Picked off on the Southside

Alternate title: Scoring opportunity goes south on Southside

Mental health check-in. One-run games will fray even the most resolute fan’s nervous system. Half-way through the 2025 season the San Francisco Giants have now played 35 such contests (19-16 record). They’ve played in five games ending with a 1-0 final score, and after Saturday’s Robbie Ray duel with Chicago White Sox starter Adrian Houser, they’ve now lost four of them.

It’s not the greatest start to what looked to be a friendly stretch of the schedule. The Giants have lost four of their last five playing against, in the blunt words of Rich Aurilla, two “not very good teams.” The sweep by the Marlins soured the home stand, and at the start of this long road trip, after two games against the lowly (but now sanctified) Southsiders, the Giants haven’t assumed the role of “better team” very convincingly.

The number one problem has been the number one problem for awhile now, and it’s an obvious one. They need to score more runs. The best way to do that is to collect more hits.

This is the kind of in-depth analysis you get with an SB Nation blog.

Adrian Houser and reliever Grant Taylor held the line-up to just 4 hits (all singles) and 1 walk. They managed one hit through five innings and did nothing with the few (read: two) at-bats with runners in scoring position.

It’s the 10th time in the last 14 games (since the start of the LA series) that the Giants’ order has been limited to 7 hits or less, and the fifth time they’ve been held to 5 or less. Their hit total is the lowest in the National League, their average is the third lowest.

Adding to the frustration was the unusually loud contact the Giants were putting up against Chicago’s starter. They had seven 100+ MPH exit velocities off Houser, but many of them were shot too high in the air, pushed back into play by the wind coming in from right, or at ‘em balls. Their xBA across the Houser’s seven innings was .354. Chicago’s against Ray? .191. But the southpaw was still hung with the loss.

A low-scoring offense isn’t a kiss of death. San Francisco fandom knows this intimately. We all grew Brian Wilson beards, dyed them black each morning and watched them turn gray night-after-night in 2010. But a one-sided club tends to flirt with demise more often than not. Slim margin for error is the hot term these days. Watching the Giants play is like watching a performer spin four different plates on the end of very long sticks balanced on different parts of their face while riding a unicycle. The stress of lackluster bats puts every other facet of play, from pitching to fielding to base running, on high alert. Playing in that headspace isn’t fun. The balance achieved is a fragile one, and when a plate inevitably falls and shatters, the aura of performance also shatters, and the audience finds themself staring at a guy in a cheap suit surrounded by shards of cheap ceramic wondering what was so appealing about such a gimmick in the first place.

Don’t look at Robbie Ray — he kept the pitching plate spinning with a bounce back performance having posted a 4.09 ERA across four starts in June. The lefty picked up another quality start, his 11th on the year, giving up just 1 run on 4 hits and 2 walks while striking out 6. He lowered his ERA for the first time since his last outing in May, with his 2.83 mark dropping to 2.75 by the end of Saturday’s 6th.

Defensively, the Giants maintained the act as well.

Heliot Ramos — known to bobble a plate now and then — tracked down a couple looping fly balls while staring directly into the Chicago sun. Andrew Knizner helped clear a path out of a two-on, nobody-out thicket in the 3rd by bare-handing a dribbler out in front of the plate and making a heads-up and strong throw to third to nab the lead runner. Jung Hoo Lee turned an RBI single off the bat of Josh Rojas into an inning-ending out with a bee-line route and a sliding finish in the 2nd.

A play made even more consequential considering Lee was robbed of a much-needed extra base hit in the top of the inning by old teammate Austin Slater, who upon review of his twisting-and-turning and last-ditch leap, appeared to be caught by the baseball more than anything.

Thems the breaks right now for Jung Hoo. His expected batting average is still high (.283), but in terms of results he’s had a miserable couple of months (.231 in May, .162 in June). When San Francisco needs knocks more than ever, Lee’s knocks just aren’t knocking. Still, Lee’s defensive retort is an example of how he maintains some of his value. If he doesn’t read that ball off the bat, if he isn’t quick or direct to it, a run scores, and if he misjudges his slide and misses the ball completely — much like Ryan Noda did on Patrick Bailey’s sinking line drive yesterday — everyone comes home.

