There's inclement weather approaching and you have a young studly pitcher set to take the mound. What to do? Do you put him on the hill and hope that the weather subsides? Or do you decide to have him wait a day and throw out your long reliever to start the game? Or do you somehow do both? Well if you were either Bruce Boche or Joe Torre last night you somehow made the baffling decision of choosing both. With the rain in the near forecast, Joe Torre made the first act, deciding to start Hong Chih Kuo, king of the bat toss, rather than Chad Billingsley. Not to be outdone Bruce Boche right before the opening pitched decided, hey why should I pitch my young stud if they're not going to pitch theirs, so he decided to start Merkin Valdez rather than Tim Lincecum. So then it started relievers throwing the start of the game, getting pinch hit for and replaced. This lasted 3 1/2 scoreless innings. Then someone hit Bruce Boche with a bottle, or atleast that's the only thing that makes sense. Why, because he brought out Tim Lincecum to start the 4th inning. Perhaps this would make sense if the weather cleared up, but rather it was actually raining now. Lincecum proceeded to give up a run during the first inning of work to break the tie.
Not to be outdone in the realm of stupid, Joe Torre decided to warm up his starter Chad Billingsley, again during the hardest part of the rain, and brought him out at the start of the 5th inning. Billingsley gave up two hits while recording an out before, guess what, a rain delay. The rain delay lasted an hour and 15 minutes and when they came back out for the start of the game guess who wasn't on the mound anymore. That's right Chad Billingsley. He was replaced by Esteban Loiaza who proceeded to lose give up another run and lose the game.
Lincecum unlike Billingsley actually came back to the mound and threw 3 more innings following the rain day. Lincecum finished with 4 innings thrown and managed to get the win thanks to Esteban. Either way it was an incredibly baffling display of managing by these two.
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