Giants win…but my goodness, did it have to be that close?

The answer is yes.

By the 8th in Friday night’s contest against the Marlins, the San Francisco Giants hadn’t scored a run in 17 innings.

They had just been two-hit by a back-end starter on an impressive Brewers team, and their bamboozlement at the plate continued against a starter with 10 innings under his belt this season on a terrible Miami Marlins team. Losing 1-0 to Miami, in which the offense undermined another dominant Blake Snell start, reducing his contribution to at-best a participation ribbon—it all felt impossible and entirely possible, the unconquerable ennui of a .500 team.

For six innings, Miami starter Adam Oller showed Giants hitters the door, with the added insult of doing it in their own home.

It was hard to say exactly what made him so effective. He had two differently shaped breaking balls that he played off a less-than-overpowering fastball. The curve and slurve snapped in and out of the zone with late-life, he occasionally dropped in his offspeed to get opponents off the scent of his heater. Easy to say from my couch, but nothing seemed particularly spectacular.

The mix, the release-point, whatever it was, the Giants weren’t picking anything up. They were flailing at pitches well off the plate with typically well-rooted batsmen like LaMonte Wade Jr. swinging out of his shoes.

Mike Yastrzemski provided the offense for the entire order against the Miami starter, and the contributions were far from overwhelming. An infield hit, two walks—Yaz wasn’t retired by Oller, but everyone else was. Their only real scoring opportunity came in the 3rd after Wade led off the inning with a double, but after subsequent strike outs from Casey Schmitt and Grant McCray, whatever brief wind that filled up San Francisco’s sails had died out.

Oller was a mirror image of the reigning NL Cy Young Blake Snell. Both scattered 2 hits over 6 shutout innings, both struck out 8, while Snell walked 1 to Oller’s 2, an impressive bounce back after walking 6 Mariners in his previous start.

Snell was typically stellar. His only blip was minor but loomed large in the late innings. Derek Hill (a good Giant) slapped a 2-strike curveball up the middle for a lead off single in the 7th. The curve is generating a near 50% whiff rate with opponents hitting just .100 against the pitch, yet it was the Miami’s third hit of the night against Snell’s premier weapon, something that opponents hadn’t managed since L.A. did it in April of 2021.

The offering to Hill itself wasn’t terrible, but reflected Snell’s late-game pitch count. It lacked the devastating shape and drop-off typical of his curve. It lingered in the zone, and Hill’s sensible approach to see it deep and go the opposite way with it was rewarded. With the lead-off man, the Marlins manufactured an opportunity with a stolen base, a productive fly-out, and David Hensley untied the nil-nil knot by slapping a 1-1 fastball through the hole between Wade and the first base line. The run snapped a streak of 31 ¹⁄₃ scoreless innings at Oracle pitched by Snell, the longest streak in park history.

Those adaptable swings by Hill and Hensley threatened to be decisive. The flexibility in the box, the situational hitting, the aggressiveness on the base paths continue to be foreign concepts to the Giants, while their over-reliance on stringing hits together—or the BIG HIT— continue to make life harder for this club. With Oller out of the game in the 7th, Chapman quickly reached base to lead off the inning, and the frame, just as quickly, ended with him still on first. Before the 8th, the offense advanced a runner 90 feet only once.

In the 8th, San Francisco started to piece together grittier at-bats against reliever Mike Baumann (#forevergiant) in his second inning of work.

Pinch hitting for Schmitt, Jerar Encarnacion dug in in an 0-2 count, and worked it full before singling on the 8th pitch of the at-bat. With one out, Yaz worked a 9-pitch walk, pushing Encarnacion into scoring position for the first time since the 3rd. The tides continued to turn when Ramos worked another 8-pitch walk to load the bases with only one out.

Needing just a fly ball to the outfield to tie the game, Michael Conforto couldn’t put the ball in play and looked like he was trying to do too much in the situation. Sitting on a fastball, he took a first pitch breaking ball for a strike. He then hacked at a heater level with his eyes and came up empty on a shoelace curve. Three disciplined at-bats that set-up a three-pitch see-ya. The offensive performance this season in a nutshell. They do a couple things really well, and are pants at everything else, specifically anything that requires dynamism, pliancy, and versatility.

I suppose you wouldn’t know it from my moans and groans, but the Giants actually won this game.

Matt Chapman dispersed the metaphorical fog that had enveloped Oracle Park after Conforto’s hack-job with a lead-changing, bases clearing gapper on a 1-2 slider from reliever George Soriano.

Why Soriano chose to throw a slider, we’ll never know. On the previous pitch he had fooled Chapman so badly with a changeup that the righty swung at a ball that probably would’ve punched him in the gut if he hadn’t somehow deflected it. The choice to go back to the breaking ball in that situation felt like a gift, the fact that Chapman didn’t miss it, an answered prayer.

But coastal Californians know as well as anybody that though the fog dissipates, it inevitably returns. For a team hanging onto postseason relevancy by mathematical fingernails, a win is a win; but the way the bats continued to flail for the majority of the game against a shell of a team won’t inspire much confidence, nor rejuvenate any seeds of hope already trampled on.