OAKLAND – The San Francisco Giants could not have asked for much more from right-hander Jordan Hicks in his final tuneup before the start of the regular season.
Hicks was dominant Monday in his final start of spring training, striking out 10 while not allowing a hit in five innings as the Giants beat the Oakland A’s 4-1 at the Coliseum in the first game of the exhibition Bay Bridge Series.
Hicks, making the transition back to being a starting pitcher after spending last season as a reliever for both the St. Louis Cardinals and Toronto Blue Jays, retired 14 straight batters after he walked A’s second baseman Zack Gelof in the first inning.
With his fastball touching 99 mph in the later innings and a sinker between 94 and 97 mph, Hicks got better as the game went on as he struck out seven straight batters from the third to the fifth innings.
A splitter that Hicks experimented with this spring was used to finish off four A’s hitters on Monday.
In his last two outings before Monday, Hicks struck out 12 in 7 2/3 innings while holding opponents to a .120 (3 for 25) batting average. In five starts this spring, Hicks struck out 28 in 17.0 innings, and finished with a 2.65 ERA and a WHIP of 1.06.
Hicks is projected to start Saturday when the Giants play the San Diego Padres in the third game of a four-game series at Petco Park. It’ll be his first start since July 12, 2022 when the Cardinals played the Los Angeles Dodgers at Busch Stadium.
HOMERS GALORE: Giants backup catcher Tom Murphy hit his second and third home runs of the spring Monday, both off A’s starter JP Sears. His first homer traveled 375 feet but had an exit velocity of 112 mph, and his second traveled 405 feet with an exit velo of 106 mph.
Wilmer Flores also homered in the fifth inning as the Giants took a 4-0 lead.
MELVIN’S RETURN: Bob Melvin has been back to the Coliseum before as a visiting manager, but he still enjoys returning to the nearly 58-year-old facility where he spent 11 years as the A’s skipper.
“This is a special place for me. I love this place,” said Melvin, who spent some time before Monday’s game, “reminiscing about some of the games here in the past and I think that’ll probably be the case anytime I’m out here on this field.”
His favorite?
“The last game in (2012),” Melvin said of the A’s win over the Texas Rangers that clinched American League West title. “That’s the one that probably stands out the most, but there were a lot of great games here.”
The A’s lease at the Coliseum expires after this season and the team has not yet announced where it will play next season. All MLB owners approved the A’s proposed relocation to Las Vegas earlier this year and the club hopes to open its Strip-adjacent ballpark, with a fixed roof, on a nine-acre parcel of land in 2028.
Melvin hopes this won’t be the last season the Giants and A’s have a Bay Bridge Series.
“Honestly my feeling is that they need to play out the string here before they move,” Melvin said. “That’s what I would hope.”