Beat LA (past tense)

A welcome change.

There is a special thing that happens in professional sports, and baseball is certainly no exemption. When a team is falling and flailing, they desperately reach for something, anything, to catch hold of. Occasionally they’re lucky and, like an unrealistic protagonist in an action film, grab hold of a ledge with the tips of their fingers. Fingers that suddenly have free soloist strength, and a ledge defying all that we know of architecture to stay intact long enough for the hero to pull themself up and out of danger.

It always seems as though there’s a knowledgable, targeted desperation in that moment. As though the protagonist knows exactly which ledge must be clung to, and somehow knows, even while hanging by one arm, rocks and debris falling around them, the villain waiting overhead, that they’ll be just fine.

Baseball players live their own version of this, where everything around them is falling and they cling to one small thing that they truly believe will pull them out. Analytics are still undecided on the concept of momentum. They may not believe in it. You may not believe in it. But the athletes living in it believe in it. And at some poetic level, isn’t that all that matters? Momentum may not exist functionally, but it certainly exists conceptually. And a concept is all that is needed for a narrative. And a narrative is all that is needed for a story.

It’s something we plebes cannot really relate to, except that we kind of can. I workshopped a few examples that I initially intended to run with as the lede to this article. Check them out:

I’ve never been a professional athlete, but I have started a college essay at 4AM on the day it was due, and spent an hour trying to perfect the first sentence.

I’ve never been a professional athlete, but I do suffer from clinical depression, and make my bed every morning.

I’ve never been a professional athlete, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

We all know that feeling, in some form or fashion. That feeling that if you can turn one little thing around, the rest of the day will follow.

That feeling was in the air when the San Francisco Giants beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 4-1 on Wednesday night, netting their first win against baseball’s darlings. There was a sense — not from the fans or the media or the TV, but emanating from the players — that if they could just do this, and just do that, and just hang on, that they’d be just fine. That they’d maybe turn this thing around after all.

The sentiment started brewing in the first inning, when Logan Webb immediately found himself in trouble, allowing a leadoff single to Mookie Betts followed by a walk to Shohei Ohtani. A one-out, nine-pitch battle against Will Smith culminated in a plunked shoulder, rising Webb’s pitch count well past 20 and loading the bases with just one out.

Webb, as he has a few times this year, so clearly did not have his instrument tuned quite properly. And while a pessimist would point to the 32 pitches he needed to escape the inning, one look at the ace’s face after striking out Max Muncy and retiring Teoscar Hernández told you the importance of exiting the inning unscathed, peripherals be damned.

The sentiment only grew when Webb continued to struggle with the strike zone in the second inning, needing 19 pitches for his donut, and when he walked his third batter of the game in the third inning, needing 16 pitches to get through it, bringing his total to 67 on the night, but none that had produced a run.

One of the great beauties in those moments of salvation is how the stars align so perfectly. Perhaps it’s cosmic intervention, perhaps luck that you have created, perhaps the one bead in life’s long string of coincidences that you finally noticed. It’s the cliff that seems to appear out of nowhere for the hand to grab onto. It’s the text message from the person you didn’t know you needed to hear from until you heard from them. It’s that one rose in your garden, blossoming weeks ahead of schedule, liberating you in ways that aren’t quite available for description.

On Tuesday night, Blake Sabol hit a high-arcing fly ball to right field that, according to Statcast, would have been a home run in all 29 parks except the one it was hit in. On Wednesday night, in the bottom of the third inning, Mike Yastrzemski hit a looping fly ball to right field that, according to Statcast, would have only been a home run in 19 parks. A tear drop of a fly ball that had an expected batting average of merely .090.

But now, with the game tied 0-0, with Curt Casali on first base following a single in his first at-bat since returning to the Giants, Yastrzemski’s baseball carried just far enough, dropping at an almost perfectly vertical angle onto the copper-lined fence, issuing the Giants a 2-0 lead.

The mood within the dugout was palpable through the various screens most of us watch these games on. With every jam escaped, every clutch hit knocked, every out snagged, the Giants found the intersection between frustration, excitement, and confidence. I thought of my mother, standing behind teenaged me, watching football players angrily scream at each other in celebration, asking with a confused expression, why are they so angry about something good? I didn’t have the answer then and I don’t have the answer now; but I’m also not confused in the slightest.

These indescribable moments that I’ve nonetheless spent 1,000 words attempting to depict reached a crescendo a half inning later. The ink had barely dried on third-inning line for those who so bravely scorekeep in pen, when Hernández led off the fourth inning with a rumbling blast, sending the poor baseball 405 feet into right-center field, scorched at 109.1 mph.

Luis Matos, who had spent the series to this point looking like a center field experiment that should be moved on from, broke back with the crack of the bat. He took a straight line and floored it, then did that majestic thing that all great fielders do where he slowed ever so slightly, almost to a glide, giving his body a brief moment of looseness to prepare for the monumental feat at hand.

He leapt, he extended, he collided no more than a foot from where Jung Hoo Lee did. He collapsed and crumpled on the warning track dirt. His teammates rushed to his side, taking inventory until the trainer could jog out.

And here we return to momentum, and all that it entails. Through the first 44 games of the year, the ball is not caught and the player is not well. The Giants lose momentum and a player. They have no cliff to cling to.

It does not matter whether or not that is true. It only matters that those dancing inside the snow globe believe it to be, and thus react accordingly.

Matos caught the ball. A catch so mesmerizing, so unlikely, so violently balletic that Webb, even after letting the moment subside long enough to retire the next two batters, still waited atop the dugout for Matos to march the 350 feet home, just to tell him how badass it was.

