When It’s Time For a Change

Whoever said Benjie Molina isn’t the greatest cleanup hitter in all of baseball?

Two home runs, including a walk-off shot in the 11th, means he now owns a .600 SLG. Never mind that he hasn’t drawn a walk and his OBP sits below .300 and that he’s never slugged above .467 in a season. Benjie is a cleanup hitter and we shall all believe.

Without MLB.tv (or more specifically the disposable income to purchase MLB.tv this year) I took up the expatriate view of the game: Constantly refreshing Yahoo and FanGraphs to see how everything played out.

My favorite part of the game in a strictly observational sense was Brian Giles’ sac-fly in the ninth. Notice how Tony Clark’s single absolutely killed the Giants chances of winning, putting them below 50 percent for the first time since the second inning.

But when Giles’ got the run in by giving up the out it decreased the expected runs for the remainder of the inning to .55, meaning it wasn’t likely anymore they would get the winning run in. And with the Giants being at home the win probabilty swung in their favor again.

Eugenio Velez did a great job with a single and a stolen base in the 10th, increasing the win probabilty from 64 percent to more than 80, though the double play wiped that out.

Overall Giant pitchers came through when they needed to, lowering the expected runs in seven of the top-10 highest leverage situations. Unfortunately two of those times (the sac-fly and Kahlil Greene’s FC RBI in the sixth) scored runs. And while it’s good that Tim Lincecum and Brian Wilson got out of those situations with only one run apiece it’s still never good to get to that point.

Of course the hero of the game was Molina, who came through with .404 WPA.