Giants vs. Dodgers: Los Angeles Takes Advantage of Atrocious Giants Fielding, Solid Starting Pitching

If the San Francisco Giants were a telecommunications company, they would have just dropped your call. If there’s some weird, hyper-contagious, communicable disease ravaging through a quarantined area, send the Giants in to administer aid -- they wouldn’t catch whatever was going around. And if the Giants were a baseball team, they could lose a four-game series after kicking around the ball for three of those games. The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Giants 7-5 on Sunday night, winning three games out of the four-game series.

After Rafael Furcal singled on Barry Zito’s first pitch of the game, Jamey Carroll tripled past a diving Aubrey Huff, who gambled and lost, missing the ball by a foot. Matt Kemp then pounded a Barry Zito changeup -- an 84-mph wonder that Pitch F/X stubbornly insists was a fastball -- deep into the left-field stands for a two-run home run that gave Los Angeles a 3-0 lead.

The Giants were able to scratch out single runs in three different innings to tie the game, but the tie ended when Marcus Thames tripled off the glove of a disoriented, woozy Huff, scoring a run. The Dodgers didn’t let up, pounding Dan Runzler in relief and putting the game out of reach, even by Jonathan Broxton standards.

Somewhere out there is a graph that plots the perceived talent of Hiroki Kuroda and Barry Zito over time, with two lines that intersected a while ago. Kuroda has been underrated for a while, and over the past couple of seasons, Zito moved from ace to certified innings-eater. Both pitched well, with each picking up a quality start and alternating between hittable and untouchable for concentrated stretches.