Austin Slater was selected by the Giants in the eighth round back in 2014, and his 10 years in their organization has all been leading up to this moment of platoon player revenge: where he bats second against a left-handed opposing starter.
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Luis Robert Jr. was out with trainers pregame testing out his ailing left hamstring, and was able to hit and participate in baseball activities.
Will Venable sounded more confident than ever Saturday that Robert will avoid an injured list stint, but he remains out of the lineup, yet technically available off the bench.
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Jonathan Cannon is very obviously going to come off the IL and start Sunday, even as he and Venable continue to do the bare minimum to hide that reality, which is only made more clear by Shane Smith, Sean Burke and Aaron Civale already being the announced starters for next week's series in Los Angeles.
"Probably around that 80 pitch mark is around where we kind of decided," Cannon said of his next outing. "I’m here and ready to pitch. Nothing is official yet. We’ll see how the game goes today and make a decision."
Cannon said he first tweaked his back on a defensive play in Cincinnati and that his condition deteriorated from there.
"It kept progressing, getting a little bit worse until I did something to kind of blow it up even more, and then that was when I had to go on the IL," Cannon said. "It was really just some rest and treatment and kind of get back to where we are at. But definitely some more exercises that I’ll be doing for probably the rest of my career to prevent something like this from happening again."
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Adrian Houser thinks the mechanical changes that have helped his fastball velocity return to the mid-90s have actually just helped everything. And since six start stretches of a 2.27 ERA don't just grow on trees, who can argue against him?
"I have a cleaner arm path, a cleaner motion, I'm able to access pitches a little bit better," Houser said. "I'm not fighting against myself. Last year I felt like I was fighting to get things through the zone. Stuff just wasn't as crisp and wasn't coming out as clean. Now I feel like I'm in the right position where I just let it flow rather than thinking 'I need to get to this spot' or something like that. It's helped cleaned up a lot of things."
First pitch: White Sox vs. Giants
TV: CHSN
Radio: ESPN 1000 AM, WRTO 1200 AM (Spanish)
Lineups:
| Giants | White Sox | |
|---|---|---|
| Christian Koss, 3B | 1 | Chase Meidroth, 2B |
| Rafael Devers, DH | 2 | Austin Slater, RF |
| Heliot Ramos, LF | 3 | Miguel Vargas, 1B |
| Dominic Smith, 1B | 4 | Andrew Benintendi, LF |
| Willy Adames, SS | 5 | Edgar Quero, C |
| Mike Yastrzemski, RF | 6 | Lenyn Sosa, DH |
| Jung Hoo Lee, CF | 7 | Michael A. Taylor, CF |
| Andrew Knizner, C | 8 | Josh Rojas, 3B |
| Brett Wisely, 2B | 9 | Vinny Capra, SS |
| Robbie Ray | SP | Adrian Houser |