So the plate that dropped, that UFO’ed off its stick and exploded into a thousand fragments was the San Francisco’s base running, particularly one egregious instance. In a game decided by a run, you can draw a line about as direct as Lee’s route to Rojas’s line-drive from Saturday’s loss to Brett Wisely being picked off at third in the 6th.

The strike-em-out, throw-em-out back pick pulled off by Chicago’s battery was the equivalent to a fist to the stomach. San Francisco had just one hit off Houser going into the 6th. Hard-hit batted balls weren’t working out, but Wisely got things going with a broken bat flare into right to lead-off the inning. Christian Koss, batting lead-off for the first time, poked another one to right for his second hit of the day (and third 2-hit game in a row).

Two on, nobody out with Rafael Devers and the heart of the line-up coming up — and just when we thought things couldn’t get peachier, Houser balked both runners into scoring position. A Giant occupying the far reaches of third base, threatening to score, felt completely unearned, but not to be taken for granted. A run was inevitable, two runs certainly probable. You’d excuse even the most run-starved of teams to get greedy here, thinking about going back for seconds before they had even started what was on the plate. The aggressiveness proved costly. In a 1-2 count, Devers (who seemed to be an ideal candidate to rake with his long swing and Houser’s east-west sinker movement) salivating after the sinker, swung over an elevated off-speed, and as soon as he received the pitch catcher Edgar Quero zipped the ball to Rojas at third to catch Wisely diving back to the base.

It was the second game in a row, Wisely had been wiped from a base. Yesterday it was at first with a 3-1 lead. This one weighed a teensy bit heavier. Getting picked off at third can not happen. Wisely knows that. That being said, his misstep stems from the team-wide struggles to score. He wouldn’t have been so hyper-focused on gaining every possible inch of ground on his secondary lead if San Francisco’s bats were functioning as they should. Desperation courts risk, and risk exposes error. The White Sox recognized an opportunity and made a great play when that opportunity arose.

Two outs in a single pitch — a significant shift in Chicago’s favor. An absolute momentum suck for San Francisco made even worse by Andrew Benintendi’s solo shot with two outs in the bottom of the inning. An opportunity snuffed out in an instance, followed by a run conjured out of thin air. Solo shots don’t typically hurt a starter and his team, but this one certainly hurt Ray and the Giants.

Ironically, Wisely’s base-running gaffe wasn’t even the worst in the game. That honor goes to Michael Taylor who experienced a bizarre sequence of near-misses in the 7th.

The veteran outfielder shot a low liner over Mike Yastrzemski’s head that hit the yellow lined padding on top of the right-field wall and bounced back into the field of play.

A tick harder off the bat, a degree higher launch angle, one more push-up in the morning workout (as Hunter Pence joked during the broadcast) and Taylor had a homer. Instead he had a one-out double, which didn’t appear to be too much of a concern when Josh Rojas rolled a single through the right-side of the infield. Taylor raced home on the hit, sliding head first behind Knizner as he fielded Yaz’s relay, and appeared to claim Chicago’s second run without a tag. But at the end of the play, Taylor pulled up on his knees behind the plate and Knizner, noticing the umpire had yet to make a call, walked over to Taylor, tentatively tagged his shoulder, and the ump called him out.

He just didn’t touch the plate. He swung wide on the approach, hit the dirt, beat the throw by plenty but couldn’t perform the most essential task in scoring. Taylor missed a homer by an inch, and then missed touching the plate and an easy score by half-an-inch.

Measured in a vacuum this is inarguably worse than Wisely’s mistake. But what matters is context. Like many things, it’s all about order of events and sequencing. Chicago is in just as rough shape as San Francisco is and don’t have the winning record to assuage them, but they had the lead when it happened. At the time they certainly would’ve loved the insurance run, but it didn’t derail an opportunity to inch ahead. It didn’t sway the final score, nor take them out of the game. The White Sox probably retired into their clubhouse laughing about the goof. No one is laughing in the visiting clubhouse.