John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports
Johnny Cueto is an entertainer, which he has proven again and again and again. There were 36,928 at the first opened-up Oracle Park game this year, about double the previous season high, on hand to hang on his every shimmy on Friday night. That matters to him.
There were a few umpires there to check his glove, hat, belt and person for sticky substances, and that, too, became a brief spectacle. The first time, he threw up his hands as if he were about to be arrested, then complied, passed the test and came away with a big smile. He always puts on a show.
There were so many reasons for his grin to keep reappearing during a 2-0 win over the A’s to open up the Bay Bridge Series, with a new era of baseball in San Francisco beginning and the Johnny Cueto of old there to usher it in.
The Giants improved to a major league-best 49-26 behind seven scoreless innings from Cueto, who looked the best he has looked since he came off the injured list in May.
“It was the best fastball he’s had this season,” Curt Casali, his battery mate, said over Zoom. “Mixing the four-seam with the two-seam, it had some serious bite to it. I just felt like the A’s were waiting for changeups and slow stuff the entire day.”
The changeup is Cueto’s best pitch, but he only went to it 24 times of his 102 pitches — though three times it became his finish-off offering in strikeouts. He dominated with his four-seamer, which he used to record his other three strikeouts.
The two biggest arrived in the fifth, when the Giants were clinging to a 1-0 lead and Oakland put two on with an infield single and the only walk Cueto allowed. Four-seamers sat down the Matts (Chapman and Olson), and Cueto fist-pumped after the latter punch-out.
He walked off the mound and took it all in.
“I saw the fans, and that’s what we like — as players, we like to see fans supporting us, it makes us happy,” Cueto said through translator Erwin Higueros.
His ERA is down to 3.63. The lat strain that sidetracked the early going of his season seems awfully long ago.
“Every outing that I have had after coming back from the injured list, I feel better,” Cueto said.
Gabe Kapler said Buster Posey‘s back “tightened up in the cage a little bit” before the game, which bumped him out of the lineup. The manager said he is hopeful Posey can play Saturday.
Instead, Casali caught and knocked his second home run of his Giants career. After his first game off the injured list, on June 12, the veteran catcher was hitting .100. He now is batting .174.
The hamate surgery he underwent before the season left him feeling as if he were only using half of his left hand, the bottom hand when he swings. He said he feels “a lot different.”
“I feel like I got some bat speed. I feel like I want to swing the bat and swing it hard and try to drive the ball,” said Casali, who had an .866 OPS with the Reds in the shortened season last year. “My practices are more fun, my batting practices are more fun. It’s just like I can actually do what I normally can do.”