Done in by friendly fire

Rafael Devers homered, but it was otherwise ugly.

We knew as early as last night how today would begin. The San Francisco Giants suffered another dispiriting loss on Wednesday and made no attempts to hide their intentions for Thursday. Casey Schmitt, upon becoming the third Giant to get hit by a pitch on Wednesday, slammed his helmet to the ground and yelled multiple NSFW words before the production team at NBC Sports Bay Area had time to cut the mic. Logan Webb, before heading home for the night, told reporters that, “the game finds a way to even itself out.”

Those two moments were the description and language of origin administered by Dr. Jacques Bailly, and all of us sitting at home could fill in the spelling from it. Thursday’s game would feature retaliation, the oft-debated toddler tactic of purposely throwing a baseball at someone to express your disdain that they accidentally threw one at you.

If retaliation has a thousand haters, I am one of them; if retaliation has one hater, it is me; if retaliation has no haters, I hope that they served only the finest and freshest bread, cheese, and tinned fish at my funeral.

I hate retaliation in baseball, and I hate it for myriad reasons.

I hate it for the moral reason that a baseball is a very hard object that, when administered in the direction of a person’s body, can cause great harm and potentially jeopardize one’s career, and I think we should save intentional violence for … well, perhaps now is not the time to talk politics.

I hate it for the logical reason that it accomplishes nothing. As young Kyle Harrison once taught us while nearly hitting future Hall of Famer Bryce Harper in the face, getting yelled at, and then nearly hitting him in the face again, neither professional pitchers nor professional hitters are easily fazed. Neither the Marlins Janson Jung on Thursday nor the White Sox Aaron Civale on Friday is going to look at the scouting report for Heliot Ramos, see that he struggles with pitches in at the hands and feasts on the outer half of the plate, and say, Well they seem pretty upset about getting hit, better pitch him away and live with the bad results.

I hate it for other reasons, and we’ll get to them shortly. But for now, let’s get back to the baseball game.

Hayden Birdsong took the mound on a sunny San Francisco afternoon, and set forth with the ceremonial plunking, for which I assign him minimal blame — he’s the youngest player on the team, and surely was following marching orders.

He approached it somewhat well, and somewhat poorly. The situational element was handled properly: he faced the first two batters straight up, retiring each with nary a hint of shenanigans. The execution left much to be desired though, as Birdsong eschewed the standard off-speed thud muffin to the tush, opting instead for a 97-mph fastball directly towards the knees. The knees of, to make matters worse, Otto López, who spent the 2024 Spring Training months with these very same Giants.

Here we must pause to welcome in any sweet innocent souls who remain unconvinced that Birdsong intended to hit López. When the umpiring crew immediately offered warnings, neither Birdsong nor anyone on the Giants mounted a complaint. When Marlins manager Clayton McCullough stormed onto the field and was ejected, the Giants sat and stood quietly, showing neither emotion nor defense. It was standard stuff. They filled out the retaliation form, submitted it, then got back in the car and drove home. This is the way it’s done. Protocol was followed, and the game could resume.

And so too can my list of reasons for hating retaliation, after that brief detour into the actual game we’re here to discuss.

I hate it for the baseball reason that it hurts your team. You give your opponent a free base, which is gold to most teams and the entire mine for a team facing the Giants and their inability to score. You fire up your opponent, offering them free bulletin board material in the middle of the game. And, above all else, you put your pitcher in the precarious position of knowing that one mistake — one slip of a finger, slide of a cleat, or millimeter delay upon release — will result in that pitcher’s ejection. Birdsong entered the game having unintentionally hit three batters this year. If he hit a fourth, his day was over.

Anyone who has dabbled in athletics, or in … uhh … life, really … is familiar with how much excess pressure can throw a wrench into things. Birdsong, to that point, had danced divinely on the edges of the strike zone. But, tasked with the knowledge that a bad pitch could end his day, the equation was altered. After McCullough had left the field and López had inhabited first, Agustín Ramírez stepped into the batter’s box, and Birdsong’s very first pitch was a gift of a fastball that perfectly bisected the strike zone on both the vertical and horizontal axes.

Ramírez absolutely tattooed the baseball, hitting it harder than all but two Giants have hit a baseball this season. He hit it so hard that it hurt him, in that it bounced off the left field wall with such velocity that Heliot Ramos was able to get the ball into the infield in time to keep López at third. Disaster temporarily averted.

