Giants’ homer-heavy weekend good omen for healthier lineup originally appeared on NBC Sports Bayarea
Not only are the Giants getting healthier by the day, but they’re doing what they’ve typically done best.
Sunday’s 6-4 win over the Oakland Athletics at the Oakland Coliseum capped off a two-game series sweep over the cross-town rivals, with San Francisco taking home the 2022 Tom Pellack Memorial Bridge Trophy for the second season in a row.
On Saturday, LaMonte Wade Jr., JD Davis and Joey Bart each hit home runs in the Giants’ 7-3 win. On Sunday, San Francisco blasted another three home runs. Mike Yastrzemski hit his 10th and 11th of the season and Thairo Estrada returned from the 7-day concussion IL and hit his 10th of the season.
Estrada, Brandon Crawford and Joc Pederson returned from injury this weekend and the lineup immediately produced like that of a 2021-esque Giants team.
For manager Gabe Kapler, the Giants’ power-filled weekend isn’t a coincidence, but rather a long-overdue outburst, one that he expects to continue for a couple of key bats in the lineup.
“Sometimes you run into a stretch of balls leaving the yard and sometimes you run into a dry stretch and you don’t always have something to point to,” Kapler said. “But I will say, Yaz is going to produce power, it’s just a matter of when. And LaMonte Wade Jr.’s going to produce power, it’s just a matter of when. It’s not always the easiest thing to predict, when it’s not there it can be frustrating, but both these guys have been putting in a ton of work. Not just them, but obviously, Yaz stands out today.”
Minus the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Yastrzemski has hit 21 and 25 home runs in each of his two full seasons with the Giants. Prior to Sunday’s game, Yastrzemski had hit just nine home runs through the team’s first 107 games this season. His multi-homer game was just a reminder that what he’s been working on all season long was eventually going to pay off.
“Just keep reminding me that the things that we’re working on are going to come and go, it’s not going to be an immediate success, it may not last for a week, it may be wavy, up-and-down,” Yastrzemski said. “But just to stick with it, because it’s going to work and it’s what we should be doing.
“I think we’ve been really close to clicking on all cylinders several times this year and it’s just nice to win a couple games in a row and see both sides of the ball working well.”
It’s not just the uptick in home runs that creates optimism for the offense down the stretch. Sunday’s starting pitcher Logan Webb believes that the hits and walks that often precede big moments are a clear indicator that things are clicking again for the Giants.
“There’s other things too,” Webb explained. “Like you get a walk and then a home run, a bloop-hit and then you get a double or something. It’s just little things like that. I think when we’re really going right, those are the things that happen.”
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Two games certainly is a small sample size, but they happen to be two games against a cross-town rival that seemingly always plays the Giants as hard as anybody in the league. Not to mention that Oakland has been scorching-hot since the All-Star break.
Heading into a huge three-game series against the San Diego Padres and their newly-acquired superstar Juan Soto this week, the Giants will again be put to the test against a division rival. They need it to go better than it did against the Dodgers earlier this week.
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