*Offer not valid in the 9th inning.
Monday’s game between the San Francisco Giants and New York Mets started out in … well … fashion. Let’s call it fashion. That’s what I wrote in my notes: just “fashion.”
Had the Giants lost, it would have been “ominous fashion.” Had the Giants won — a silly thing to pose as a hypothetical, seeing as how they did, in fact, win — it seemed likely to be “encouraging fashion.”
Now that we know that the Giants emerged victorious, by a score of 5-2, we can slap the “encouraging” label on there, right in front of the “fashion.”
The moment in question occurred on just the fifth pitch of the game. With one out and the bases empty, Starling Marte squared up to bunt at a 90-mph slider from Keaton Winn. It was a perfect bunt, dribbled expertly down the first base line, hit hard enough that catcher Tom Murphy had no chance, soft enough that first baseman Wilmer Flores had none either, and just fair enough that Winn had to field the ball but had no angle to make a good throw.
Winn threw nonetheless but, between his poor angle and Flores’ line of sight being blocked by a broad-shouldered man barreling down the line between those two, the ball never even flirted with the glove, and instead trickled into center field.
Not thinking twice (sometimes a good thing; other times, not so much), Marte admired his gift while turning the corner, and set course for second base. But right fielder Austin Slater, who would be forgiven for letting his mind wander a touch given his struggles and infrequent playing time, had done the most fundamental (yet often rare) thing, and ran in from the onset to back up the play.
He fielded the ball cleanly, with time to soft-toss it to second base, had he chosen to do so. Marte was out by a distance that only occurs when someone has done something embarrassing on the baseball field.
It was a “fashion” because the Giants have done this a hilarious amount of times through the first 24 games of the season. And when I say “done this,” I don’t mean registered an out because their opponent got silly; I mean they’ve been the Marte in that scene, over and over again.
They’ve had outs on the basepaths a-plenty. They’ve had embarrassing foibles galore. You want good plays that have somehow turned into negative outcomes? They’ve got twenty! But who cares, no big deal, they want more.
Except this time it was the Mets, and it was ripe to be meaningful. Had the Giants lost, it would have been salt in the wound; sure, the Giants have been crippled by their own senseless mistakes, but they can’t even capitalize on an opponent doing the same? Now that’s the mark of a bad baseball team.
But they won, and so instead it feels like some blend of karmic retribution and catharsis. Other teams let their lemons rot before making lemonade, too. Sometimes they even come buy lemonade from the Giants, in a fit of desperation.
It didn’t take long for us to learn whether that Marte foible was ominous fashion or encouraging fashion. Pete Alonso led off the second inning with an infield single, but Winn quickly got Brett Baty to bounce into a double play before striking out DJ Stewart on a splitter that would flummox Mets hitters all night long.
And in the bottom half of the inning, New York’s silliness returned, when Jorge Soler hit a soft grounder toward the middle to lead off the inning and Jeff McNeil, cutting off Francisco Lindor — who would have had a play — kicked the ball.
Not in the baseball sense of “kicking.” In the literal sense of “kicking.” In the sense that you’ll find if you look up “kicking” in the dictionary. As in — said in his best Jacques Bailly voice — “Kick. Verb. Language of origin unknown. To use in a sentence: The second baseman placed his foot on the incoming baseball and thrust his foot forward, kicking it away from the helpless shortstop.”
It was a rally defined by backwards. Soler — big, strong, power-hitter Soler — requiring a soft soccer touch for a single; and then, with one out, Michael Conforto — on the roster primarily to try and hit home runs — blooping a parabola of a single; and then, with two on, Thairo Estrada — with two walks drawn in 90 plate appearances — earning a free pass; and then, with the bases loaded, Tom Murphy — brought in here to be one of the best-hitting backup catchers alive — watching meekly at strike three.
The bases-loaded rally was down to the Nick Ahmed, the ninth-place hitter brought in to play defense first, second, and third, and if he gets a hit once a week then I guess that’s pretty cool too. It’s not the guy you want up in that situation, but the whole rally had been backwards, so it felt fitting when Ahmed blasted a ball down the line, with intentions of clearing the fence, and it banged off the top of the wall, seemingly scoring a pair.
And yet, it felt somehow even more fitting when, amid Kruk and Kuip still innocently discussing the brilliant bout of hitting, it started to dawn on you from Ahmed’s reactions at second base that the ball had been foul.
