Foremast Splintered, Mizzenmast Today

Giants win! SBOD hits. Let's keep it going.  The usual quick recap of last night's game leads to a fairly quick look at Braxton Ashcraft who is on the mound for the Pirates tonight. He faces Landon Roupp in what should be a pitchers dual.  That thought leads to a look at the numbers and the task of finding today's Safe Bet of the Day™.  Wednesday's walk to Oracle Park reminded me of today's song of the day, "High Dive" by SHAED, another of Aidan's contributions.  Hope you like it.  

Transcript

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Welcome back to stage AM in the AMO San Francisco Giants pre game podcast. Preview previews, projections, and predictions before every Giants game. Good morning and welcome back into the pod. It is Saturday morning, May 9th. It is a beautiful sunny day out there here in the East Bay. Hopefully, wherever you are, the weather is just as fine. We are coming to you today after a Giants win. Alright, finally. And a safe bet of the day win. See how easy it is to pick wins when the Giants win? It certainly helps. They had a really good game, 5-2 final. They actually had chances to score more than that. Boy, I think the only negative thing about the game was the inning where Ray started out with two strikeouts and then gave up three walks to load the bases. And I think it was O'Neill Cruz that was up after that. And luckily he struck him out off, I think it was a 3-2 pitch and got the strikeout. So that was the most worrisome part of the game was that little half an inning there, but he got out of that. And after that, the rest of the game was good. So let's just move right on to today's matchup. And that is 6-05, 6.05 game tonight. And it's Landon Roop on the mound for the Giants, and he is facing a guy named Braxton Ashcraft. Now I've talked about Roop a lot. He's kind of like Robbie Ray. I always speak pretty highly of him. Now, his last outing what his last outing was not that good. His four earned runs in four and the third innings, and that took him up to a 3.18 ERA, which is still very good. But I looked over his other outings, and last time he had a bad, he's had two bad games this year. And the last time he had a bad outing, he recovered with his next game one earned run over six innings against Baltimore. So I think he's gonna come back with a good game here. I got a feeling that's my prediction. It's not like him to have two bad games in a row. So I'm feeling good about Landon Roop on the mound, yeah, tonight. And he's facing a young guy named Braxton Ashcraft, like I said. He's a 26-year-old righty. He's only been up in the bigs for one year last year. He was in 26 games. He was a little bit of a reliever and partially a starter. He only pitched 70 innings in those 26 games, but he came out with a 2.71 ERA, which is really good. Did I say he had pitched 70 innings in those 26 games? He had 71 strikeouts, which is good, but he did have 24 walks, which is a little higher than he probably would have liked. Now, 70 innings is a bit of a small sample size, I understand. But this year in 2026, he has been a starter so far for seven games. He has a 3.02 ERA, which is really good, and he's really only had one bad start where he gave up six earned runs in four and a third. Other than that, he has been lights out. Never more than two earned runs, never less than five innings. For example, his last outing was no earned runs over seven and two-thirds against Cincinnati. He only gave up four hits and two walks, and only took him 82 pitches to get through seven and two-thirds. That's pretty impressive, pretty efficient all the way through. He had six strikeouts in the seven and two-thirds. All around, his numbers were good, his metrics, his underlying numbers, everything looks good with this guy. And I know the Pirates have high hopes for him going forward. So I'm expecting both Roop and Braxton to wait. Braxton's his first name. I'm sorry, Braxton. Roop and wait, what's his last name? Braxton, what? Oh, yeah, Ashcraft. Okay, Ashcraft. So I guess there's Roop. So I'm expecting Roop and Ashcraft to show up tonight. I think they'll both be in with their good games. I'm expecting them to pitch lights out. So with that, let's just get right into today's safe bet of the day. And when I looked at the unders, I looked right away at the unders because I was thinking, boy, with these two pitchers, it's gonna be that's the way I'm gonna lean. And the full game under was seven runs, which it's usually at least seven and a half. So that was a little disconcerting. I'm guessing the books think that it's gonna be low scoring, also. But then I looked at the first five under over under, which is usually three and a half runs, and it was four. So I immediately flagged that because I like Rupe and Braxton. I was leaning toward the first five under. I was surprised it was four because that would mean we would get a push if it went to four instead of a loss, which usually isn't the case. But then after looking around, I was looking at other numbers, looking to see if I could find anything else that was flag worthy, and I was having trouble because I don't like the money line or the first five money line because I'm worried about Braxton and the Pittsburgh offense. The other numbers, the strikeout rates, minus 130 and minus 140. The outs for a Braxton was minus 140. The no runs in the first was minus 170. So those were all so juicy I didn't want to take any of those. The only other one I found that I put a star next to was under 14 and a half hits. Now, what worries me is usually that's 15 and a half hits, sometimes even 16 and a half hits. I guess the books are thinking there's gonna be less hits and 14 and a half, so I like it at 14.5 because the Giants got 12 hits yesterday and they're not gonna get 12 hits against Bracton Ashcrash, I don't think. And I think Root will be able to keep Pittsburgh's hitting hit numbers down too. So I kind of like it at 14.5 at minus 112, but I am going to stick with my initial feeling, my gut feeling, and that is first five under four at minus one fifteen. So I guess that's all as far as that goes. That's the that will be the official play today for the safe bet of the day. First five under four minus one fifteen. So that'll take me to today's song of the day, and that is going to be so the how I came up with this on Wednesday when I went to the game. I was walking from the ferry building to Oracle Park, and on the way, it's about a mile, mile and quarter, and you pass, you know, some sculptures, and you're right, you're walking right along the waterline. It's a really nice walk, and there are a couple little dive bars along the way with Giants fans in there getting ready for the game. One of them, I think it's Frankie's, one of them is Red Lava, the Lava House, Java House, something like that. And one of them is called the High Dive. And that reminded me of a song off of Aiden's last playlist. It's a song called High Dive by a I don't know if it's a group or a person. It's Sheed, I guess. S-H-A-E-D. I'm not sure how you would pronounce that. Shahed, Shahed, but you'll have to look it up. Like I said, S-H-A-E-D called High Dive. Got a nice little groove to it, a really good song. Hopefully you'll like it. Add it to the uh the rest of the list. I'm gonna have to make a little list of all my safe better the day songs. I'm starting to like the list I'm coming up with. Anyway, that's the song of the day. Join us back in tomorrow. Make sure and tune in tomorrow. It is a 105 game, the final game of the series. We have Tyler Malley, the Malley cat on the mound against another young kid, 23-year-old guy named Bubba Chandler. So we'll have to look him over, do some analysis. I think from the initial look, it looks like there might be some runs in tomorrow's game. So, tomorrow we will recap tonight's game. We will look at tomorrow's game, do a little analysis, and be ready for our pick for that. I guess that's all I have for today. Make sure and stay safe out there. Watch out for those pirates and go, Giants.