SF Giants Minor Lines 4/10/17: Reyes Moronta strikes out the world

April 10th. It’s a red-letter day for Giants’ fans, commemorating one of the more momentous meetings in franchise history:

If you’re wondering, San Jose won that game 4-0 with Bumgarner throwing 6 scoreless innings, striking out 5 and allowing just 2 hits. Buster Posey went an easy 1 for 3 with a walk. And Brandon Crawford provided much of the offense hitting his first ever professional HR. Good times were a-coming.

HIGHLIGHTS: Reyes Moronta struck out 5 in 2 innings of work; Jalen Miller had three hits with a double; Kevin Rivera had two doubles.

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Sacramento lost to Tacoma Rainiers (Mariners), 3-1 (7 inn) in Gm 1

Sacramento beat Tacoma Rainiers, 4-0 (7 inn) Gm 2
Winning their four game series, 3-1

Joan Gregorio continued the trend of somewhat disappointing debuts from the system’s starting pitchers (non-Beede division)*. Gregorio certainly wasn’t bad in this start, but coming off a season where he was 4th in the PCL in strikeouts, he managed just one K in this start, while walking three in an uncharacteristic start his 2017 season. The radar gun at Raley Field hasn’t been functional to start the year, but we have enterprising field correspondents!

*We’ll see more of this trend later today by the way.

Though certainly not at his most effective, Gregorio kept the RiverCats in the game, but the offense managed just three hits in going down to their first defeat of the year. They did manage to pull off a nifty double-play to help Gregorio out. Check out both sides of this, particularly Hwang’s athletic ability on the back end:

It’s worth noting that both Arroyo and Hwang were manning their respective positions on this play for the first time this year.

Doubles are the theme today, and for Hwang and Arroyo, picking up a double play on defense wasn’t enough: they both whacked doubles too, with Hwang’s breaking open the nightcap.

Anyway, enough of me! To the field correspondents! Game 2 provided a lot of interesting pitching performances, including a sleeper in the “Giants SP Depth Chart” race:

That’s “6th overall pick in the 2005 draft” Ricky Romero to you (one pick before Tulo)!

Ah the old “sit behind the scout and sneak a peak at their radar gun” trick. One of my favorites! And guess who else was checking out the action?

The Sacramento lineup is going to be a fascinating experiment for the coming months, mixing and matching the Ruggianos and Uptons and Morses of the world with the Arroyos, Slaters, Williamsons, and Hwangs. And likely, a lot of these guys are going to be in AT&T hopefully helping out before it’s over.

Excellent start to the year for Sacramento who now travels to Salt Lake City for some Rocky mountain high spring baseball. But before we leave Sacramento, we can’t ignore the system’s only HR of this day, as Carlos Moncrief broke up a no-hitter in Game 1 in a loud and decisive way (and don’t sleep on the great beer cup catch at the end of this!)

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Richmond lost to the Altoona Curve (Pirates), 2-1 in 12 inn

Since opening the season with an 11 run explosion, Richmond has scored just 8 runs in four games, three of those losses. They jumped out to a nice start in this one, with Chris Shaw bringing home Slade Heathcott (who’s really been the only productive member of the lineup so far) with a booming 1st inning double.

It was the start of a nice game for Shaw, who’s been scuffling a bit in his first series. Shaw reached base three times. Shaw struck out twice in the opening game, but has been making steady contact since then. He has 3 walks and 2 Ks on the year. Speaking of which, my Miguel Gomez pool only lasted a day, as he struck out for the first time this year in this one.

After the Shaw double there came 11 innings of futility that ruined some terrific pitching. The bullpen was particularly sensational as DJ Snelten, Tyler Cyr, and Reyes Moronta combined for six innings of shutout relief.

All were terrific but the clear star was Moronta. Remember how Rodolfo Martinez destroyed the Cal league and then advanced to AA and fell apart. For two outings at least that has not been Moronta’s fate. The burly, hard-throwing righthander has now faced 10 AA batters, and he has struck out 8 of them. And he is really shoving it straight down their throats. Yesterday’s outing, which was his first multi-inning appearance since 2015, he had two three-pitch Ks and two four-pitch Ks. Let’s watch the man perform!