There’s an unwritten rule in baseball — one of many — that says that if you almost get a big and powerful hit, but it’s foul, that you’re not allowed to do it again in that at-bat. That was your chance. No takesies backsies. You had one power swing and you wasted it on a foul ball. Now you must strike out looking, as the gods intended.
But again: a backwards rally. And so Ahmed bounced one up the middle that squeaked through the infield — no kicks needed — and still scored a pair of runs, giving the Giants an early 2-0 lead.
0-2 turns into 2-0 pic.twitter.com/XcVQHd8dEG
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 23, 2024
Everything was lined up. The Mets were making Giantsy mistakes. The Giants were capitalizing on them. The defense, pitching, and hitting were all flowing. We were having a good time.
…
You’re waiting for me to say “but.” I just know you are. It’s the most common literary trope in the book, and it’s common because it’s good. It’s how these things work. I tell you how you good things are. You know a “but” is coming, yet you get lost in a but-less world for half a second — just long enough to feel your heart sink when the “but” comes across the artificial glare of whatever device you’re reading this on. It works every time. You curse me, yet you’re oddly satisfied. The itch is scratched, if a wee bit bloody.
But there is no but.
That’s just it. The Mets were making Giantsy mistakes. The Giants were capitalizing on them. The defense, pitching, and hitting were all flowing. We were having a good time. And we continued to have a good time because the game continued to progress in that exact manner until the gulls swarmed and the babies slept and spilled beers turned sticky and Hunter Pence had his 9:00 p.m. quad shot of espresso to help him wind down for the evening.
Winn, riding that aforementioned splitter and a revelatory defense, cruised through a one-two-three third inning, and a one-two-three fourth. He took a brief interlude to allow Alonso to hit a leadoff home run in the fifth, then retired six more batters in order.
The offense, meanwhile, manufactured the sort of standard-issue offensive success that teams are supposed to possess, but has evaded the Giants for much of the season. They kept the pressure on, never letting José Quintana get in a groove, and forcing him to throw 93 pitches in five innings. The pushed the lead in the third, with a beautifully straightforward rally: a walk by Flores, a single by Jung Hoo Lee, and a two-run double down the line by Matt Chapman, aided slightly by continued dullness from the opposing team.
Chappy? Doubled.
Lead? Doubled. pic.twitter.com/j08BPKy0Lm— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 23, 2024
They added on, as teams are supposed to do. And they did so in that intangible momentum-building way that makes a team appear fully in control. On Monday, that meant Conforto watching as Quintana jogged out to the mound to try and take on the sixth inning — or at least to take on the left-handed batter that would lead it off — and Conforto flipping the bird to that idea, putting the very first pitch of the inning deep into the night, simultaneously knocking Quintana out of the game and letting the Mets know that gimme outs were an eradicated concept.
First pitch ‘forto pic.twitter.com/T9pOO15ccx
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 23, 2024
The closest the Giants got to abandoning their script of solid, sound, and secure baseball came in the seventh inning, when Winn — brilliant all night — was given an opportunity to record a seventh-inning out for the first time as a starter, and instead gave up a single and a four-pitch walk; with Alonso marching to the plate, Bob Melvin had no choice but to turn to the bullpen.
But there was no drama there. Ryan Walker breezed through the inning as if no one was on base, and Tyler Rogers cut through the eighth with nary a whiff of drama. It was a 5-1 lead going into the ninth, when the dramatic lights finally got a chance to play, as Camilo Doval was summoned even for a non-save situation.
Camilo’s first entrance under the lights pic.twitter.com/YAXTUtHBUW
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 23, 2024
It got weird. It got silly. I’ll spare you the details, but just know that Doval committed an error and allowed a run on a wild pitch; Chapman threw a non-rushed throw in the dirt; and Lindor is swinging so poorly that he hit a pitch after it bounced in the dirt … like, long after it bounced in the dirt.
Francisco Lindor reached after hitting a ball that bounced in the dirt pic.twitter.com/4wJSdVnI2G
— SNY Mets (@SNY_Mets) April 23, 2024
It wasn’t a pretty ninth inning, but when you have eight pretty innings that precede it, you can mess around and not find out. And so the Giants won 5-2, and looked like a darn good team doing so.
Now please enjoy this picture of Lee.