The Giants snapped a 4-game losing streak and showed some resilience by weathering a late-inning comeback from Arizona.
They got one. They finally got one. Just when it felt like the San Francisco Giants would never win a baseball game ever again, they won one.
No, the game wasn’t the cleanest and most lighthearted romp through green pastures, and it had some of the hallmark characteristics of one of their slumpier losses: runners left on base, a lot of walks handed out, a consequential miscue, an early lead jeopardized, a late lead blown.
I, like many of you, like Camilo Doval did, tried to turtle our heads into the shell of our chest as Ketel Marte’s swing swallowed a 1-0 slider and spit it out into the right field seats.
Two batters into the 9th inning, the lead San Francisco had all game was gone. This result felt inevitable. What has been the most brutal about this current slump is not necessarily the lack of offense, it’s the slip in pitching performance. Expecting quality starts from your rotation night-after-night, rolling out your high-leverage relievers inning after inning to produce shutdown innings and protect laughable leads is a tough formula to sustain success. No matter how long someone can hold their head underwater, they’ll eventually going to have to come up for air. The pitching took a breath in June, and the Giants suffered.
The overall team ERA is 3.44 — still best in the National League and second lowest in the Majors — but that’s after a month in which both rotation and bullpen has flirted with a middle-of-the-pack ERA of around 4.00. There has been a regression. Walks are up, strikeouts down. Opponents are hitting .258 with a .325 wOBA against the bullpen, marks that are in the bottom third of the league. Their 1.39 WHIP since June is ranked 23rd. We’ve seen this manifest: a lot of runners on base in tight games, a lot of contact, a lot of unsavory counts, a lot of prayers for unproductive outs that go unanswered…
Every hitter a Giants pitcher faces is swinging a magic hitting stick. We saw it from Alek Thomas and his flared singles against Logan Webb on Monday. We saw Geraldo Perdomo waving it around again on Wednesday, reaching base five times in five plate-appearances, including a lead-off, opposite field single in the 9th to bring the tying run immediately to the plate. Is it bad pitching, excellent hitting, or just evolutionary instinct? With blood in the water, the predator focuses; when wounded, the prey hides.
The Giants have been very good at being the prey. We saw that defeatist mentality against Miami and Chicago and in the previous two games of this series against Arizona. But something changed in game three. instead of going limp in the jaws of the beast, Doval and the Giants escaped and responded.
It wasn’t a dramatic retaliatory bashing. You can see Doval die a teensy bit on the mound as his pitch rocketed over the fence.
But the pity party lasted a second or two, then he closed out the next three batters without fuss. In the top of the 10th, the San Francisco offense did the little things right. Pinch hitter Heliot Ramos lined an infield single off closer Shelby Miller to start the 10th, pushing Jung Hoo Lee as the Manfred Man over to third. Patrick Bailey got a fastball up and wasted no time driving it out to deep center to easily bring Lee home. Next pitch Miller threw, Dom Smith rolled into an inning ending double play.
Based on past experiences, the one-run lead didn’t feel like it’d be enough. One swing and the Diamondbacks could win it, ergo, as worst possible outcome for the Giants, this would absolutely happen. The 10th inning would be Doval’s responsibility, and he’d face Lourdes Gurriel, who homered in the first two games of the series, with a runner on right from the start. Trauma-generated images of walk-off bombs and mushroom clouds flashed through our minds. The very real possibility of Doval giving up a game-tying and game-winning home run in back-to-back innings hung overhead in the rafters.
Doval threw seven-straight cutters to Gurriel. On the seventh, Gurriel drove it 360 feet but to the deepest part of the yard in center. Lee tracked it down easily, and it advanced Arizona’s Manfred Man to third easily.
