"Big gulps, huh? Welp, see ya later."
Remember the infamous scene from Dumb and Dumber? The eight-second clip sums up the Giants' first experiment with an opener. But the decision to do so was far from dumb.
The Giants had allowed 42 first-inning runs this season going into Tuesday, compared to scoring only five. Nick Vincent's first start of the year made it 45 first-inning runs for the opposition.
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"I was all on board," Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow said Wednesday on KNBR. "Anything to shake it up."
Vincent, who has made 14 appearances out of the bullpen this season, allowed three earned runs in the first inning of a 7-3 Giants loss. Krukow generally sways with the thinking of baseball traditionalists. This time, however, he was ready for a change.
Once that change happened, though, he noticed a domino effect for the Giants. The first usage of an opener had the team all out of sorts, Krukow believes.
"It seemed to me like it just upset the entire rhythm of the game," Krukow said. "Everybody was a bit out of whack."
San Francisco Giants
[RELATED: A running diary of Giants' failed first opener experiment]
That could be true, but it doesn't mean this needs to be the end to this experiment for the Giants. When a team is having this many issues with its rotation and sits at the bottom of the NL West standings, nothing should be off the table.
"It's not a big enough sample for someone to say that it doesn't work," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said after the loss. "I don't know when we would do it again, or if we would do it again, but we're not going to let one outcome dictate that."