Grit (and stuff)

A dynamic young battery emerges.

If there’s one compliment you can pay the San Francisco Giants this year, one thing that you really just admire their affluence at, it’s the ability to lose games that they probably should win. Trust me when I say that the Giants are not as adept at this as it feels like they are, but they’re still pretty darned good at it.

They get picked off. They load the bases and then don’t score. They have that one inning where everything goes wrong. They’re not exactly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the final minute of the movie, but you’ve got to think that, “damn, we should have won that” is a refrain commonly muttered in fancy cars and charter busses exiting the stadium over the last month.

Friday night’s dramatic 3-0 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates was no such game. The Giants didn’t lose a game they should have won, because they won it. And they didn’t escape at the last possible moment with a bail-out win that they should have had in their pocket all night long.

Instead, they won a game that will leave the Pirates players muttering that same refrain — damn, we should have won that — as they head back to their hotel. Muttering it so hard that Rowdy Tellez might even forget to look out the window of the bus and say something offensive about the city and its residents.

It’s not that the Giants didn’t deserve to win the game. They didn’t steal it, at least not in a way that makes you feel as though they’re not as good as the result would indicate. They merely won because they refused to lose; refused to lose so much that the Pirates were left wondering why they hadn’t tried that tactic.

That was the theme of the night, really: refusing to lose, when it would have been so easy to simply flop to the floor and let defeat engulf you like a cozy blanket.

The tone was set by Kyle Harrison, with the southpaw showing veteran moxie not befitting his youngest-starter-in-the-Majors name tag. Out of the gates it didn’t seem like Harrison quite had it, whatever “it” may be defined as. Despite needing just four pitches to nab the first two outs, Harrison fell into trouble when he allowed a two-out single to Ke’Bryan Hayes and a double to Connor Joe, with a nice play by Michael Conforto making sure Hayes didn’t get up to any funny business.

Unbothered, Harrison got Edward Olivares to ground out and end the inning.

In the second, it was a leadoff double by Jared Triolo that Harrison worked around, striking out a pair of batters and acting as though he didn’t even realize a runner was on base, let alone in scoring position.

He worked around a two-out single in the third, and was sitting on 56 pitches at the end of the inning. He was putting up zeroes, which is a pitcher’s primary job, but there was a bend-don’t-break philosophy behind it that never feels sustainable. When a pitcher takes that approach, something is going to break — it’s just a matter as to whether it’s breaking apart, or breaking into place.

For Harrison it was the latter. He gave up a leadoff single to Olivares to start the fourth, and that was the last we saw of Kyle Harrison, Non-Dominant Pitcher. He got Triolo to ground into what should have been a double play ball, but a bad throw from Nick Ahmed meant only one out. No worries — he made Oneil Cruz look silly, then made Michael A. Taylor look weak to end the inning.

The fifth was equally dominant: Henry Davis struck out with three swings and misses to begin a one-two-three frame, aided by sensational defense from Jung Hoo Lee.

And the sixth inning required just 12 pitches to record a soft grounder and two strikeouts.

It’s a common sports trope to talk about the importance of finding success even when you’re not at your sharpest, but Harrison took that a step further. He not only found success, but found a sharpener as well, flipping the script from “uh oh” to “well, you’re finding a way” to “you’ve never looked better.”

Glance at his final line — six innings, five hits, no walks, no hit batters, no runs, and seven strikeouts — and no part of you would think it was a gritty, tough, grind-it-out performance. You’d think it was a dominant one.

It just so happened to be both.

Harrison had indeed set the stage, but he was far from the only actor. Replaced to start the seventh inning — he’d thrown 93 pitches, after all — Harrison watched as Ryan Walker played a similar role. After two fairly-dominant outs, Walker gave up a six-pitch single to Taylor, then an eight-pitch walk to Davis, then plunked Andrew McCutchen to load the bases.

