What a Giant Difference a Week Makes for Nomo

The San Francisco Giants are no longer on pace to win 162 games, and Barry Bonds is no longer on pace to hit a few hundred home runs.

Dodger starter Hideo Nomo and reliever Jesse Orosco made sure of that on a soggy Tuesday evening, Nomo throwing 72/3 shutout innings and Orosco retiring Bonds on a dramatic eighth-inning groundout to lead the Dodgers to a 3-0 victory before 40,706 in Pacific Bell Park.

Shawn Green knocked in two runs with an RBI groundout in the first inning and a solo home run in the eighth, helping the Dodgers extend their win streak to four and hand the Giants their first loss after opening with six victories, including three over the Dodgers.

“I tell you what, that was exciting,” Dodger left fielder Brian Jordan said. “That’s just what we needed, to send a message. They swept us last week, and we settled down and played some good baseball. People might start to see that the Dodgers have a good team too.”

The victory did not come without a considerable amount of hand-wringing and pacing by Manager Jim Tracy and pitching coach Jim Colborn in the Dodger dugout.

Trailing, 3-0, Tsuyoshi Shinjo and David Bell singled with two outs in the eighth off Nomo, bringing up Bonds, who entered with a .538 average, five homers and 11 runs batted in and represented the tying run.

Tracy summoned Orosco, the 44-year-old left-hander who had limited Bonds to a .136 average (three for 22) in his career.

Orosco fell behind in the count with two outside breaking pitches. But instead of coming in with a straight fastball, Orosco came back with a cut-fastball that swept off the outside corner and Bonds grounded weakly to second. Eric Gagne pitched a scoreless ninth for his second save in as many games.

“I was kind of relaxing because I thought Hideo was going to get out of the inning, but after a couple of hits, I had to get my game face back on,” said Orosco, who has given up only one home run to Bonds, back in 1988. “Barry will get anyone’s heart rate going. He’s such a great hitter he strikes fear into any pitcher, so I get really aggressive against him and try to make tough pitches.”

Nomo made quality pitches all night, extending a streak in which Dodger starting pitchers have not given up a run in 271/3 innings over four games.

It was a stark contrast to the Japanese right-hander’s first start, when he was rocked for four runs on six hits and six walks in three innings of last Wednesday’s 12-0 loss to the Giants. It didn’t take an advanced degree in baseball management to pinpoint his problem.

“Sometimes we over-analyze things, but this was a case of ball one, ball two,” Tracy said. “Major league hitters narrow the scope when they’re hitting from 2-0 and 3-1 counts. The plate gets a lot smaller for them. No major league pitcher is going to succeed doing that.”

Nomo wasn’t a picture of first-pitch efficiency; of the 29 batters he faced Tuesday, Nomo threw first-pitch strikes to 14. But of the 102 pitches he threw, 65 were strikes, so he didn’t run into as many 2-0 and 3-1 counts.

That allowed Nomo to be more aggressive with his forkball, using his sharp sinking pitch to keep the Giants off-balance. Though he only struck out three, he avoided the fat parts of San Francisco’s bats.

“The difference between my first game and [Tuesday] night is that in my first game, I gave them lots of pitches that were easy to hit,” Nomo said through an interpreter. “This game, I located the ball well.”

Nomo breezed through four innings, giving up only one hit--Bonds’ first-inning single--but he ran into some serious trouble in the fifth when the Giants loaded the bases.

That set up an all-Japanese showdown between Nomo and Shinjo, a matchup that piqued the interest of the dozens of Japanese media members in a packed press box.

So much for suspense. Shinjo slapped Nomo’s first pitch to second base for a routine out, ending the inning and preserving the Dodgers’ 1-0 lead.

The Dodgers added insurance runs in the seventh, when Mark Grudzielanek doubled and scored on Dave Roberts’ bloop single, and in the eighth, when Green slammed his first homer of the season to straight-away center.

“That was a Shawn Green swing we saw a lot of a year ago,” Tracy said. “The ball gets hit and it just keeps going. You think he didn’t get enough of it, and then you realize he got enough of it, and then some.”

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Giant Killer

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