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New York Times
2 days ago
- Sport
- New York Times
Casey Schmitt contributes as Giants' win streak reaches seven games
DENVER — Tristan Beck received the most thankless assignment you can give to a major-league reliever: enter a game at Coors Field trailing by a run and try to keep it close. Three batters in, Beck was already pitching from his heels. He had allowed one run and only recorded a second out because the Colorado Rockies ran their way into it. When he threw a breaking ball that actually moved according to its designs, the Rockies' Keston Hiura snuck his barrel to it and hit a hard grounder that hugged the third-base line. Beck whirled around, saw the ball skipping over the bag and assumed his inning was becoming a war of attrition. Advertisement That's when third baseman Casey Schmitt made a lunging grab while staying on his feet. As his momentum carried him into foul territory, he flung a throw across his body that arrived true, in time and without so much as a hop to first baseman Jerar Encarnacion. 'I gotta admit it,' Beck said. 'I had to double-check who that was back there.' It will be no easy feat for the Giants to replace any element of Matt Chapman's game while he recovers from a sprained right hand. He's one of the league's smartest and tidiest baserunners. He is their leading home run hitter. And, of course, he's a five-time Gold Glove winner whose defensive skills annually account for a significant portion of his Wins Above Replacement. Chapman's defense should be the most irreplaceable aspect of his game. Instead, it might be the area where the Giants have the most coverage. Schmitt, a gifted defender, turned heads with his sparkling play in the fifth inning. Then he made contributions to a pair of late rallies as the Giants scored four runs in the eighth inning and three more in the ninth while storming to a 10-7 victory over the Rockies Wednesday night. It was the Giants' 20th come-from-behind win of the season. 'notha comeback in Colorado! — SFGiants (@SFGiants) June 12, 2025 Schmitt drew an eight-pitch walk in the eighth that set up Mike Yastrzemski's tying, two-run double. Then Schmitt scored the tiebreaking run following a replay reversal when he sprinted home on Tyler Fitzgerald's safety squeeze and slid a hand across the plate barely ahead of the tag. At that point, the Giants were set up to win their seventh consecutive game by a one-run margin, which would have matched the 1927 Chicago Cubs for the longest streak in major-league history. But it's a good thing they didn't stop there. They scored three more in the ninth and Schmitt knocked in one of them with a single up the middle. Advertisement Camilo Doval needed the extra cushion in the bottom of the ninth. He served up a solo home run to Hunter Goodman and the Rockies brought the tying run to the plate before Orlando Arcia tapped to the mound to end it. The streak of one-run victories might be over, but the winning habit continues. The Giants are a season-best 12 games over .500, just a half-game behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West, and they will have a theoretical chance to dislodge their archrivals when they arrive at Chavez Ravine this weekend to begin a three-game series. The three-run victory didn't release much pressure, though. 'Well, it still came down to the last pitch,' Giants manager Bob Melvin said. 'So I won't necessarily say this was a laugher.' Every pitch seems to matter more at Coors Field, where attrition is a way of life. Schmitt's defensive play had the underrated impact of saving Beck from throwing more pitches in the fifth inning, which otherwise might have prevented him from completing the sixth and seventh. The Giants dealt with the opposite effect earlier in the game when a missed-catch error on Encarnacion compounded a labor-intensive third inning for Robbie Ray, in which the left-hander was charged with four runs (two earned) and threw 34 pitches. 'It just drains you,' said Ray, who was lifted after throwing 93 pitches in four innings. 'More than at normal altitude. Any time you have to throw that many pitches in an inning, regardless of where you are, it's tough. But when you're here, it just takes more out of you.' So when a defensive gem like Schmitt's ends an inning here and allows everyone to get back to the dugout? 'Oh, a hundred percent, it's huge,' Beck said. 