This could have been how it all ended. And indeed, many people thought it was how it all ended — anyone watching in person or with the game on mute would have been awfully confused at what happened next, when Walker threw a pitch with so much movement that it dove in on Bryan Reynolds, hit him on the foot, and ricocheted away. And as fans moaned at either a run-scoring hit batter, or run(s)-scoring wild pitch, depending on what they had seen, the Giants slowly walked back to the dugout: the pitch had been so nasty that Reynolds had fully swung at it, ending the inning.

Tyler Rogers didn’t need to grit through quite as much for his inning of work in the eighth, but still had to work around the rarest of feats, a Matt Chapman error.

And then it was Camilo Doval. Harrison may be the face of Friday’s grit, but Doval is the face of making the Pirates feel like they should have won. Trotting to the mound for the ninth inning of a still scoreless game, Doval wasted no time getting into trouble, giving up back-to-back singles to Cruz and Taylor to kick off the frame (and, again, with help from an outfielder, this time Mike Yastrzemski, who cut off what looked like it would be an RBI double). Taylor promptly stole second, and suddenly the force play was off: the Pirates had the go-ahead run at third, the insurance run at second, and no outs.

Up came Tellez, pinch-hitting with an opportunity to really stick it to a fanbase and city that he already thumbed his nose at over the offseason. Doval struck him out and made him look useless.

Then a battle with McCutchen — a battle Doval seemed willing to concede, walking the future Hall of Famer to load the bases and set up the force play.

A prescient decision. Two pitches later, the double play of the year, accompanied by a heart rate threatening to rise above the Mendoza line.

I mean ….. what?!!?

The Giants had made it to the bottom of the ninth inning still knotted in the run column. They’d done it despite going from a Yastrzemski two-out single in the second to a Lee one-out single in the sixth without any baserunners. They’d done it despite Ahmed hitting a one-out single in the eighth in his first career at-bat against Aroldis Chapman, then immediately getting picked off. They’d done it despite Lee advancing to second later that inning, only for Jorge Soler to get robbed by a frustratingly-sensational bit of glove work by the third baseman Hayes.

Their offense had frustrated, but it was surely nothing compared to what Pittsburgh was feeling, and now they had a chance to punctuate that. Facing David Bednar — the last in a long line of Giants connections to wear the black and yellow in this game — Conforto fell behind 0-2, but still worked a leadoff walk. The party hard run was at first base. Chapman singled, and now the celebratory runner was at second.

Up stepped Patrick Bailey, and a poetic scene unfolded. The Pirates, to start the inning, had made a defensive switch to increase their chances of seeing a 10th inning, replacing Davis with Joey Bart, who now crouched behind the plate in his first game against the team he spent so long with. There was poetry in Bart, once the heir apparent to the Buster Posey Throne of Squatting Greatness, behind the dish with his new team, while Bailey, who supplanted Bart in that role, stepped into the box. Bart is doing well in Pennsylvania and I, for one, am thrilled for him, so don’t mistake this labeling of poetry as finding it satisfying to defeat the man who once held so many of the franchise’s hopes and dreams. Poetry takes on many forms. It’s not always moralistic. As the great philosopher Charles Barkley once said, “I am not a role model.” Neither is poetry.

Bailey stepped up and swung at the first pitch, a 96-mph fastball over the plate. He fouled it off. He pulled in his cheeks and formed an “O” with his mouth, his eyes growing wide, the universal signal for “well damn, I just missed it.” You knew he’d be unlikely to get another chance at the “it” that he just missed.

And then Bednar spiked a splitter in the dirt so ferociously that Bart — a fantastic defensive catcher — couldn’t keep it in front of him. Conforto advanced to third and Chapman to second.

Suddenly Bailey only needed a fly ball to send everyone — sans Bart and the rest of the Pittsburgh crew — home happy. And Bednar, now backed into a corner, now needing to work a miracle, now knowing he couldn’t afford to spike another in the dirt, gave Bailey the “it” that was just missed two pitches prior. Another fastball. Another 96-mph fastball. Another 96-mph fastball over the plate.

The “it” would not be missed twice.