Playoff Prospectus: NL... (10/19)
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October 19, 2012 Playoff ProspectusNLCS Game Five Recap: Giants 5, Cardinals 0Guess the MLB.com headline! a. Giants Don't Feel Blue, Barry These are terrible. They're all terrible because one of them (a terrible one!) is terribly real. *** If the Giants win the World Series this year, it will be because Barry Zito pitched Game Five of the NLCS and pitched wonderfully. Sure, he was paid a billion dollars and had been terrible in his previous postseason start and had spent the previous six years acting like the mole in The Mole, but whatever. If the Giants win the World Series this year, it will be because of Barry Zito, and you know what? Maybe it’ll have all been worth it (as long as "it" doesn't literally mean "all the money he was paid). It took a long time for Zito to have a signature moment as a Giant. He’s had opportunities, and he’s had some decent stretches, and he’s not—well, okay, I was going to say he’s not Mike Hampton, but Zito has produced 1.6 WARP as a Giant and Hampton produced 10.4 WARP during his eight-year contract, so never mind. Anyway, I can’t think of one spectacular Zito moment in his time as a Giant. Is there one? Here are, before tonight, what I would call his 10 most important starts as a Giant. Let’s see how he did in them:
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Once upon a time, long ago in a kingdom called rec.sport.baseball, Gary Huckabay had a statistic he called "Flakiest Pitchers," based on the best and worst starts that guys had and the frequency and severity of the extremes. Any chance of resurrecting that for a look at Zito? It might be fun to apply it to Lance Lynn, Adam Wainwright, maybe Bronson Arroyo, and some other post-season guys whose performances have been ... erratic.
Zito has been at his flakiest this season for the Giants. On average he has been, well, average. But he has had some huge games for the Giants starting with the complete game shutout at Coors to end a 3 game losing streak at the beginning of the season and ending, as of now, with last night's performance. And then he has had those games like in the NLDS where he doesn't make it into the 5th. Go figure.
I would have expected that Coors game at the beginning of this season to easily make a list of Zito's most important games as a Giant, both because it foreshadowed yesterday's game and was critical to keeping the team and fans from doing a Jonestown early this year.