'Any pitcher will tell you what it's like here. Any chance you get to have a ball fielded and make a play like that, it's so important. That's one of the better plays I've seen behind me in my career. We all knew Casey could do that. Obviously, we're a little used to it with Chappy over there on the regular. But we know Casey can, too.' What a play by Casey Schmitt 🤯 — SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) June 12, 2025 Schmitt became the best defensive infielder in the Giants' farm system from the moment the club took him in the second round of the 2020 draft out of San Diego State. But every avenue to playing time on the left side of the infield appeared impassable at the end of last year when the Giants agreed to a six-year, $151 million extension with Chapman and then signed shortstop Willy Adames to a seven-year, $182 million free-agent contract. Both Chapman and Adames pride themselves on playing 150-plus games and have to be cajoled into taking a day off. When spring training began, it was unclear what future Schmitt might have in the organization. Advertisement Schmitt made the opening day roster anyway, in a utility role. Then he added to his value when he turned himself into an above-average first baseman seemingly overnight. Now he's expected to receive an extended run of playing time while Chapman recovers — a process that is likely to extend into July. Even though Schmitt acknowledged that he is merely holding down the fort at third base, there's plenty more at stake for him. It's not impossible to envision Schmitt parlaying this opportunity into unseating Fitzgerald, who is in the midst of an inconsistent season at the plate and ran into another out on the basepaths on Wednesday. While Fitzgerald has played a credible second base, he cannot match Schmitt's arm strength or tagging skills, either. If Schmitt can combine better situational at-bats with his defense, then the Giants will be tempted to find a way to keep him in the lineup even after Chapman returns. 'That was huge, (fouling off) breaking ball after breaking ball and taking a fastball on the last pitch,' said Melvin, describing Schmitt's walk against right-hander Tyler Kinley in the eighth. 'It's a great opportunity for him. He's got a real opportunity to do some good things while Chappy is out. We're lucky to have him.' Does it help Schmitt to relax knowing he'll be in the lineup virtually every day for at least a couple weeks? 'I guess so, but I know my role,' he said. 'We all can't wait for (Chapman) to come back to doing his thing here. We're counting down the days.' The Giants also have been counting the days until Adames began to make an impact at the plate following two slow and challenging months. Perhaps these first two games in Denver will be the start of something. Adames hit a home run for the second consecutive game and finished a triple short of the cycle, singling to ignite the four-run rally in the eighth and doubling to help set up the three-run ninth. Advertisement His two-run home run gave the Giants a quick lead in the first inning. He also contributed a sacrifice fly. Arcia took away a potential fourth hit at third base in the fifth. Whether the margin of victory was one run or three, the Giants continued to do just enough to cover up their mistakes. Encarnacion's error in the third might have been the most glaring, but the coaching staff also blundered when Melvin failed to signal in time for a replay challenge on a blown call that ended the seventh inning. It was the second mea culpa of the series for Melvin, who acknowledged on Tuesday that he shouldn't have sent reliever Spencer Bivens out for a third inning. Maybe it didn't feel like the Giants had breathing room when Doval recorded the final out, but the three-run margin meant that the Giants would not equal the all-time one-run margin of victory record. The Cubs set that mark in a season in which they added a new upper deck above the third base stands at Wrigley Field (one year after the name had been changed from Cubs Park) and became the first National League team to draw 1 million fans. The seventh of those one-run triumphs came June 12, 1927, against the New York Giants when Charlie Root retired Rogers Hornsby to seal a 7-6 victory and delight an overflow crowd that spilled onto the grass and required the use of a boundary rope in the outfield. How long ago did the Cubs fashion that streak? The headline in the New York Times the next morning was: 'New York in Holiday Mood Greets Lindbergh Today' It astounded the nation when Charles Lindbergh climbed into the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis and crossed the Atlantic. Bet he couldn't throw a scoreless relief inning at Coors Field, though.