But Birdsong had made his bed and he would have to lay in it all game. And so, in a 2-1 count to Kyle Stowers just moments later, Birdsong hung a slider that once again was placed at the sort of location that has made tee companies a whole lot of money, and Stowers annihilated it to the tune of 440 feet, a distance one rarely ever sees at Oracle Park yet, fittingly, would not be the furthest-hit ball of the day.

The Giants, in their quest to stand up for themselves, had instead gifted the Marlins a rally, and a team that had averaged just 3.5 runs per game over their last 35 games suddenly trailed 3-0.

It got worse! Birdsong still looked uncomfortable in the second, even though he made it through the inning. He still looked uncomfortable in the third when, perhaps nervous about the sheer number of meatballs he was chucking, he walked Jesús Sánchez to open the inning.

After retiring López, Birdsong once again faced Ramírez. In an attempt to learn from his previous mistake, Birdsong stayed away from the fastball that had been toasted in the first inning, opting instead for three consecutive sliders. But he forgot to learn from the location mistake, as all three found the heart of the plate, culminating in a true disaster of an 0-2 pitch, and a simply majestic, Galarragaian 443-foot home run with an understandably slow trot.

That was the end of the tape measure homers — for the Marlins, at least — but it wasn’t the end of Birdsong’s struggles. His hesitance to pitch naturally and risk hitting another batter resulted in home run derby pitches, and his hesitance to keep throwing home run derby pitches resulted in trying to nervously nibble, and no one ever pitches well that way.

Birdsong opened the fifth inning by walking Sánchez and López on a combined nine pitches, prompting Mike Krukow to quickly and loudly proclaim, “He’s gotta come out,” even though he stood at just 76 pitches.

It was the obvious thing to do, especially with the Giants having surprisingly tied up the game, and Bob Melvin agreed. In came Spencer Bivens, who briefly appeared to work true magic, striking out both Ramírez and Stowers, before ceding a double to Eric Wagaman and a single to Connor Norby, allowing the Marlins to reclaim the lead at 8-5.

The Giants had come back once, but between their feeble offense and their stupidity in this affair, few had hope that a second comeback would be in the works.

And indeed, it wasn’t. The Giants would give up more runs but gain none, with Sean Hjelle getting shellacked for an eighth-inning five-piece, turning an own goal into an embarrassing bout of unnecessary friendly fire, and an unsightly 12-5 loss.

There was joy in the game, but it was short lived. Rafael Devers put on a show with his best game as a Giant, hitting 3-4 with a walk, a gorgeous double, and an absolute behemoth of a two-run homer to get the Giants on the board in the third inning.

Per the incomparable Sarah Langs, Devers’ homer, when paired with the moonshots from Stowers and Ramírez, marked the first time in the history of Statcast (a decade) that there had been three home runs of at least 435 feet at Oracle Park.

They tied the game with an encouraging rally from a quartet of players in need of good days: Jung Hoo Lee led off the fourth with a defense-assisted triple, and scored on a single by Willy Adames. Christian Koss, starting at third with Schmitt sidelined following the aforementioned plunking, cracked his first double of the season, which was followed by the first hit of the year from Brett Wisely, a game-tying, two-run double.

But it was all the positive that they could muster, while the negatives mounted. And as they did, a clear theme emerged. Mike Yastrzemski, who rarely emotes much anger, got his money’s worth in the third inning contesting a called strike three that was clearly in the zone. Wilmer Flores, normally as mild-mannered as can be, had to be held back as he went after both the umps and the Marlins following a properly-called strike three in the seventh, prompting the benches to clear. Melvin is likely hoarse from barking at the umpires all game long.

The Giants can claim anger at their recent string of being hit by pitches all they want, but on Thursday it was clear the issues are more deeply rooted than that. The hit batters aren’t why they got swept by a lower division team, and they’re not why they can’t score. And as those frustrations mounted, the Giants did little to distinguish themselves from a toddler who has stayed up past nap time, melting into a frustrated and self-harming tantrum.

They chose retaliation on Thursday, and it backfired. Perhaps they should have chosen retaliation on Wednesday night, when they were hit by two batters in the ninth inning, instead of waiting until the next day. Perhaps that retaliation would have looked like using the two free batters to their advantage by mounting a game-winning rally.

I would think that’s the type of retaliation that actually proves a point.