DENVER - With expanded rosters, Bruce Bochy has started mapping his lineups out days in advance. Before Tuesday's game, he told Joe Panik and Brandon Crawford that one of them would be off for Wednesday's series finale.
Crawford told Bochy he felt fine physically and wanted to try and get a win before the Giants left Denver for the season. Panik let his bat do the talking.
The second baseman had five hits in an 11-3 win over the Rockies Wednesday night, following three-hit and four-hit games. Panik tied a major league record with 12 hits in a three-game series, and he became the first big leaguer to do it since Boston's Jerry Remy in 1981.
The feat left Panik shaking his head and smiling. It left his manager comparing him to one of the all-time greats.
"I'll say this, I was lucky and fortunate to have played with and managed Tony Gwynn," Bochy said, his eyes lighting up. "He had some great series, but I don't recall him having a series like this ... Everything (Panik) hit, he hit on the barrel and found holes. When he didn't, he hit it out (of the park) or hit a gapper. It was quite a display of hitting. It did remind me of Tony."
There's no higher praise than that, and Panik is doing a pretty good Gwynn impression on the road this season. Away from AT&T Park's harsh dimensions, Panik is hitting .342. His average at home is just .212, and it was a two-hit series against the Cardinals that had Panik contemplating changes.
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He went up to hitting coach Hensley Meulens before the first game of this series and told him his bat felt heavy over the weekend. Meulens spends hours every week looking at exit velocity data and launch angles and anything else Statcast spits out, but he suggested a very old-school tweak. Meulens told Panik to choke up on the bat. He homered in his first at-bat Monday and never cooled off.
"I'm going to keep riding it," Panik said of his approach. "It's funny, it's just a simple thing. It makes the bat lighter in your hands and it allows you to see the ball better. I'm going to keep doing it. Sometimes, it's the simplest things. When it comes to hitting, you can overanalyze it. We're playing the same game as in little league, and sometimes you've got to think basic."
Panik had a single in the first Wednesday and scored the game's first run. He had RBI doubles in the fourth and sixth. In the eighth, he hit a bouncer up the middle to tie Mike Benjamin's franchise record for hits in a three-game series. As Panik ran to first, a Rockies player in the dugout yelled out that he was having a Tony Gwynn-type night. Panik smiled and chatted it up with first base coach Jose Alguacil, and it appeared his record run would end there. But this is Coors Field, and the Giants kept pouring it on. Panik got one more chance in the ninth and bounced another single up the middle, raising his average to .285. It was .267 when the Giants landed in Denver.
"Everything is slow," Panik said of his at-bats. "It's a good feeling to be in. Every time up I feel like I can be patient. I feel like I'm in control of the at-bat. It's definitely a good feeling."
Panik knows it won't last. It never does. But he has had this feeling in the past for a day or two at a time, and he's happy to keep it going as long as he can.
As he packed up Wednesday and prepared to leave Coors Field for the South Side, Panik said he was looking forward to getting a nice steak dinner with his wife on the day off. He was sketching out other plans, too.
"I might go to the White Sox place and take a few cuts," Panik said.