New York Times
11-04-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How to watch the Giants vs. Yankees series: Polo Grounds mini-rivalry now stars Aaron Judge, Logan Webb
The Polo Grounds rivalry renews. Aaron Judge and the hot-hitting, torpedo-batting Yanks welcome Robbie Ray, Logan Webb and the Giants' array of arms. These teams were archenemies as neighbors in New York City, dueling over World Series trophies and eviction notices alike. Even if the animosity has historically calcified, this is still a banger of a series. The Yankees just snapped a three-game losing streak, taking a gray and cold Wednesday tilt at Detroit by a 4-3 final (they led 4-0 in the bottom of the ninth). Even with the offense held in check by the Tigers' exacting pitchers (and the Michigan chill), New York still leads all teams in runs and homers per game. Reigning MVP Judge has another Jon Dowd slash line of .354/.446/.792, and it's been an all-around slugfest up and down the lineup. Ben Rice (1B, DH) looks like a real ascendant at 26 years old, while Paul Goldschmidt has adjusted to his pinstripes at age 37. Advertisement But they have a tough draw in San Francisco. Former Cy Young Robbie Ray looks to start his season 3-0 on Friday. The Yankees are .203 all-time against Ray, but they have smashed eight homers in those six starts. Saturday's assignment, righty Jordan Hicks (1-0, 2.38 ERA), is in the 94th percentile for fastball velocity on Baseball Savant. And Sunday's starter is the most formidable — right-hander Logan Webb, who finished sixth in NL Cy Young voting last year and was the runner-up in 2023. First baseman Wilmer Flores' bat is billowing smoke, with five homers and 27 hits in these early season games. Japanese second-year Jung Hoo Lee has three multi-hit tries in his last five. And outfielder Mike Yastrzemski hit a walk-off ball that splashed nearby kayakers. Here's one of many considerations for the broadcast moment of the year: The swing. The call. The celebration. 😍 — SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 9, 2025 San Francisco gets righties Marcus Stroman and Will Warren on Friday and Saturday, respectively. Both have been underwhelming in the early returns. Opening Day starter LHP Carlos Rodón takes Sunday's mound at 1-2 with a dispiriting 5.19 ERA. He surrendered six runs (five earned) in Monday's loss to the Tigers. Most home runs in both jerseys: Betting/odds, ticketing and streaming links in this article are provided by partners of The Athletic. Restrictions may apply. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication. (Photo of Logan Webb: Tim Warner / Getty Images)
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Are the Yankees playing today? Weather forecast for Yankees vs SF Giants on Friday
Are the Yankees playing today? Weather forecast for Yankees vs SF Giants on Friday The New York Yankees are back in the Bronx after spending three bone-chilling days in Detroit. But will they be able to start their homestand Friday night against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium? Advertisement It will depend on Mother Nature. What is the weather forecast for Yankees vs SF Giants on Friday? According to rain is forecast throughout the day and lasting into the evening. Low of 39 degrees tonight. Winds NE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%. What time is Yankees vs SF Giants on Friday? First pitch is set for 7:05 p.m. What TV channel is Yankees vs SF Giants game? The YES Network is broadcating Friday night's game. Yankees vs SF Giants pitching probables Marcus Stroman (0-0, 7.27 ERA) is scheduled to start for the Yankees, while Robbie Ray (2-0, 3.18) will take the ball for the Giants. This article originally appeared on Are the Yankees playing today? Weather forecast for Yankees vs SF Giants
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Reviewing the San Francisco Giants' 2025 City Connect uniforms
The Giants and Nike have announced the new City Connect uniforms for 2025, and, boy, do you have opinions on them. That's just an educated guess. Our simian brains don't like change, so when a baseball team changes anything about their uniform, that means your brain has to process something new for several hours every week. You're still adjusting to Bobby Bonds' kid making the majors, and now you're hit with this? The world needs to slow down. A new look for a city that never stays still — SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 8, 2025 You have opinions on them. I have opinions on them. Let us share these opinions in an online forum. The only thing you need to remember. For the first, oh, two months the Giants wore their orange creamsicle City Connect jerseys, it was an affront to everything we held