The little things were absent in a 6-3 loss.
It’s rarely easy, or particularly fruitful, to compare an incoming manager to the outgoing one. There are so many variables, and we’re still not entirely sure how much impact a manager has — or in what ways. And in the case of the San Francisco Giants, there’s a whole bunch of roster turnover that makes a fruitless task even sillier.
Still. When the San Francisco Giants switched from Gabe Kapler to Bob Melvin — a move I liked and, if you did too, 18 games should not change that — one of the logical conclusions was that the team would shore up their fundamentals. We’d have to wait to see how many teams would best them, but we could pencil in that they wouldn’t beat themselves.
And yet, through the first three weeks of the season, the defining characteristic of the Giants — other than, you know, the whole can’t hit worth a lick thing — has been sloppiness. Outs on the bases. Poor defensive decisions. Bad situation hitting. Errors and wild pitches and so on and so forth.
That all reared its ugly head on Tuesday as the Giants lost 6-3 to the Miami Marlins. Was it their worst game? No. Was it their ugliest game? No. Was it the sloppiest game? Also no. But against a feckless team that rolls over and plays dead for any team showing a modicum of baseball sensibility, it was perhaps the game where the sloppiness felt responsible for the unfortunate outcome.
The bottom of the fourth was where it seemed to come to a head. To that point, the Giants were sitting pretty, despite Ryan Weathers cruising to what would be a 10-strikeout night. Jordan Hicks looked to be adding to his early Cy Young campaign (yes, I’m starting the talk early, it’s just good marketing, people!), needing just 31 pitches to build a three-inning home in Groundball City.
The offense, while not exactly producing fireworks, was finding a way to put runs on the board. Their first hit came with two outs in the second inning when Matt Chapman absolutely crushed one.
Matty Miami missile pic.twitter.com/JJQ3tf7LYu
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 16, 2024
Chapman hasn’t yet had the season that he or the Giants were hoping for, but swings like this are a reminder of the days that likely lie ahead. Despite the early struggles, he’s already sitting at four home runs, and looks poised to make it a race to see who can break the curse of the 30 dingers.
A two-out rally manufactured another run in the third inning, when Austin Slater, making a rare start, went the other way for a single, and scored easily when Wilmer Flores split the gap in left-center.
FLo pic.twitter.com/b8PbAWX6qn
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 16, 2024
But even that rally brought about a mixed bag. On the very next pitch, Jung Hoo Lee — temporarily moved off of the leadoff spot — scorched a 100.2-mph liner to right field, but right at Jesús Sánchez.
I won’t call that unlucky. That’s baseball, and plays like that happen many times every game. A lot of such plays happened to the Giants in this one: hits down the line that were just foul; pitches well off the plate that were called for strike three; ground balls by Miami that were hit too slowly; etc., etc., etc. It happens almost every night.
And more importantly, those same things happened to the Marlins.
Against a bad team, those little things shouldn’t even be noticed. But for the Giants right now, there’s simply no margin for error. The little things are nearly insurmountable, and make the deck feel stacked against the Giants; you hardly even notice that they’re the beneficiary of those same little breaks, bounces, and calls.
Anyway, that was the situation the Giants found themselves in when the bottom of the fourth inning, and the Marlins finally broke through against Hicks, with doubles by Luis Arráez and Bryan De La Cruz putting a run on the board for Miami. with one out.
The seams were loosening. De La Cruz stole third, with Hicks not paying enough attention to hold him close enough for Tom Murphy to even think about throwing. Then he walked Josh Bell.
And then came the defining moment of the game, even it proved to only be so philosophically. Hicks got Sánchez to hit a ground ball, in what initially looked like the inning-ending double play that he’s so brilliantly drawn all year. But the ball, hit at just 79.2 mph, was in the dangerous “maybe too slow to turn two” zone.
Nick Ahmed made the right read, trying to turn two instead of making a likely feeble attempt at home. He soft-tossed it to Tyler Fitzgerald — starting in place of Thairo Estrada — who slung the ball to Flores at first. We waited with baited breath for that eighth of a second, before Mike Estabrook ruled Sánchez safe at first. The Giants, playing on the margins, had missed the double play by an inch, and the tying run had scored.
