David Kohl-USA TODAY Sports
Scooter Gennett won over one Giants fan more than a year before he was dealt to San Francisco.
The second baseman entered his first home game at Oracle Park having hit one homer at the stadium, a May 16 shot last season. He remembers it — and the chance meeting prior to it — fondly.
“What’s crazy is there’s a gentleman that I met a few days before at the gas station, where I was going to get some Gatorade and stuff,” said Gennett, adding the man wore a trench coat, knew his name and hunts home-run balls in right field.
“Dives in the water, the whole thing,” Gennett said before the Giants played the Nationals on Monday. “… I told him, ‘I’ll hit you one.’ Kind of forgot about it.”
The homer came in the seventh inning, off Cory Gearrin, in a 6-3 Reds win at then-AT&T Park. Afterward, he walked to the bus and saw a trench coat on the way.
“I get on the bus and I start thinking about it. I look on the app and I see the highlight, and I see this guy run and get the ball,” said the trade-deadline acquisition. “And so I get off the bus and he’s like, ‘I got your ball. You actually hit me a home-run ball.’
“That was a special thing — what are the chances of that?”
Not a bad precursor to his (likely brief) San Francisco era. The infielder, who had missed most of the season with a groin injury, enters the Giants equation for the remainder of the season to replace Joe Panik, who’s been reduced to a do-everything bench player. Gennett, an All-Star last season, has more pop for a team that needs it.
Like a lot of players the Giants have brought in this season, Gennett was not playing well elsewhere, having hit .217 in 21 games with Cincinnati since returning. Farhan Zaidi is gambling — and not much, as either cash or a player to be named later will go to the Reds — that Gennett can become the player who slashed .310/.357/.490 last season.
It makes for a bit of an awkward dynamic for a player filling in for a Giants World Series champion.
“He’s a great dude,” Gennett said of Panik. “Got a chance to meet him before coming over here. It’s tough; I hadn’t had the best year since I’ve been back. I know he would’ve liked for things to go better. We’re kind of in the same boat in the sense that we’re trying to figure things out, improve our game, do what we’re capable of doing.
“… We’re definitely not walking around, looking at each other like, ‘I’m going to try to do better than you today.’”
For a lefty hitter, Oracle Park is not the easiest place to separate himself. He’s acquitted himself well for his career, going 15-for-56 (.268) with the homer and six RBIs in San Francisco.
He said he doesn’t “care too much” about the deep right-field fences, but he does have a workaround for one Bay Area issue: the cold.
“I learned to close my eyes, not keep them open,” Gennett said. “My eyes would start watering.”
Gennett has had issues with the winds at the park in the past and talked about needing to find a rapport with the fielders around him with pop-ups and fly balls. As the Giants’ new second baseman against righty starters, he’ll have time to figure it out.
“I think a couple of series here, you get accustomed to it,” Bruce Bochy said. “But with that, there are days that are different and it’s tough even for our guys — left field in day games, wind blowing different ways. That’s something that’s hard to get used to.”