Moronta’s K/W ratio since the start of 2016 is now 101/20. Just because he’s in AA, doesn’t mean he can’t leap over other 40 man folk to the big leagues. It’s happened before.

In the end all that great pitching went for naught as the Squirrels could hardly muster a threat, and went 0 for 8 on the rare occasions that they did get players into scoring position. The game continued a depressing trend from last season, when the Squirrels went 3-11 in extra inning games.

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San Jose lost at Lancaster JetHawks (Rockies) 11-7

Matt Krook’s highly anticipated A+ debut was a rough affair. Following his performance in the SJ/Sac exhibition game, in which he put Ryder Jones on the DL by beaning him in the head, Krook continued to show minus control in his regular season start. Krook threw less than half of his pitches for strikes and retired just 4 of the 13 batters he faced. He walked 4, surrendered a HR, and uncorked two WP.

Not so good.

Better however, were the continued hot start from the offense, which fought back from an 8-1 deficit to climb to within 8-7 at one point (before Carlos Diaz torched up the bottom of the 7th inning and put the game back out of reach).

The Giants got most of their production from the top of the order with the 1-4 hitters reaching base nine times. Jalen Miller picked up three more hits including an RBI double, with one of those hits coming off rehabbing major leaguer Jairo Diaz (though Miller was subsequently CS). Aramis Garcia also hit an RBI double (told you there were lots of doubles tonight!) among his two hits and a walk. Following a 1 for 7 night in the long opening night, Garcia has gone 8 for 15 over his last three games with two XBH. Aramis could be getting tired of the Cal League!

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Augusta lost at Charleston RiverDogs (Yankees), 9-8

The Augusta pitching staff continued its extremely rough first turn through the rotation. Given leads of 3-0 and 8-5 at various parts in the game they just kept coughing it back up. Indiana University left-hander Caleb Baragar limited the walks, but backed by some shoddy defense he ended up allowing 5 runs in his 4 inning start. So far Augusta starting pitchers have allowed 25 runs (21 earned) in just 13.2 IP. That’s a rough way to try to compete in this game.

Though walks were mostly not a problem in this game (for the first time this year), it turned out they were being saved up for a comic denouement as Cesar Yanez personally delivered Charleston a walk-off win when he walked three batters and then WP in the winning run. It was Yanez’ second WP of the inning. Third if you count the pitch to the backstop that bounced right back to Will Albertson preventing the runner on 3rd from scoring. He also balked. It wasn’t pleasant. The Venezuelan RH has really struggled to find the zone this year, walking 8 in just 3 IP.

The offense was almost mysteriously productive in this one. They converted 13 baserunners (with two HB and two Charleston errors) into 8 runs despite going just 3 for 10 with RISP. Mostly this was thanks to, what else, a bunch of run scoring doubles! Here’s Kelvin Beltre getting things started:

Kevin Rivera, the young Puerto Rican 2b, provided two doubles in the game. The heart of the order, however, had a rough go of it in this night with the 2-5 hitters going a collective 1 for 16 with 9 Ks. Sandro Fabian took the hat trick and Fabian has now K’d 7 times in 21 ABs.

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Today’s Starters:
Sacramento: Chris Stratton vs. Alex Meyer
RIchmond: Jordan Johnson vs. Yeudy Garcia
San Jose: Heath Slatton vs. Trey Killian
Augusta: Stephen Woods vs. Albert Abreu

The RiverCats get to go against the former highly regarded prospect Alex Meyer, who’s now been traded three times, while the Augusta squad squares off against the highly regarded Albert Abreu who was the plum acquisition of the Yankees in the Brian McCann trade. Heath Slatton’s turn in the rotation is somewhat surprising, and comes on the heels of a Mark Reyes relief outing.

Finally, worth noting that while all of these kids are playing under the lights, those left behind in XST are still grinding away, far away from the glamour of “real baseball games.”

Well, I guess sometimes it’s a tiny bit glamorous: