Bay Area Sports Blogging

Today's outcome with Barry Zito on the mound was not unexpected. Zito was doomed to have a repeat performance from his last game when he gave up a walk to the Reds' leadoff hitter.

The Reds batted around to put up an ugly 6-spot in the first inning. The Reds continued to score against Zito in the 2nd and 3rd innings to give him a line of 3 innings pitched with 8 earned runs and 3 walks to push his ERA up to 7.53.

Watching Zito throw fastballs in the low 80s makes one wonder why he can not locate his pitches. He was consistently up in the zone and with the lack of velocity, he was pretty much serving it up to the Reds on a tee.

The only thing to look forward to when Zito pitches is to see if the blowout is large enough for Bochy to put in a position player to try out pitching.

The 5th man of the Giants starting rotation, Kevin Correia, had to leave the game early with a strained oblique muscle after throwing only nine pitches.

Brad Hennessey came in and gave up a run in the first which led to flurry of offense for both teams in the succeeding frames.

Early on, the Giants scored with small ball. None more representative than Emmanuel Burris' run in the 2nd. With Rich Aurilla on first base, Burris grounded into a fielders' choice, stole second, moved to third on Steve Holm's groundout and scored on Brad Hennessey's single.

Another game, another nail biting win for the San Francisco Giants to extend their win streak to three games.

Jonathan Sanchez was dealing tonight against the Cincinnati Reds, striking out ten batters in eight innings putting him into a tie with Tim Lincecum for the team lead. Sanchez was not even laboring through looking for the strikeouts either. His pitch count was very economical, heading into the ninth inning he had thrown only 99 pitches.