San Francisco, CA — The SF Giants came out firing and shutout the Los Angeles Dodgers 2-0 to complete their three game series sweep and improve to 33-26 on the season.
Giants Center fielder Austin Slater didn’t waste any time amping up the pressure against Dodgers pitcher Julio Urias (3-5) as he homered his first at-bat. Right Fielder Mike Yastrzemski didn’t take too long to follow suit as he crushed his first ball at the plate with a 385 feet homer that extended the Giant’s lead to 2-0.
“I saw something pop I was just trying to battle with two strikes and luckily it was able to get in the air,” Slater said.
Following the Giant’s early display of offense, the majority of the game was a defensive chess match between both teams.
Urias had a slow start on the mound but it didn’t take much longer for him to heat up. Outside of the two home runs that he gave up in the first inning Urias put on a masterclass of pitching striking out 10 batters in six innings.
It was Urias’s first double-digit strikeout game since June 6th of last year and the 10th overall of his career.
Towards the latter part of the game, the Dodger’s bats started catching heat but the Giant’s defense didn’t waver at any point. At the top of the fifth inning, Dodgers left fielder Chris Taylor tried to give his team a spark with a second base hit that followed with catcher Austin Barnes being walked. The Dodger’s momentum came to an end arubtly after a spectacular ground-out grab from Shortstop Brandon Crawford on Hanser Alberto’s attempt to advance Taylor.
Following their explosive first inning, the Giants also struggled to get back on the board and didn’t for the rest of the game despite having bases loaded at the bottom of the seventh inning. Longorias attempt to bat one of his runners in fell short on a fly out to right field.
Part of the reason the Giants were able to shutout their division rivals began with stellar defense and it all started with the pitching of Carlos Rodon (5-4). Rodon had eight strikeouts and only allowed two hits throughout the game but he didn’t fail to recognize how big of an impact the rest of the bullpen had.
“They’ve had ice in their veins this weekend,” Rodon said. “Big pickups from them especially yesterday and today it’s been pretty amazing, it’s been big for us.”
Slater also commended the bullpin on how they performed this weekend and said that they were unbelievable.
“I mean the bullpen game yesterday was huge and then just overall this whole last week they’ve been pretty spot on,” Slater said. “And that’s what we expected, I think when you look back at the first couple of months a lot of it was just really bad batted ball luck so for us it’s just continuing to stay confident in those guys and tell them were behind them and that at the end of the day it’s all going to even out.”
Prior to this series sweep, the Giants lost six of their last nine games but they are hoping to ride off of the momentum of a sweep of a worthy opponent that led the NL West prior to today’s loss.
“It’s big [to get a sweep against this team] it turned around for us a little bit [and] were just trying to build off of that, build off today and this whole weekend,” Rodon said.
Although the Giants won this battle they know this won’t be the last time they battle it out with the Dodgers and in the words of pitcher Dominic Leone “For us we want to show everyone were still here and were still a competitive team and that we can play our best baseball with anybody.”
The giants next series begins on Monday at 6:45 p.m. pacific standard time against the Kansas City Royals.
