Former San Francisco pitcher Ty Blach will visit his old stomping grounds and will get a duel with a promising youngster as the Colorado Rockies continue a three-game road series with the Giants on Saturday afternoon.
Neither team got much from its starting pitcher in Friday’s series opener, but the Giants used a three-run home run from Thairo Estrada and five RBIs from Luis Matos as the foundation for a 10-5 victory.
The win came on the same day that San Francisco learned its table-setting center fielder, Jung Hoo Lee, would be lost for the rest of the season due to a torn labrum in his left shoulder.
“I feel bad for him,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “This is a significant time for us, so it’s disappointing for everybody. He was really a key guy for us this year.”
Lee wasn’t missed in the series opener, in which his replacement — Matos — had a career game, driving in half the team’s runs.
“It seems like he’s one of those guys that just absolutely loves runners on base,” Melvin said. “He can get a little aggressive sometimes, but it’s working for him. He’s really embraced guys on base, and that’s been a problem for us.”
Pitching-wise, Melvin elected to take a cautious route with 22-year-old left-hander Kyle Harrison (3-1, 3.42 ERA), pulling him from his scheduled start in the series opener and pushing him back a day.
Despite a rocky effort from replacement starter Mason Black, San Francisco managed its second straight win Friday and now has Harrison, who shut out the Rockies on four hits over seven innings on May 7, rested for the rematch.
Harrison is unbeaten in his past seven starts, going 2-0 with a 3.00 ERA. He has thrown against the Rockies just twice in his career, posting a 1-0 mark with a 2.25 ERA.
Harrison went head-to-head with Blach (1-1, 3.00) in last week’s game in Denver. The Rockies’ left-hander threw three innings of relief in the Rockies’ 5-0 loss, allowing one run.
The 33-year-old then made his second start of the season Sunday at home against Texas in his team’s 3-1 win, limiting the defending champs to one run in five innings.
Blach was the fifth-round pick of the Giants in 2012 and pitched three-plus seasons for them, going 15-19 with a 4.56 ERA. He has since gone 6-7 with a 6.09 ERA for the Baltimore Orioles and Rockies.
In hopes of redirecting a Rockies team that had won seven in a row before Friday’s setback, Blach will make just his second career start against the Giants.
In five previous meetings against his old team, one as a starter, he’s gone 0-0 with a 5.52 ERA. That one start came last September in a 9-8 loss in which he did not get a decision, having allowed four runs in his five innings.
Blach, who went unsigned in free agency over the winter before signing with the Rockies in spring training, admitted it’s been a long and winding road since his days in San Francisco.
“I’ve had a lot of ups and downs, and it’s just kind of perseverance,” he said of his career. “Just trusting my process (by) continuing to put in the work (and) finding little tweaks here and there — things that can make me better. And just enjoying every opportunity I can right now.”
–Field Level Media