It’s over, the National League West race, even though technically it’s not, and so even if the Giants absolutely couldn’t blow it, they’re saying all the right things about not easing up.

More significantly, they’re doing all the right things to prove they’re not easing up. Instead, they’re revving up.   

They clubbed the Colorado Rockies, 9-2, Thursday afternoon at AT&T Park, a sweep of the four-game series, an eighth win in the last nine games.

These are party days at the ballpark, from the pre-game organ solos – just like in the 1950s – to Pablo Sandoval rediscovering the home run to the seventh-inning Beatles’ recording of “Twist and Shout,’’ one of the great rock songs anywhere, anytime.

"Every single day, 41,000 people excited for us,’’ said Sandoval a short while after the one single day in his career in which he hit home runs both righthanded (in the first with no one on) and lefthanded (in the fourth with two on).

"We play hard for them.”

They’re playing hard and well and entertainingly. The unassailable idea that sport is intended to be tumultuous merriment is carried to the max every game at AT&T, where there’s laughter in the dugout and rejoicing in the stands.

At the so-called old man’s game, the crowds are young and joyful, singing, dancing, cheering.

"We are happy, not satisfied,’’ said Sandoval, the Panda. Until Wednesday, he hadn’t hit a home run in weeks, 161 at bats going back to July. Now he’s hit three in two games.

"We are loose and having fun.’’  He stopped momentarily. “But it’s not over yet.’’

Yes it is. Before the Dodgers played the Nationals, Thursday night, the Giants’ magic number was four, meaning any combo of four Giants wins and Dodgers losses would make San Francisco champions of the West. You think that’s not going to happen?

Bochy, managing his hat off – or on – was asked if he would watch the Dodgers-Nats game.

"No,’’ he answered. “I’m probably going to have dinner, to be honest with you.’’

There’s a man with perspective. A man with intelligence, not that we weren’t previously aware. A night off in the City by the Bay — why waste it watching a ball game?

He’d already been involved in a rewarding one.

Already had seen Barry Zito pitch well enough often enough to get the victory and, when he was removed in the sixth – “He hates it when I come out there,’’ said Bochy -- to get a standing ovation.

Had seen Marco Scutaro, the pickup of the year, at age 36 set a career season mark with his 175th hit (he added another) and raise his batting average to .301.

Had seen the Giants bat around and score six runs in the fourth, when Sandoval and Buster Posey hit back-to-back home runs and Zito had a fine sacrifice bunt that drew an appreciative cheer from a turnout as into the nuances of baseball as it was the taste of the garlic fries.

"The mood, tempo and spirit of the club are very good,’’ said Bochy. “That’s the way it’s been for a couple months. We did a great job on the road. Now we’re playing well here. This club has a lot of character. We’re having fun, keeping it loose.’’

Why be uptight when Matt Cain is zooming along, when Tim Lincecum appears to finding his immediate past, when Buster Posey, the presumptive MVP, is batting .335, when the Panda has found his stroke, when Barry Zito, the man the public despised, has a 13-8 record and receives standing o’s?

"The crowd and that enthusiasm,’’ Bochy said. “The adrenaline. We run on it. These guys feed off that. They’re (the fans) as happy for our success as we are.”

You need to win in sports, and the Giants the past few years have been winning. But there’s more. There’s the realization by management that people want to have a good time, and in the majors’ best ballpark, they must. Or there wouldn’t have been 159 consecutive announced sellouts.

You have to tip your hat to them, no matter if it says 49ers or Giants.

RealClearSports: When Baseball Teams Give Up

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

It's a business. That inescapable point has been drummed into us as long as there have been professional sports. At no time, however, does the idea become as apparent as that tidy little period at the end of July, baseball's trading deadline.

Teams in contention desperately go after the player or players they believe will make them champions. Teams out of contention basically throw up their arms and throw out their stars, although nobody involved ever would concede they, well, have conceded. Even though it's obvious they have.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2012