The San Francisco Giants will get the opportunity to introduce Jung Hoo Lee and reintroduce Bob Melvin to their fans when they host their home opener against the San Diego Padres on Friday afternoon.
The clubs met to open the Giants’ season in San Diego, where Melvin was the manager the past two years. He recorded his first two Giants wins in the middle two games of the series, before and after the Padres earned a split by winning on Thursday and Sunday.
Melvin is quite familiar to San Francisco Bay Area baseball fans, having played at Menlo-Atherton High and Canada Community College on the west side of the bay and the University of California on the east side before playing catcher for the Giants for three seasons from 1986-88.
After managerial stints with the Seattle Mariners and Arizona Diamondbacks, he came back to the Bay Area to skipper the Oakland Athletics for 11 seasons before moving on to the Padres in 2022.
Lee has joined the Giants after seven seasons in the Korean league. He’s had hits in five of his first seven major league games, including his first home run as part of the Giants’ 9-6 win in San Diego last Saturday.
The Giants have lost four straight and five of seven to open the season, including a three-game sweep in Los Angeles against the Dodgers to start the week. The last two defeats were by 5-4 scores.
Third baseman Matt Chapman, another player with Bay Area ties who will be making his Giants home debut Friday, said better days lie ahead.
“A lot of guys had good games throughout the course of this (trip),” he said. “So I think we saw what this team is capable of. We’re deep and we’re promising.”
Chapman, who came up in the Oakland organization and played his first five MLB seasons across the bay with the A’s, had two homers in the Giants’ first win at San Diego last Friday. He brings a .233 average into the home opener.
Chapman went 1-for-5 with a run last Saturday against Padres right-hander Dylan Cease (0-1, 3.86 ERA), who will get the call in the rematch.
Acquired in a trade from the Chicago White Sox in March, Cease took the loss in his Padres debut despite allowing three earned runs (two earned) and two hits in 4 2/3 innings. He walked two and struck out six.
San Diego was trailing 3-0 when Cease left the game in the fifth inning of a 9-6 defeat.
The 28-year-old’s National League debut featured a surprise– the three slowest pitches of his career, clocked at 64.1 mph, 64.6 mph and 66.6 mph.
“I love the eephus change,” catcher Kyle Higashioka noted afterward. “He was getting a lot of swings and misses. I really liked what I saw. He’s a fun guy to catch.”
Cease had beaten the Giants in both previous meetings. Over three career appearances, he’s gone 2-1 with a 2.45 ERA. One of the wins came in his only previous visit to San Francisco, a 7-3 White Sox win in which he allowed just one run in five innings.
For the second straight start, he will be matched up with right-hander Jordan Hicks (1-0, 0.00), who shut out the Padres on three hits over five innings to earn a win in his Giants debut.
One of the three hits surrendered was a single by Manny Machado, who has two homers and seven RBIs in his first nine games.
Hicks has faced the Padres five times but just once as a starter. He’s 1-0 and has yet to allow a run in 9 2/3 innings with 14 strikeouts.
