A 6-4 loss, and a tied series.
There are a lot of baseball games in a season. So it only stands to reason that there will be a lot of storylines in those games. Some of them are wonky, absurd, or otherwise hard to fathom. It’s like parallel universes: get enough silly little worlds together and some of them are bound to make you blink repeatedly.
The one-off storylines pop up from time to time, and the rest of the season is filled in with repeat storylines in which the specifics may change, but the formula does not. The San Francisco Giants 6-4 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on Tuesday was one such game.
I’m often surprised by how frequently the storyline of a game is that two teams played just like each other, which is what happened Tuesday. And I’ve noticed that it’s usually teams of similar proficiencies that do that.
Bad teams often mimic each other until one team falls upward into victory. And good teams mirror the other’s movements until one does it ever so slightly better.
The good news here is that the Phillies are, without a shadow of a doubt, a good baseball team. Which means that we’re left to surmise that the Giants probably are, too. They’ve spent the first two weeks of the season telling us they are. It only seems right to listen.
And so the Phillies and Giants engaged in a good old fashioned game of who wore it better, with the east coast besting the west coast, at least for one night.
Take, for instance, the starting pitching. A pair of proven veterans battled, with Jesús Luzardo in the red corner and Justin Verlander in the orange corner. Neither had their best stuff but both pitched well, and then they were stuck trying — and failing — to escape tough-luck jams before their ERAs disintegrated.
Verlander overcame a two-run second inning to cruise through the next three innings, working around a Willy Adames error in the fourth and throwing an eight-pitch inning in the fifth. But the sixth inning finally did him in when a quartet of Phillies all knocked singles off him in what was far from the first case of bad batted ball luck he’s experienced this year.
Luzardo powered through a two-run fourth inning, only to get stuck in the sixth inning, leaving with runners at the corners and just one out recorded, relying on teammate Orion Kerkering to get out of the inning mostly unscathed.
And then consider the luck that each team was gifted and managed to put to great use. For the Giants it came in the bottom of the third inning, when the unstoppable force of Verlander’s walk issue met the immovable object of the Phillies’ baserunning foibles. After Trea Turner drew a free pass to open the inning, he made the regrettable decision to attempt a stolen base on Patrick Bailey, and it didn’t end well for him.
He was replaced at first by Bryce Harper, who also took four balls outside the zone, and then made the inexplicable choice to try to take second on a fly ball to Jung Hoo Lee, which went about as well as you can imagine.
For the Phillies it came during the aforementioned sixth inning, in which they scored a pair of runs to flip a deficit into a lead. The first single, a one-out knock by Kyle Schwarber, carried with it an expected batting average of just .170. After a more traditional single by Nick Castellanos the back-breaker came from a pop-up by J.T. Realmuto which, with aid from the wind, stayed just far away enough from a set-very-deep-and-probably-not-taking-a-great-route-anyway Heliot Ramos, to drop in for a single.
The expected batting average? .010. Realmuto will surely claim it as reparations for his tragically awful luck during Monday’s game, and I’ve been on hold with the baseball gods and goddesses for the last three hours so I haven’t been able to get a comment on that one yet.
And then, finally, consider the case of the baseballs hit deep into both the night and the game. They came one after the other. In the bottom of the seventh, with the Phillies clinging to a 4-3 lead, Harper came up to the plate against young Hayden Birdsong, with one on and one out. With the most obvious of green lights in a 3-0 count, Harper swung at the second consecutive slider thrown his way and sent it loudly towards the right field bleachers.
It cleared the fence.
A few moments later, in the top of the eighth, the Giants had mounted a rally, with back-to-back-to-back singles by Ramos, Adames, and Lee. After two unproductive outs, Casey Schmitt — who had a two-run single in the fourth — stepped into the box representing the go-ahead run. After a pair of sinkers to make it a 1-1 count, Jose Alvarado hit Schmitt with three straight 93-mph cutters. Schmitt swung through the first, fouled off the second, and put the barrel of the bat on the third, sending the ball loudly towards the center field bleachers.
It fell short, and into the waiting mitt of Brandon Marsh.
This isn’t to say the Giants got unlucky. Harper’s home run was hit 4.5 mph harder than Schmitt’s flyout. Harper’s would have been a home run in 21 ballparks, and Schmitt’s in just seven. And Bryce Harper is Bryce Harper, while Casey Schmitt is many things, but Bryce Harper is not one of them.
But it is a reminder as to how fickle the sport can be, especially when two good teams face off and try to one-up each other. On Friday the Giants will be in Anaheim, a ballpark where Schmitt’s futile fly ball would be a home run … and where Harper’s vital shot of insurance would have stopped short of the wall.
And that was the difference on Tuesday.
Or, if math is more your type of thing, the Giants are now 0-1 when Wilmer Flores steals a base, which is a disturbing trend that we should keep an eye on.