by Michael Duca

SAN FRANCISCO–The Kansas City Royals pitchers Yordano Ventura who was fined for hitting A’s third baseman Brett Lawrie on the elbow on Saturday and Kelvin Herrera threw a 100 MPH fastball behind Lawrie on Sunday and was suspended five games and Herrera is appealing the suspension. That suspension is expected to be served for less than five games and probably will be dropped from four to three.

The real reason their appealing it is because Greg Holland is on the 15 day DL and if you take two players out of that bullpen you really change the dynamic of the Royals pitching staff. It’s a funny thing about all this you have to almost wonder if the umpires are too quick in issuing the warnings the first time around.

Herrera he throws hard and there is really no excuse for throwing up around the head and you can’t defend that any way shape or form. Ballplayers think a certain way and I don’t think their clever enough or fast enough to come in after an inning after they’ve thrown at somebody and tell somebody “think about what your doing” like Herrera did on Sunday. Herrera will more than likely serve the five game suspension at a later date but the appeals process is on for now.

San Francisco Giants update: After losing nine of their last ten games the Giants were glad to get Monday off before the Dodgers series. It was very important. The one guy that didn’t have Monday off was Giants manager Bruce Bochy he ended up handing out over 40 World Series rings to members of the Giants front office.

On Tuesday the key play was shortstop Brandon Crawford at the plate who dragged bunt to move a runner up and it finally gave the Giants what they had in almost two weeks executing the bunt to advance the runner. That was key in a game where they only got four runs off Dodgers starter Brett Anderson and at one point they had two runs off him with nine hits.

So once again the Giants were in one of those situations with a lot of people on base with not a lot of people scoring at the same time you don’t want to have anybody overlook what’s going on. Giants pitcher Jeremy Affeldt was in relief on Tuesday and he wasn’t in their trying to blow people away he went an inning in relief and walked only a batter. The Giants got the Dodgers to hit into four double plays in the game and that was part of their success in the 6-4 victory.

Michael Duca is a talk show host and talks Giants and A’s each week listen to his podcast below at http://www.sportsradioservice.com