dear. Oh, how far we had strayed from the baseball gods' light. Then, after a while, you'd turn on your TV and think, 'Ah. It's one of those games today. Whatever.' Maybe you'd roll your eyes. Maybe you stopped even having a reaction, and it became one of the hundred baseball-related things you didn't think about during a baseball game, akin to a ceremonial first pitch or a scoreboard message promoting the 50/50 raffle. It was a part of the ambient hum in the background. Advertisement You'll get used to it. Doesn't mean you'll buy the gear. Doesn't mean you'll ever love it. But you'll tolerate it. One of my favorite things I've written for The Athletic was a historical deep-dive on proposed baseball team names that didn't make the cut. Here's the link in case you want to be the ninth person to read it, but the condensed version is that you almost never think about how stupid the Phillies' team name is. It's like having a buddy named James and calling him James Jimmy. Maybe that works for both of you! But that doesn't mean it's anything other than silly. City Connect jerseys are different from team names because the visual will always exist in contrast to long-established uniforms, and you won't get used them nearly as fast. You'll also have to process them every couple of weeks instead of every day, which means it will take longer for a callous to build. You'll still get used to them. The least forgivable sin of the first City Connects was that they used a different orange than the standard Giants orange. You can't establish a team color and then mess with it slightly. You either have to mess with it majorly or leave it alone. Make the uniforms French vanilla and black. Add a splash of silver and lavender in there, whatever. But don't change the orange to slightly different orange. It makes it look like a bootlegged uniform, like the change was made because someone lacked the resources or attention to detail. While I can't tell you with any palette-determined certainty, it looks like the orange of the 2025 City Connects is closer to the orange that Willie McCovey made pop in the late-'70s. That kind of Halloween orange was dated at one point, and the Giants took it off the bills of their cap, but that just made it cooler. The Padres embraced their diaper-gravy retro color scheme because time made it cooler. Astros fans love wearing the ugliest retro jerseys in baseball history, but that's because they're also the coolest retro jerseys in baseball history. I'm not sure how both things can be true at the same time, but it reminds me of something Noah Cross says in 'Chinatown.' Advertisement Of course I'm respectable. I'm old! Politicians, ugly buildings and retro baseball uniforms all get respectable if they last long enough. Cross had a different third example than 'retro baseball uniforms,' so I'm paraphrasing, but that's a movie line I think about often. Maybe the creamsicle jerseys could have gotten there, but it took decades for the Halloween orange to become as cool as it eventually became. It was going to take longer, much longer, for the creamsicle orange, specifically because the variation on the regular orange was so slight. The color scheme for the new City Connects? I can get used to it. The hat bills are different, and not in a bad way. The press release is proud to announce that the violet on the jerseys is a nod to the 1913-17 Giants, who included it as a tribute to New York University for … some reason. The actual reason is probably that manager John McGraw liked tinkering with uniforms before every season. The most famous baseball player to come out of NYU was Ralph Branca, though, so there's at least a little Giants history baked into it. There are explanations for each variant at the official store website, and here's what they about the font: A new Giants script, flowing like a psychedelic music poster. If Moby Grape or Quicksilver Messenger Service released an album titled 'Giants' in 1968, this would not be the font they'd use. This would not be a font used on a Fillmore poster. It is aggressively un-psychedelic. You can tell because there's an actual psychedelic font on the sleeve of this same jersey. But we'll get to that part. This was written by someone whose idea of psychedelic music is a Beastie Boys instrumental. No, the Giants' City Connect 2025 font is something a video game would use in 1989 through 1999, somewhere between the NES and Sega Saturn, used for a game that's trying to be fun and gritty at the same time. You can 100 percent see Elmer Fudd wearing the Giants' new City Connect jersey in 'Looney Tunes B-Ball.' That was a '90s approximation of streetball, at least in the minds of game designers who thought 'White Men Can't Jump' was a gritty documentary. Maybe