Giants rally in 9th for sixth straight win

Thanks to a furious comeback in the 9th inning and contributions from nearly the entire lineup, the SF Giants notched their sixth victory in a row — all by one run.

Down three runs on the road in the top of the 9th Tuesday night, the San Francisco Giants found a way to win. Or perhaps more accurately, the Colorado Rockies found a way to lose.

Mike Yastrzemski’s two-out single capped a four-run 9th inning that gave the Giants a 6-5 win over the Rockies at Coors Field. As if playing their eighth one-run game in a row weren’t stressful enough, Camilo Doval let three Rockies reach base in the bottom of the 9th, but held on for his 10th save by getting former Giant Thairo Estrada to fly out with runners on first and third.

Erik Miller (3-0) “earned” the win by coming in to walk a batter and strike out another in the 8th, after reliever Spencer Bivens gave up two triples in his third inning of work after Kyle Harrison went five innings (3R, 6K, 4H, but two hits were home runs). One of those triples wasn’t really Bivens’ fault, after a fly ball to left simply eluded Heliot Ramos in left.

But in the 9th, the Giants got to 24-year-old rookie Zach Agnos, making his 19th career appearance. His first pitch was a bad mistake, a 95 MPH fastball right down the middle that Casey Schmitt hit 408 feet for his first home run of the season.

If Matt Chapman is out for another week, then it’s now Schmitt’s job to hit dramatic ninth-inning home runs. And also to make clutch defensive plays to bail out struggling pitchers, as Schmitt did starting a 5-4-3 double play in the bottom of the 9th.

The bottom of the order kept things going. Tyler Fitzgerald battled back from an 0-2 count to draw a nine-pitch walk. Dan Knizner walked on five pitches. Agnos got his first out on a Jung Hoo Lee groundout that forced Fitzgerald at third, but then he undid the good of erasing the lead runner by throwing a wild pitch. When Willy Adames worked a walk on eight pitches, the Rockies turned to Victor Vodnik, who sounds like a guy who would abduct Liam Neeson’s daughter, in total ignorance of his special set of skills.

Ramos hit a deep fly ball to center to score Knizner and send Lee to third, but the Giants were down to their last out. Plus, they’d loaded the bases, and we all know how well that generally goes for them. The Rockies may have felt a sense of relief, but they didn’t account for the absolute wheels of Wilmer Flores. The Giants DH topped a ball that rolled about 50 feet down the third base line and Vodnik’s throw to first didn’t come close to nailing Wilmer “Crazy Legs” Flores.

Lee scored the tying run for the Giants and also their first run. He tripled to lead off the game, then showed off his speed by defying Gold Glover Brenton Doyle to score on a medium fly ball to center from Adames.

Starter Kyle Harrison didn’t do terribly in his first start at altitude, but he certainly got Coors’d by Kyle Farmer’s line drive homer that barely left the park and gave the Rockies a 3-2 lead.

It’s hard to blame the ballpark for the 424-foot bomb Ryan McMahon delivered in the 4th to give Colorado a 3-2 lead. It would have been out of all 30 major league ballparks and every ballpark in MLB history except the Polo Grounds.

On offense, the Giants were getting opportunities from the wildness of Rockies starter Carson Palmquist, who walked three Giants and hit two more in his 4 innings of work. The Giants wasted two innings where Palmquist beaned runners into scoring position in the 3rd and 4th, then the Giants chased him a walk to Ramos followed a leadoff homer by Adames.

Then came an incredible relief performance that inspired this author’s “Rockies Give Giants The Bird” headline that had to be scrapped after the 9th inning rally. Reliever Jake Bird came in and struck out the first five Giants he faced, on only 19 pitches, then got Knizner to ground out. Between the walk to Ramos and Schmitt’s home run, the Rockies bullpen retired 12 straight Giants, and only the last one even got to a 3-2 count.

The bad news from this game was that Jerar Encarnacion is now 1-for-14 on the season, with his lone hit coming on an infield single. The team went 2-for-8 with runners in scoring position and left nine men on base. The late-inning pitching still seems quite volatile, even if some of the pitching and defense worries were extremely Coorsy.

But ultimately it was a sixth straight win. Even with the Rockies falling to 12-51, Coors Field remains a world where the laws of physics don’t always apply and where curveballs go to die, which also includes slurves like the one Farmer hit out. And if the Giants hitters who are struggling are going to break out anywhere, it’ll probably at a mile above sea level.

A great win for the Giants, and another great business opportunity for Bay Area cardiologists. One-run wins count exactly the same in the standings after all.