PHILADELPHIA _ Ty Blach did not merely control the strike zone Friday night. He bent and shaped it from the mound. He mastered it from the batter's box, too.
Blach became the first Giants pitcher since Ray Sadecki in 1969 to draw three walks in a game, although a young and inexperienced Phillies pitching staff had something to do with that.
More impressive was the way Blach kept ruffling the fringe and firing strikes all the way to the handshake line in a 10-0 victory over the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.
Blach fired a seven-hitter while throwing both the first complete game and shutout of his career. The Phillies only advanced one runner into scoring position. Blach struck out four and did not walk a batter while throwing 112 pitches.
Along the way, Blach (4-2) also became the first Giants rookie to win four consecutive starts since Madison Bumgarner in 2010.
The Giants haven't made an upward move in the standings, but they slowly and quietly crept near the top of one major league ranking. They are third in the majors, behind only the Nationals and Cardinals, with a 58.9 percent quality start percentage.
Increasingly, their starters are lasting six-plus innings and giving up three earned runs or fewer _ and while the minimum standards of a quality start quantify to a relatively unimpressive 4.50 ERA, there is irreplaceable value in not pitching your team out of the ballgame.
Blach is a huge part of that trend. He has thrown five consecutive quality starts since his May 6 disaster in Cincinnati, when he became the first Giants pitcher in more than a decade to give up 10 runs in a start.
It would be human nature for a pitcher, especially a contact-oriented lefty like Blach, to become governed by fear and begin gnawing at the corners like a timid dormouse. Blach has done the opposite. His strikes thrown percentage is higher since the Cincinnati game than his starts up to and including it.
Pitchers have a way of adjusting to hitters. Blach is doing it on a macro level. At a time when the home run rate has never been higher, even including the most bloated and beefed up years of the steroid era, Blach has found a way to pitch underneath the launch angle.
He has given up just four home runs all season _ two of them in that Cincinnati start _ and has leveraged the most consistent attribute of a troubled Giants roster, a reliable and surehanded infield, to his advantage.
He even finds a way to help himself at the plate. Blach drew a leadoff walk and scored in the second inning. He drew a two-out walk and scored in the third. He walked again in the fourth. And it took a borderline, 3-2 strike call from plate umpire Phil Cuzzi to keep Blach from becoming the first big league pitcher since 1950 (Chuck Stobbs, anyone?) to draw four walks in a game.
As it stood, three walks was pretty rare. The last major league pitcher to do it was the Rockies' Aaron Cook in 2009. Before that, it was Joaquin Andujar in 1984. And Sadecki, the last Giant to do it, somehow pulled off the feat twice in a 10-day span amid 1969.
Yet the Giants truly did not put the game away until the sixth inning. They stranded a season-high 17 runners, including 11 in the first four innings alone. It took Eduardo Nunez's two-run double in the sixth to more or less settle things.
The top of the order had perhaps its most productive game of the season. Leadoff man Denard Span matched his career high with five hits, while No.2 batter Nunez had three hits plus a walk and now boasts a .375 average over his last 16 games.
The lack of production at the top of the lineup is a major reason that Buster Posey has just 13 RBIs despite seven home runs this season. But on a night when the top three hitters went bonkers, Posey didn't get a hit until his final at-bat.
The Phillies demonstrated why they went 6-22 in May. Cesar Hernandez botched a ground ball for an error that led to a run in the first inning, and pitcher Joely Rodriguez missed a catch while covering first base that opened the door for a four-run sixth.
But Rodriguez is still a major league pitcher, and so Austin Slater's RBI single up the middle most definitely counted as the Stanford kid's first major league hit.
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