San Francisco pitcher Alex Wood delivers a pitch during the San Francisco Giants spring training game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Scottsdale Stadium on March 4, 2023 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (John Medina for Bay Area News Group)
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — At 5:43 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2022, Asa Francisco Wood was born. On Saturday afternoon, he watched his dad pitch for the first time.
“I needed to do good,” Alex Wood said a short while later, “because it was my son’s first game today.”
Mission accomplished: the new dad’s first start of the spring couldn’t have gone much better.
“He wasn’t going to be allowed back if I did bad,” Wood joked.
Wood breezed through his two scheduled innings in the Giants’ exhibition against the D-backs. He didn’t allow a base runner and struck out all but one of the six batters he faced. He put away one hitter with his fastball, another with his changeup and the remaining three with his slider.
And if you thought Wood already worked fast, just wait until you see him with the pitch clock.
“I felt like I was working too fast in the first inning,” Wood said.
Wood, who worked at the 25th-fastest pace in the majors last year (one of five Giants in the top 25), was frequently throwing his pitches with upward of 10 seconds left on the clock. While adjusting to the quicker pace was no issue, he said this spring will be all about tuning his internal clock.
“Everybody who’s been pitching forever has their own,” Wood said. “Now there’s an actual clock. … It’s just finding a solid pace where you’re not just rapid-firing every pitch for 90 or 100 pitches because guys will probably start to fatigue a lot faster with the clock.”
Once that happens, Wood seems like a prime candidate to use the clock to his advantage.
Look no further for an example than in Max Scherzer’s recent start. A batter called time — his one timeout for the at-bat — and when he stepped back in the box, Scherzer was waiting on the mound, ready to fire the next pitch as soon as it was allowed. No surprise, it sailed through a feeble swing.
The incident prompted MLB to reiterate its rules about quick-pitching, which haven’t changed, but also prompted some debate among Giants.
“Come on, you shouldn’t be able to do that,” Wood said.
Whereas Kapler said, “I didn’t see that as a quick-pitch. A quick-pitch to me is when a pitcher is trying to catch you when you’re not looking. But he waited until the hitter looked up and just used the clock to his advantage.”
However, Wood added, “I think there’s still ways to mess with guys.”
It’s just going to take some adjusting this spring before he is comfortable experimenting.
One-two punch
By the time Arizona starter Slade Cecconi had thrown three pitches, he was already in a 1-0 hole with a runner standing on second.
That’s how much (or little?) time it took Michael Conforto to lead off the bottom of the first with an opposite-field home run, and for Mitch Haniger to follow him with a line-drive double to right-center field. Conforto took ball one, then hammered his first spring homer over the left-center field wall. Haniger swung at the first pitch he saw and laced it the other way.
“That leadoff homer was nice,” said Wood, who is beginning to picture a Conforto-Haniger combo at the top of the lineup.
It was the second double of the spring for Haniger, who has consistently connected well with the ball though a week of games. Conforto reached base in both of his other two plate appearances, singling and scoring in the third inning and drawing a walk in the fourth.
“It’s gonna be fun the further we go in spring and we start to roll out a lineup that’s looking similar to what we’re going to open with and start feeding off each other,” Wood said. “I liked Mikey. He had a lot of energy coming in after that home run today. You love to see that.”
Notable
— In the Giants’ other split-squad game against the Brewers in Maryvale, Logan Webb tossed a solid three innings (two walks and a hit batsman but no runs or hits allowed and no contact that made it out of the infield). The same, however, could not be said about the pitchers that followed. Drew Strotman and Erik Miller, two non-roster invitees, combined to allow 12 runs in the fourth and fifth innings.
— Outfielder Stephen Piscotty is now batting .500 (6-for-12) this spring after another multi-hit effort Saturday, his second game in a row with two hits.
— The split-squad games are providing additional opportunities for Giants coaches to moonlight in other roles. On Saturday, that meant Alyssa Nakken was the Giants’ bench coach in Scottsdale, while Taira Uematsu was their third-base coach in Maryvale. Both would have made history if it were the regular season: Nakken as the first female bench coach in major-league history, and Uematsu as the first Japanese-born base coach.
Originally published at Evan Webeck