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The All-Star Break couldn’t have come at a better time. We’re going to need a week of baseball detox after Sunday’s extra-inning loss to the Dodgers. Days spent slathered in balms, various soothing lotions, our essential oil diffusers running on high while we pound Big Gulp after Big Gulp of spa water with meditative ocean sounds blasting in our ears.
Sunday’s 5-2 loss in extra innings felt distinctly cruel. Luis Matos’s game-tying 2-run homer in the 9th brought an unexpected hope, a lightning bolt of offense the San Francisco Giants hadn’t seen since the 5th inning of Friday’s opener — but ultimately what felt like a promise, proved to be just a suggestion, a phantom blip on a long flatline.
The lackluster offense fans suffered through during Saturday’s 2-1 loss remained its catatonic state all afternoon on Sunday. All-Star Yoshinobu Yamamoto cruised through 7 innings of work, rinsing the bitter taste of his previous two starts against San Francisco (7.84 ERA) from his mouth, not to mention his last outing in which he surrendered 5 runs (3 earned) tossed 41 pitches and couldn’t work through the 1st inning.
An All-Star in All-Star form going into the All-Star Break — go figure. The Giants managed just three hits and five baserunners against him, with each of those runners reaching base in separate innings. San Francisco managed just two at-bats with runners in scoring position and came up empty in both of them. Relief didn’t come after Yamamoto surrendered the mound either, with the hyped-up southpaw Alex Vesia striking out Patrick Bailey, Heliot Ramos and Rafael Devers in the 8th.
Despite their own All-Star Robbie Ray’s best efforts, the Giants entered Sunday’s 9th ticketed to lose. It wouldn’t have been the most shocking thing in the world. They’ve been on that train before. They were on that train yesterday. When holding their opponents to just two runs or fewer before Sunday, the Giants have lost ten times — which is a lot fewer than they’ve won (24), but still a lot more than they should lose.
Matos waved his magic hitting stick and rescued the team from an 11th dubious loss in that specific split. A nice gesture, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem. Instead of leading a charge to a series win, the homer merely served as an illustrative point. Two runs is not a lot. It’s not a chasm, it’s a crack in the sidewalk. That’s the takeaway, the morsel to chew on and mull over for the next five days. At the end of the day, San Francisco put two runs on the board. Even with the late game drama and solid pitching, that’s not going to cut it. No reasonable player left the field feeling like they got stiffed trying to buy a win with what amounts to loose change.
Great pitching does not directly transfer to great hitting. No matter how much we want it too, that kind of alchemy just does not exist. If it did, the Giants would’ve usurped LA as the best offense in the league a long time ago, and the bats would have definitely found a way to put up more runs on the board in this one.
Robbie Ray gave up just two runs over six innings and earned his 13th quality start in 20 games. After tallying a single run in the 4th and 5th against Ray, LA didn’t record a hit or score a run until the 11th inning. Five different San Francisco arms linked up to allow just one baserunner from the 6th to the 10th inning while striking out 8 of the 15 batters they faced.
Joey Lucchesi masterfully scattered manageable contact around the infield to strand the Manfred Man at third. Spencer Bivens nearly added a seventh hitless/scoreless frame with two outs in the 11th until a 70 MPH flare off the bat of Freddie Freeman was hit weakly enough away from no-doubles defense alignment for it to find grass in shallow center.
The RBI incited a riot of comical contact, a barrage of bloops, a farcical display of balls-in-play. Three runs that openly mocked Matos’s 2-run shot that left his bat at 105 MPH, or Rafael Devers’s 106 MPH line drive in the 10th that had an xBA of .720.
LA’s decisive rally was like getting trampled by a stampede of basset hounds. Short legged, long-eared, dopey eyed… yet deadly. Deadly because the Giants’ offense invited it. They laid down in front of that slow-moving herd of canines and said Do your worst.
With a chance to win the game with a couple of outs, Patrick Bailey botched two bunts to lead off the 10th, blowing the chance of moving the runner at second over to third on a sacrifice. Even with that strategic advantage off the table, a measly poke through an infield hole was all that was needed to bring in the winning run, and Willy Adames, despite his hot-hitting and good vibes, couldn’t find a way to do that. No one could find a way to do that. The line-up went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position. All-together, the top of the lineup (Ramos, Devers, Adames, Chapman) went 1-for-19.
We could bemoan the lame way LA plated those extra inning runs, but that opportunity to dink and doink to victory came about because the bats essentially forced it on them.
Two losses in two close and winnable games. Is this what separates division winners and division losers? The Giants have now lost both series — home and away — against LA. Their next inning won’t be until September. Does it seem silly to hope they’ll be hitting by then?