Well, that was unexpected

The Giants blew out the Dodgers, just as you all thought they would.

I am far from a baseball expert. Very far from a baseball expert. I was tempted to say the furthest thing from a baseball expert, but seeing as how I am a person who has met my sister, that would be a blatant lie.

But I will say this: my years of covering the San Francisco Giants may not have made me more prepared to hit a triple-digit fastball, or more adept at scouting the vertical break of an A-Ball prospect’s curveball, but it has given me a fairly strong understanding of fandom. I read a lot of comments, on articles, Twitter, and in emails. I interact with a lot of fans, some happy, some angry, some indifferent. But more than anything, a few times a week every year, I log into the Vox Media CMS and begin my baseball fandom therapy session.

It’s a unique position, writing about a team you’re openly allowed to root for. And while I can only hope that it’s provided some thoughtful or at least entertaining reads, what I do know is that it’s helped me process a whole lot as a fan. And after many years of being both the therapist and the client in my own literary-fueled relationship with the Giants, I’ve started to learn a few things. With every season, the feelings I experience watching the Giants become things that I can explain more than the year before.

That happened this morning, while I was reflecting on last night’s simultaneously thrilling and atrocious 14-7 loss in 11 innings to the Los Angeles Dodgers. That game hurt, even when I woke up; I’m guessing it was the same for you. Now I’m not trying to be Doctor Duh here — losing to the team you hate, in dramatic fashion, when you had the walk-off run on third base with less than two outs is bound to hurt a little bit more than your garden variety seven-run defeat. But it hurt even more than that.

And I immediately knew why. When the series began on Friday night, and the Giants bullpen was already massively taxed, these were our three pitching matchups:

Friday: Logan Webb vs. Landon Knack
Saturday: Bullpen vs. Tyler Glasnow
Sunday: Bullpen vs. James Paxton

That’s a series that starts with “you should win this,” and ends with “you should lose this,” and stuffed inside like the meat and cheese in a sandwich with all the fixins and all the extra boxes checked was a big ol’ pile of “hahaha not a chance in hell, pal, who do you think you are?”

The Dodgers in that Saturday matchup were Pete Weber and the Giants were whatever poor kid was in the audience, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about just search “Pete Weber” on YouTube and you won’t even need to watch the video because you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

It’s both baseball’s biggest truth and biggest lie that every run counts the same, every inning counts the same, and most of all, every game counts the same. In the basic mathematical sense it’s obviously true, but it’s kind of like saying that every $20 bill is the same … be that as it may, I’m a lot more excited about the $20 bill on six-inch stack of $20 bills than I am about the one the bartender gives me as change after I slam down a Franklin to conclude a night of questionable choices.

And so it’s the case that two types of losses hurt more than any other — both in the standings and in your emotions. And those two losses reside at very different ends of the spectrum: there’s the loss in the game that you should have won, and there’s the loss in the game you should have lost, but almost won.

The Giants weren’t supposed to have a chance on Saturday. They were facing one of the leading Cy Young candidates, and countering a behemoth offense with a bullpen game opened by a rookie with an ERA in the 4s, and handing the bulk of the innings to a player on the roster in large part because he was expendable enough to DFA after the game.

And then they jumped out to a 5-2 lead and you realized that maybe they would steal a win. And then they came back to tie the game after blowing the lead and you thought they might actually steal the win. And then they put the winning run on third base with one out and one of their most clutch hitters at bat you really, truly thought they would steal the win that they never should have even had a chance at competing for.

And then, of course, they lost. And it hurt for the same reason that it hurts when your corner mart has the winning lottery ticket. You were never supposed to have that money, but you were also never supposed to be close enough to feel like you could have had it; to allow yourself to daydream a little.

Saturday’s game was a double whammy, because not only are those near stolen misses bad for your heart, but they impact the next day’s strategy. Howard gave up six runs, which made the score 6-5. If those six runs instead make it 6-0, Howard probably stays in a little bit longer to preserve and protect his soon-to-be-former teammates. Perhaps Luke Jackson cleans up with two or three innings, and instead of using Howard, Erik Miller, Randy Rodríguez, Taylor Rogers, Ryan Walker, Camilo Doval (for the second straight night), and Sean Hjelle, they just use Howard, Miller, and Jackson, and enter Sunday’s game — another bullpen affair — fairly well rested.

But no. They broke your heart, went down in the standings, and tossed half the wheels off the car before Sunday’s game, which if you recall was already a “you should lose this” game before they limped towards it.

And so Sunday’s game became a game that you really did not expect the Giants to win. You expected the bullpen — even with the subtraction of Howard and the addition of Landen Roupp — to end the day with a stack of workers comp papers, and for Paxton and his 3.39 ERA to calm the Giants’ increasingly-competent bats.

And then the opposite happened. The Giants scored a run in the first inning, when Jorge Soler, Austin Slater, and Heliot Ramos loaded the bases with no outs, and Matt Chapman drove in a run on a sacrifice fly.

They scored two runs in the second, when back-to-back-to-back singles by David Villar, Nick Ahmed, and Tyler Fitzgerald were followed up by a Soler double and a Slater sacrifice fly.

They added a fourth run in the third on back-to-back two-out doubles by Luis Matos and Villar.

And then in the fourth the Giants did to the Dodgers what we expected the Dodgers to have done to the Giants on both days of the weekend. They forced the waving of the white flag. They forced Roberts to leave his struggling pitcher on the mound, letting a core part of the rotation eat it on the chin to buy some rest for a taxed bullpen in a game where fate was already decided.

Fitzgerald led off with a single, and Soler drew a walk behind. Slater flew out, and then the cavalry of extra-base hits: a double smacked off the wall by Ramos, a double ripped down the line by Bailey, a majestic home run from Chapman.

It was 9-0 and still Paxton stayed in, Dave Roberts hell bent on getting innings where he couldn’t get a win. Who could blame him?

And, to the shock and wonderment of all, Spencer Bivens did the opposite. Bivens, whose story more closely resembles an unrealistic feel-good sports movie than anything you actually expect to happen in professional baseball, turned his nose up at the idea of a bullpen game, instead pitching five brilliant innings. A hanging sweeper to Chris Taylor in the fifth inning was put over the fence, but that was his only mistake on an otherwise brilliant day in which he pitched five innings and gave up just four hits and one run. He walked nobody and struck out three, concluding his night with an emphatic punchout of Shohei Ohtani.

To quote the great Michael Scott, oh how the turntables.

That was all the Giants needed. They piled on a proven quality starter, and shut down the Dodgers with their apparent secret weapon. They would add a final run in the eighth, again on back-to-back doubles by Ramos and Bailey, who are quickly emerging as an electric up-the-middle, heart-of-the-order young core. They would give three runs back to LA courtesy of Roupp, who was pressed into action far ahead of schedule (he had been rehabbing in the Complex League, and hadn’t pitched above that level since a AAA game on May 16), but thankfully was put in a low-stress situation.

They won 10-4. They won the series 2-1. They won the game they were supposed to and won half of the games they weren’t supposed to. Don’t let the proximity to a sweep detract from overall success of the series.

It sure wasn’t what you expected. But then again, when the Giants play the Dodgers, the best you can ever ask for is that it’s not what you expected.