And Matos, after a few frightened moments reposed, and a few test runs of his faculties, stayed in the game. And you, again, felt the energy and emotion pouring through the TV, or the monitor, or the iPhone, or the radio, or maybe even the bleachers. That angry determination that collides with triumphant joy.

That’s not to say that the Giants were clearly going to win at this point. Sometimes the ledge really does crumble again, and you have to hope there’s another one waiting 50 feet further. Sometimes that person who texts you is reminding you that you owe them money. Sometimes you make your bed in the morning but can’t get the lumps out.

I won’t pretend to have had total confidence in the Giants winning after that catch, or else this recap would have been published at least an hour earlier. But it was clear, even then, that the Giants were scratching and searching for moments. And with each moment, it was clear that they were finding it a little easier to locate the next one.

Webb settled in, producing a line that would never hint at his earlier struggles: six innings, three hits, three walks, five strikeouts, and no runs. Six shutout innings when he woke up on the wrong side of the bed and put his underwear on backwards. Six shutout innings when his team needed him the most. Needed him to provide the steady platform on which the meaningful moments could stack into something resembling momentum.

In the sixth inning they added on, no longer letting scoring opportunities fall by the wayside. Thairo Estrada led off the inning with a single, and found himself still stuck there after the first and second outs were recorded. Then up came young Heliot Ramos, who has been playing both with the swagger of someone who knows he belongs, and the urgency of someone who knows it’s doubted.

He fell behind 0-2, but fought back and worked the count full. On the seventh pitch of the at-bat, he finally got the pitch he was looking for — the pitch he didn’t get last year, because he swung at worse pitches before the good one ever arrived.

The ability to hit hittable pitches has never been in question for Ramos. It’s only ever been the ability to make it to those hittable pitches; to earn the privilege of a pitcher having to relent and concede a get-it-in fastball.

It came and Ramos smoked it into the gap, Estrada nearly home by the time the ball had finished bouncing off the wall, the lead increasing to 3-0.

In the next half inning, Bob Melvin got to finally manage like he has a day off tomorrow. Sean Hjelle — oh-so-improved Sean Hjelle — entered and retired the first two batters, before Betts bested him for a two-out single. Usually good for two or three innings, Hjelle’s night ended there, and the situation was folded, wrapped, tied, and handed neatly to Erik Miller, tasked with one of the most thankless jobs in baseball: the one-out reliever.

Miller’s job was simple. Retire Ohtani. At best, add a third of a scoreless inning to your ledger, lowering your ERA 0.08 points. At worst, end up the villain in your own team’s movie.

The fearless southpaw challenged Ohtani out of the gates, blowing a first pitch fastball by the best hitter alive. His third pitch was a slider, and Ohtani again went fishing only to lose his bait. The 1-2 pitch was a perfectly placed 99-mph fastball, wide enough that Ohtani justifiably spat on it, but not so wide that Hunter Wendelstedt’s erratic zone didn’t greet it with open arms, hugging it in an inning-ending embrace.

If you want to say that the Giants don’t get that call in the first 44 games, I won’t stop you; the Giants surely feel similarly.

In the eighth, everything the Giants worked for, everything they strutted down the halls with, threatened to be taken from them. Tyler Rogers entered and the first batter, Freeman, hit a seeing-eye single. The second batter, Smith, hit a veritable bloop. These are the situations the Giants have surely had on offense, but you forget they happened because the Giants did nothing with them. These are the situations that surely don’t happen to Giants pitchers more than other pitchers, but you believe they do because they tend to run away like a bouncing ball dropped from the top of a staircase.

But the confidence, the furor, the ecstasy, and all the other many emotions piping through the Giants veins and clubhouse had made their way to Rogers. He happily ceded a run on a Muncy sacrifice fly. He struck out Hernández, earning some semblance of revenge for Monday’s home run. He got Gavin Lux to ground out to end the inning.

The Giants would get the run back in the ninth inning. LaMonte Wade Jr., with a few generous presents from Wendelstedt, worked a one-out walk, and moved to second on a passed ball. Again a youngster, swinging at a two-out pitch with the determined vivacity of someone who has no intention of seeing AAA’s walls again, this time Matos delivering the RBI single.

If you want to say that the Giants don’t get that third strike called a fourth ball in the first 44 games, I won’t stop you; even if they did, they damn sure aren’t scoring it.

(Almost) all wins funnel to Camilo Doval, an apt closer for a team in this emotional state. Doval, the strong silent type, who then pitches with the pent up anger of the people Eminem makes music for. 102 straight through the bat of Andy Pages for out one. Four straight heaters followed by an 89-mph slider to buckle James Outman for out two.

Then a walk to Betts and a single by Ohtani. Just to feel something. Just to know what you’re capable of. The protagonist hanging by the ledge, the audience screaming for them to get up as they take their sweet time, mull their verbal options in their hand, then deliver the witty one-liner before finally extricating themselves from the situation.

A 2-1 count. The tying run in the box. A cutter with just too much movement for Freeman, who rolled it over to Estrada, who tossed it over to Wade, who punched the crispy air while Doval let out a lion’s roar to no one in particular.

Of course, it doesn’t have to mean anything. Perhaps the Giants will stumble when they return to action on Friday. Perhaps this was nothing more than a standard-fare victory, as happens routinely, even when struggling teams face Goliaths. Perhaps momentum is a scam, and we are but clueless individuals waving our credit cards for all to see.

Reality will soon paint the picture in full. But the Giants, blending clenched fists with toothy smiles, will at least watch it be painted with confidence. Confidence that may or may not be prescient, but was earned all the same.