Stanford football, giants baseball

9/2/09

I read in the San Jose Mercury News that Toby Gerhart plans on rushing for 2,000 yards this year. Toby, you're sick because the name Toby is cool, you're good at both football and baseball and you run guys over. But sorry, your logic of 25 carries / game + 6 yards / carry + 13 games = almost 2,000 yards just doesn't quite cut it.

If Stanford makes a bowl this year, and I so desperately want them to, it will be because they take advantage of a pattycake schedule in September, take care of business and beat ASU in potentially the most important game of the year for the Cardinal and then hang on for the remainder of the season. They have to beat WSU, SJSU, UW, UCLA and UA to get to 5 victories before their match-up with the Sun Devils. These are all very winnable games and if they don't lose one of these 5 games then they would have to beat Oregon, USC, Cal or Notre Dame in their last 4 games. Lots of people have Oregon as a dark horse for the Pac-10 title, USC is, well, USC and Jahvid best could run wild over Stanford.

WSU is just awful, a must win game, SJSU is very winnable, UW has a solid underrated QB in Jake Locker, UCLA beat Stanford last year in an excruciatingly painful loss which kept the Cardinal from a bowl, and UA is always tough.

The Giants got a great game from Brad Penny in his debut for the Giants Wednesday in Philly. After being cut by the Red Sox after a 7-8 record and an ERA over 5, Penny put up 8 sparkling innings of 0 runs, 5 hits and did a great job of pitching to contact while striking out 2. Penny could just pitch 5 or 6 decent innings each start and would be a huge contribution to the Giants post season hopes. With Randy Johnson coming back later and with diminished velocity in the bullpen the Giants need someone to step up. Penny doesn't even have to be that good and could have an impact.

In a way, this was not a conventional Giants win as they managed to get, what, more than 2 runs in a game? No way? What's that you say? 2, not 1, but 2 HRs? Ridiculous.

Uribe hit a 2 run jack on a 1-2 hanging curve and launched it, with a typical still enormous 2 strike swing and a flip of the bat once he knew it was gone. And it was a bomb. Rowand then managed to turn on an inside fastball and lined a HR out right after Uribe.

Let's give credit though to Andres Torres, who ultimately had the game winning RBI with a line drive up the middle to score Schierholtz from second. He fouled off tons of pitches and made Happ work.