And while we rued the missed opportunity, the even harsher reality slowly dawned on us: not only had the Giants failed to turn two, but they’d also failed to turn one. Fitzgerald, playing second base for the first time in the Majors, had neither touched nor straddled the bag, and both runners were safe. What once felt like an inning-ending double play was now an RBI fielder’s choice with an error thrown in; the game was tied, and the stage was set for a monster inning.
Like I said, that felt like the defining moment of the game. And, like I said, it was really just philosophically. Turning two was never very feasible with how slowly the ball was hit, and Fitzgerald’s error didn’t lead to a run. Despite a wild pitch that moved the runners over, and a walk that loaded the bases, Hicks got out of the inning with the tie intact. There would be no unearned runs in the game.
But the butterfly effect lives strongly in baseball, and sloppiness tends to snowball in ways that we can’t always see or know. After throwing just 31 pitches through three innings, Hicks had needed 37 to get through the fourth inning alone.
The Giants offense bought their pitcher some time in the top of the fifth, stringing together a runless rally that let Hicks’ arm recover, and he returned to breeze through the fifth inning. But the sloppiness — from himself, from his defense, from the strike zone, and from the very essence of it not getting more Giant — had seen his pitch count rise to 86. That, combined with the high-stress inning, meant his night was over after five.
Ryan Walker was brought in for the sixth, and didn’t exhibit his sharpest stuff. He walked off the mound having allowed the go-ahead run to score, and leaving the bases loaded with two outs for Taylor Rogers, who finally got to pitch roughly 24 hours after running on and off the field without throwing a ball. Just two pitches in, Arráez did what he does best, and lightly slapped one the other way to tack two more runs on the board, and put the Giants deep in a hole.
It was an inning that summed up the game. A passed ball by Murphy removed the force play. A walk issued by Walker was what loaded the bases. Even one of the outs occurred when Lee and Slater collided with each other, resulting in two minor miracles: no one was hurt, and Lee hung onto the ball. It was just sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
The fourth-inning foibles had not directly led to any runs, but they might have indirectly done so. Perhaps a cleaner inning would have allowed Hicks to face the power in the order in the sixth, and saved Walker for a different assignment. Perhaps the bullpen innings would have been cleaner.
As it was, the Giants trailed 5-2, and even against a miserable pitching staff, that just didn’t seem all too feasible.
It turns out it wasn’t. The Giants chipped away: after Weathers left when he seemed to suffer a minor injury while warming up for the seventh, San Francisco tacked a run on the board. Michael Conforto, who struggled all night against Weathers, led off with a single, and Ahmed’s fly ball the other way was juuuuuust past the outstretched arm of Jazz Chisholm Jr. — again, the breaks didn’t just go against the Giants. It was a ground rule double, and the Giants had runners at second and third with no outs. Fitzgerald worked the count full, before flying out juuuuust too shallowly. LaMonte Wade Jr. pinch-hit for Slater, and smashed an RBI single. The deficit was just 5-3, with runners at the corners and just one out.
And then Flores grounded into an inning-ending double play.
They tried again in the ninth inning, again trailing by three runs after Nick Avila gave up one in the bottom of the seventh. Again they made things interesting, and again they failed.
Against closer Tanner Scott, who is a big fan of walking people, the back of the order did its job. Ahmed drew a one-out, four-pitch walk, and Fitzgerald followed with a five-pitch walk. The Giants would bring the tying run to the plate, and, after eight balls in nine pitchers, Scott struck out pinch-hitter Thairo Estrada on three pitches. And a weak foul popout was all Flores needed for the Giants to end the game as mildly as they had played it.
The whole game felt boring in its repetition and predictability. The Giants made mistakes that the Marlins used to their benefit; the Marlins made mistakes that the Giants did nothing with. The Giants took 32 strikes looking; the Marlins took 29 — but four of the Giants 32 were strike three, and just two of the Marlins’ 29 were.
I don’t think that’s who the Giants will be this season. But it’s definitely who they are right now.