No perfect-o, no no-no, no shut-out… mission accomplished.
All quiet on the Giant front in Friday’s 3-1 loss against the Twins.
Chris Paddack, the supposed “soft-spot” of the Minnesota’s excellent rotation, combed back his mullet, twirled his mustache, and breezed through frame after frame of hapless San Francisco hitters.
After a slow start, the Twins have been on a tear as of late. Going into this weekend series they were on a 5-game win streak and had won 10 of their last 11 at home, thanks in large part to a pitching staff led by the likes of Joe Ryan and Pablo Lopez, who are slated for starts on Saturday and Sunday. Looking ahead, this weekend was going to be a tough one, and as Bryan pointed out in his series preview, pouncing on Paddack was the Giants best chance to steal a game and cool off a hot team.
On paper, Paddack needed to be put out to pasture. The veteran right-hander sported a 5.57 ERA and 1.48 WHIP before Friday’s start. He wasn’t doing much in terms of missing bats, keeping runners off base or avoiding loud contact — all pretty central tenets of quality starting pitching.
You think you know a guy… and then you blink, and it’s the 6th inning. Paddack has got a 3-run lead that feels like 10-runs and is teasing perfection. Fifteen Giants up and fifteen Giants down — and he needed just 43 pitches to do it. It wasn’t luck either. Paddack defied all expectations, bucked all trends. Coming in with a low 16% K%, he struck out five on his first trip through the San Francisco order. Generally susceptible to hard contact (prior to first pitch, opponents’ .263 xBA was in the league’s 34th percentile), the Giants managed just two “hard-hit” balls with an expected batting average of .095 through the first 5 innings.
The way he did wasn’t rocket science either. Paddack threw a lot of fastballs with an average velocity of 95 MPH (a tick up than his season average so far), and threw a lot of them for first pitch strikes. Given that immediate count leverage, he didn’t nibble, but attacked the zone, tossing in an off-speed offering or breaking ball when needed. Seemingly straight-forward stuff that proved absolutely baffling.
The closest the Giants got to a run, to making Paddack flinch during that stretch, was Willy Adames’s home run trot around the bases in the 1st — a jaunt that was all for naught once the stroke was ruled foul upon review.
By the 6th inning, both benches were at the railings. The warm midwestern air buzzed with anticipation, a brewing sense of excitement of anxiety: Was it going to happen? For the Giants, things were desperate. A well-driven knock, finding a hole in the infield seemed impossible. LaMonte Wade Jr.’s three-ball count to lead off the 6th — San Francisco’s first of the evening — felt like a rally. Even Dave Flemming and Hunter Pence were doing all within their power to summon a broadcaster jinx from on-high, praising Paddack’s work on the mound, peppering the word “perfect” into their headsets as much as possible, basically shouting it at the mound from their booth. At that point, only an act of god could break up the no-no.
Enter Christian Koss.
Two outs in the 6th. Down 0-1 in the count. The light-hitting infielder had just missed, and missed badly, at a slider up over the letters. He looked similarly confused by the principles of hitting in the 1st when Paddack three-pitched him with a slider, fastball, slider combo.
Back-to-back ugly hacks three frames apart. Things didn’t look promising. But Paddack got predictable, and it cost him immortality. He stuck with the pattern, followed the breaking ball with another fastball and Koss lined it into center for San Francisco’s first knock of the game.
With that obstacle finally hurdled, the Giants could take a deep breath, relax, and quietly surrender into the night.
They saved more face by avoiding the shutout on Matt Chapman’s 2-out solo shot in the 7th, but any real hope of breaking through was spurious. Heliot Ramos’s lead-off single in the 8th — a red-herring. It helped push Paddack off the mound, sure, but his walk back to the dugout, raising his hand to acknowledge the standing ovation from the crowd, was far from dejected. Rather, victory was imminent. Ramos proved to be the Giants’ last base-runner. Reliever Louis Varland retired the next two batters to close out the 8th and Danny Coulombe worked a scoreless 9th.
Three base runners all evening, not a single at-bat with a runner in scoring position. All in all, pretty flimsy support for a solid Jordan Hicks, who gave up 3 runs on 7 hits, 0 walks and 6 strike-outs. He needed just 79 pitches to throw 6 innings despite struggles in the 1st continuing to dog him.
Prior to this start, more than half of the runs Hicks has allowed this season have scored in the first inning. He lugged in a 12.86 first-frame ERA with opponents batting .457 and boasting a 1.243 OPS. Three pitches was all it took to put Hicks in a one-run hole, after Byron Buxton tripled on the first offering he saw and promptly scored on a single by Trevor Larnach.
That first run happened fast, the subsequent three-outs happened faster. A hard-hit line drive directed right at Wade gave Hicks a quick two-fer, and in 9 pitches, he was back in the dugout with minimal damage.
Honestly, Hicks did well to hang with Paddack considering what he was up against. Not that it really would’ve mattered, but the run in the 1st was Minnesota’s only clean score of the day. In the 4th, the single off the bat of Ty France to lead off the inning came on a dump-y fly produced by a lunge-y swing. Carlos Correa’s two-out RBI punch found a hole away from the defense. Both balls in play had expected-batting averages of .190 off the bat. And really, France was lucky to be in scoring position anyway. Patrick Bailey had him dead-to-rights trying to swipe second, out by a coffin’s length, but our beloved back-stop goofed it, spiking the throw way out in front of the bag and Adames couldn’t handle its skip.
In the 5th, Hicks certainly didn’t do himself any favors by throwing a wild pitch with Harrison Bader on first and hitting Kody Clemens and his sub-.100 batting average in a 2-strike count, but he still had a way out of the inning if Heliot Ramos fielded Byron Buxton’s single cleanly. Bader would’ve held up at third, and may have been stranded there since Hicks responded by striking out Larnach before France flew out to end the inning.
That being said, there are no “ifs” in baseball, and certainly no guarantees or “gimme” games. What happened happened. Jordan Hicks threw well, and by managing not to succumb to first inning demons, kept San Francisco in a game they, unfortunately, had no real chance of winning considering the pitching they had to contend with.
Ah well, baseball finds a way of balancing itself out. Maybe Joe Ryan will be out-of-sorts tomorrow. It’s happened before.
While we wait and see…please enjoy this sinker.
That’s perfection.