An Apology to Jeremy Guthrie, I'm Sorry

Forgive me Jeremy Guthrie. I'm sorry, truly. I was wrong not to trust you last night. You're the man. You did it. Congrats.

When I look at you, I see a guy with a career 4.69 FIP and a 5.36 K/9 in an environment where strikeouts are up and offense is down. I don't want you pitching game 3 of a World Series. I don't want you pitching in game 3 of the College World Series. You did in fact pitch game 3 of the not College World Series, but instead the original World Series and you did good. Thank you Jeremy for doing that. How did you do that? Maybe I can use the internet to find out.

Well you got some ground outs and you aren't much of a groundball pitcher. Most of those groundouts came on strikes. Good job generating weak contact.

You're also slightly a flyball pitcher who doesn't get a lot of strikeouts. Usually that's bad, and tonight you didn't strike anyone out so every out was a ball put in play from the Giants (other than that caught stealing). The Giants hit some flyballs off of you, but low and behold, they didn't leave the park or bounce off any outfield walls.

In fact, the only extra base hit you gave up was on a groundball (which are usually good) that skipped past Mike Moustakas, just a foot or so away from being foul.

Also tonight you stayed out of trouble. You didn't walk any batters and your defense behind you didn't have any errors. When you put a runner on you got out of the inning unscathed. Well...except for that final inning, but I'll let that one slide.

Your first appearance on the Run Expectancy board doesn't come until the 9th highest when you gave up the double to Michael Morse. Meanwhile your counterpart Tim Hudson was all over that board.

You gave up this single to Hunter Pence

But the catcher God that is Salvador Perez nailed Pence when he tried to steal second. That came in handy because Brandon Belt promptly singled in the next at bat.

That's a pretty good pitch to hit for a lot of hitters and it was a 93 MPH fastball, but then Travis Ishikawa lined out.

After that you got real impressive. You managed to retire 9 straight hitters. There was probably some luck involved, but also some skill. You got Brandon Belt to lineout on this pitch

You got one of the best hitters in baseball, Buster Posey, to chase this pitch and ground out.

And the one run you were in for to allow came off a well placed by ball Michael Morse.

In the end, you held the Giants to two runs on four hits over five innings. I told myself I'd be happy if you went six innings and allowed three runs so one less inning and one less run will work for me.

I'm sorry Jeremy. I still don't think your anything better than a back end starter, but you did well last night. I've judged a book by its cover and its text, but my judgement was wrong last night. Well, maybe not wrong, but you proved me wrong. Well, maybe not proved me wrong, but you did good. Better than I expected and hoped. Can we settle at that?