the font is futuristic enough to be used in a Sega Dreamcast game, but that's as far as I'll go. It's a video game font. Unless it's a font that would be on a spray painted shirt you'd buy at Great America in 1998. Unless it's a font that would be on a Rugrats backpack from the same era. Advertisement You get the idea. It's a cutesy font from the '90s with kids being the target demographic. That's not inherently offensive, and I can see growing to tolerate it over time, if not appreciate it. It's not psychedelic, though, and there's nothing inherently San Francisco about it. You'll still get used to them. If the fonts are from a '90s video game, the hats are from a '90s video game that couldn't afford the official Major League Baseball license. Here's the team-select screen from 'Super Bases Loaded II' with the hat added in: You can't even tell that I doctored that image. I know that ugly baseball caps are somehow a robust part of the team-gear industrial complex, but you don't have to watch teams actually wearing most of those hats. These new hats exist to sell people even more hats than usual. They had to come up with something, but it wasn't the something anyone was looking for. The colorful bills almost redeem them, but the font is 'Super Bases Loaded II' all the way, and the letters on the front are the primary focus of the hat. The new City Connects have a patch that marries the color gradients with a bubbly font that's actually psychedelic, and it's in the shape of a mitt. It's so close to getting it. I love the idea and the execution … of most of it. The inclusion of the year 1958 — the first year the Giants played in San Francisco — is way too distracting. The '50s and '60s mean very, very, very different things when they're used as shorthand descriptions of an American era. Including a reference to the '50s in a nod to psychedelia is befuddling, at best. See if there's anything that bothers you about this image: That's the same thing as this City Connect patch, and I'm going to need to speak to the manager of the person who designed it. This is for the baseball fan who likes new gear, who spends money on anything new, who is less concerned with nostalgia and more concerned with the present. This is for the fan who color-coordinates their hats with the rest of their outfit, and they're serious enough about this that they own dozens of hats. That's fine. Do you, and don't worry about what weenies like me think. Advertisement It just stinks that every so often, the people who don't like them will have to process them for a couple hours, only to have to do it again on the next homestand and every homestand after that for the next three or four years. Whatever. They're fine. Willy Adames already has a purple glove, so you know he's ready, and once the players are modeling them, they're on their way to general acceptance. You don't have to like them, but you'll get used to them.
Axios
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
How to kick off April this weekend in the Bay Area
The first weekend of April is upon us and with it, a burst of sunny weather to carry us through the next few days. Here are a few ideas on what to do: Friday ⚾ SF Giants home opener: Oracle Park is proud to celebrate baseball's return this season with a host of family-friendly activities. Gates open at 10:35am, first pitch is at 1:35pm. As of Thursday, tickets on Ticketmaster started at $120. 🎤 The Stooges tribute: The set at Bottom of the Hill will also feature bands paying homage to the English rock band Sisters of Mercy and Australian punk ensemble Radio Birdman. Doors open at 8:30pm; show at 9pm at 1233 17th St. Tickets start at $15. 🏟 Elderbrook at the Greek Theatre: The English electronic artist, singer-songerwriter and multi-instrumentalist will kick off an outdoor concert season alongside fellow DJ acts Jerro and Le Youth as openers. Doors open at 6pm; show at 7:30pm at 2001 Gayley Rd. in Berkeley. Tickets start around $68. Saturday ☪️ Tenderloin Eid Street Fair: Celebrate the end of Ramadan with halal food vendors, pony rides, a multicultural bazaar and performance from Palestinian rapper MC Abdul. From noon-5pm at Jones Street and Golden Gate Avenue. 💡 Night of Ideas: The San Francisco Public Library event returns this year with its annual celebration of critical thought, featuring panels, talks, live music, dancing and sock puppet making. 7pm-1am at the Main Library at 100 Larkin St. 🛼 Bay Area Derby opener: The roller derby frenzy returns with the San Francisco Rolling Dead facing off against the Oakland Outlaws in what's sure to be an entertaining family-friendly event. 4-9pm at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium at 403 Civic Center Plaza in Richmond. Sunday
