![Curt Casali tagging out Ian Happ at home plate.](https://www.sanfranciscosports.today/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2159583116.0.jpg)
Sweep avoided.
The ebb and flow of baseball is a funny thing that is both mysterious and extremely predictable. The way that teams can take varying routes to similar locations has a psychological impact that is as bizarre as it is completely sensible.
Take the San Francisco Giants four-game series against the Chicago Cubs, which just concluded. The Giants were returning home in dire need of some wins, recipients of a rude five-game losing streak and with enough players on the IL to field another baseball team (albeit an injured one). What they were facing was, for all intents and purposes, a blue-and-red tinted mirror. The Cubs are comprised of proven veterans and exciting-but-unproven youngsters; they had a fantastic offseason that resulted in lofty expectations entering the season; they hired one of the most respected managers in baseball to help them achieve those expectations; they’ve so far been fairly bad.
Sound at all familiar? And so they set out to play four games, which could have gone very badly seeing as how they began the adventure with exactly one available starting pitcher. And here are some things that happened along the way:
- They won the series 3-1.
- They outscored the Cubs by four runs.
- Their bullpen gave up six earned runs in 27.2 innings.
- They checked to see if arguably the top pitching prospect in their organization was ready to contribute at the Majors and the answer was a resounding, “yes.”
- Luis Matos again looks like he should be playing every day.
- They got news that LaMonte Wade Jr. would return on Friday.
Hey, look at all those good things! All those good things that, frankly, were accompanied by very few bad things.
And yet the Giants chose the final game of the series to hand in their “oh yeah we gotta lose at some point” card, and they chose to do it in fairly hair-yanking fashion, and so you probably feel a wee bit gut-punched heading into a weekend series against … gulp … the Dodgers.
Had this loss occurred on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, you’d probably be feeling pretty good. BEAT LA, you’d scream. But instead it happened on Thursday, and so instead you’re feebly saying beat LA from underneath your blankets.
But they’re the same team. I’m here to remind you that they’re the same team. I’m contractually obligated to remind you that they’re the same team, even though I’m not on the Giants payroll, despite the suspicions of the entire Twitter Giants fanbase.
They’re the same team in the same place as they would have been if you took these four games, shuffled them up, and put them in any one of the other 23 orders that they could be spilled out in.
Or at least I think they are. Here’s where we get to the deeper issue: how do the Giants feel? Are they holding steady in their basic understanding of probabilities? Or are they, too, at risk of falling victim to the bizarre hold that sequencing has on our mental state?
I’ve avoided talking about the game long enough, and you can probably guess why. We can skip straight to the ending, where the Giants lost 5-3 in the 10th inning. We can even skip to everyone’s least favorite part: Bob Melvin’s decision to bring Luke Jackson into the game for the 10th, a move that backfired when Ian Happ hit the go-ahead home run to center field.
On the one hand, you can at least see a fuzzy outline of a reason for why Melvin brought in Jackson. Four relievers had already been burned, leaving six pitchers for Melvin to choose from: Jackson, Spencer Howard, Camilo Doval, Randy Rodríguez, Tyler Rogers, and Taylor Rogers.
Howard was a no-go, as he pitched well enough to almost surely be added to the rotation for Saturday’s game. Tyler Rogers was a no-go, having pitched in each of the last two games to increase his already MLB-leading appearance count. Rodríguez was likely a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option, having thrown a whopping 53 pitches on Tuesday.
So Melvin was left with Doval, Taylor Rogers, and Jackson. Doval had also pitched two days in a row, but he was warming up so we know he was at least kind of available. Still, not only do you want to avoid using your triple-digit closer three days in a row, but the last thing the Giants want to do is enter a series against the Dodgers knowing they can’t use Doval on Friday or probably even Saturday. And with a string of right-handed hitters coming up, the lefty Rogers — who may have reverse platoon splits this year, but is still over .200 points worse on his OPS against righties for his career — was a tough sell. And Jackson? Well … he’s been the team’s worst reliever by a mile this year.
Melvin had no good options, and would have been chastised whichever way he went if it didn’t work out. Jackson is the way he went and it didn’t work out, so he’s chastised. This is not me absolving him of blame. He’s the guy paid handsomely to make better baseball decisions than the average bear. I may not know what the answer should have been, but I can still expect him to figure it out.
Oh, and while I have you here, the answer was probably just to let Sean Hjelle pitch a second inning after he finished the ninth.
The Giants thought about avenging Melvin’s difficult decision in the bottom half of the inning, when Brett Wisely led off with a pop up that no one caught, putting the tying run on base with no outs. But Austin Slater, in against a right-hander with the left-handed bench options already burned, lost a nine-pitch battle when he struck out, and Heliot Ramos and Wilmer Flores went down feebly despite a few walk-off hacks.
It was an exercise in opportunities lost, some due to poor play, others due to poor fortune. Slater led off the first inning with a deep fly ball that hooked to the outside of the foul pole, missing a home run by about two feet; he would later ground out. One of the four pitches that Slater fouled off in that fated 10th-inning at-bat was hooked a similar distance left of third base, leaving him with the flirtation of a game-altering double and nothing else. Ramos drew a leadoff walk in the eighth inning, Matt Chapman drew one in the second, and Nick Ahmed drew one in the third (followed by a Curt Casali single), but none of those players would score. In the top of the third, with Jordan Hicks fighting to avoid a big inning, a runner on first, and two outs, Seiya Suzuki hit one to right field that Luis Matos probably should have caught; instead, it was an RBI triple. And for five innings Shōta Imanaga did what he has done to so many teams this year: throw pitches that, to the naked eye, look like gifted presents on which to smack hard hits, but which the Giants did absolutely nothing with.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. They tied the game in the sixth inning when they finally got to Imanaga in a fun and chaotic way, with Jorge Soler blasting a two-out RBI double, Chapman scoring on a wild pitch, and Matos legging out a 35.9-mph groundball for a game-tying infield single. Hicks pitched well, even if three runs in five innings isn’t the stuff that boosts an ERA. They even had another fun defensive out on the basepaths, easily nabbing Happ at home when he tried to become the second Cub this series to score from first on a single.
But on the whole, the game was mostly defined by the missed opportunities, and all the ways the Giants probably should have won. Then again, almost every loss is defined by that in some form or fashion. Had this happened on Tuesday, you barely would have noticed.
But it didn’t happen on Tuesday. It happened on Thursday. And that’s baseball, folks.