With speed 90 feet from home, it was a safe bet anything in play would tie the game again. Doval would now have to be perfect. He needed a strikeout. Facing lefty Jake McCarthy, the closer authored one of the finest pitch combos you’d ever see in a 2-1 count: a 97 MPH sinker moving away from McCarthy to the outside that he fouled away, followed by a 91 MPH slider diving from the heart of the plate and away from McCarthy’s barrel, pocketing itself in the bottom corner of the zone for the second out.
Doval used the slider again in a 1-2 count to fan Alex Thomas for the final out.
Though the blown-lead in the 9th nearly headlined another defeat, resilience from the arms is the real story. Doval’s clean 10th, managing the runner at third with less than two outs, recalled Landen Roupp eight-pitch battle with Eugenio Suárez in the 4th, getting him to unleash a hollow swing over a perfect 3-2 change-up.
In the 5th, after a solo shot, two walks and a single brought an abrupt end to Roupp’s night, Erik Miller took over a muddled everybody-on, nobody-out situation and limited one of the best offenses in baseball (especially with the bases loaded) to just a sacrifice fly while picking up two key K’s, including Suárez again.
Randy Rodríguez, tasked with preserving the 3-2 lead in the 7th, worked himself into and out of trouble by following up a single and a walk with a strikeout and double play. In the 8th, Rogers limited two singles exacerbated by a Tyler Fitzgerald throwing error to just an unearned run. A run that would’ve been much more costly if not for the Giants bats uncharacteristically adding to their lead in the top half of the 8th.
Tacking on runs has not been a strong suit of this line-up. They’re typically good for a couple runs either early or late, but never both.
They put up two runs in the 1st off starter Merrill Kelly with a lead-off homer by Mike Yastrzemski and a cathartic two-out, RBI triple by Jung Hoo Lee. The three-bagger was Lee’s 7th of the year and first hit since his 6th triple sixteen at-bats ago. He turned a first-pitch fastball into a 101 MPH line-drive which had just enough zip to clear the reach of Jake McCarthy’s glove in right.
The book has been out on Lee. He’s patient at the plate, and opposing arms have been exploiting that patience. He swings at the first pitch 23.8% of the time (MLB average is around 30%). On “meatballs”, right out over the plate, he swings just 68% of the time (MLB average is around 76%). He also hasn’t shown he can do consistent damage on pitches over the heart of the plate, and with a -5 Run Value, he hasn’t proven he can be consistently effective against the 4-seamer. With this in mind, a fastball right-down-the-pipe has been a pretty solid plan of attack against Lee.
Lee ambushing that first pitch from Kelly is a solid rebuttal to the league. Adjust — it’s what you have to do to survive as a hitter. He’d go on to bag two more hits: a double in the 4th and single in the 8th, giving him his first multi-hit game since June 4th against the Padres, and fifth 3-hit game of the year.
And after a week or so of swinging under elevated fastballs or violently hacking over fastballs that were actually change-ups, Rafael Devers made some edits to the league’s book as well by ripping a 2-strike up-and-in fastball 106 MPH past Pavin Smith at first for a 2-out RBI in the 5th.
It was San Francisco’s seventh at-bat in the game and first hit with a runner in scoring position. Including Patrick Bailey’s and Brett Wisely’s RBI knocks in the 8th, the Giants would go 4-for-13 with RISP. Pretty solid production considering their recent failures in the situation. And though what it produced was far from sufficient in terms of padding, the offense bucked another recent trend by not going completely dormant with their bats after taking an early lead.
Fans would love to see a lean back in the La-Z-boy slugfest that takes a leaf blower to the fog of discontentment, revealing blue-skies and green pastures ahead, but we should know by now that this team just ain’t that emphatic. A 6-5 win in 10 innings is a 2025 Giants specialty. A late & close win, a win overcoming adversity, a mixed cocktail of disappointment and frustration and exasperation and resilience, a one-runner — we’ll have to wait and see what comes next, but an optimist (perhaps an insufferable one) is going to see the light break through the clouds after this one. It’s these kinds of authentic wins after a numbing slump that are going to get that April feeling back in this team’s bones.