Tyler Rogers pitches for winning team and winning team is not the Giants

Bummer dude.

Well, San Francisco fans got what they wanted. Not that the Giants won Saturday’s game, or followed up Friday’s gritty bullpen performance with another well-pitched barn-burner — just that we got to see Tyler Rogers pitch again. Obviously not in the way we’d prefer to watch Rogers pitch — that is in a Giants uniform, protecting a Giants’ lead, making non-Giants hitters look silly — but I’ll take Rogers pitching in meaningful MLB games any way I can get him.

Though he warmed up twice in the bullpen yesterday, the game narrative never brought Rogers to the hill. But given a slim 5-4 lead in the bottom of the 4th inning, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza got to work lining up his new collection of arms. He had the luxury to pull a roughed-up Kodai Senga (4 ER, 4 IP) and replace him with Reed Garrett, who has made the vast majority of his appearances this year in the 7th inning or later. Garrett and his 2.60 ERA worked 1.1 scoreless innings, then handed the ball to lefty Gregory Soto, recently acquired from Baltimore, to work around a one-out single from Lee for a scoreless 6th. With a 3-run lead to protect in the 7th, the time had finally arrived for the marquee billing: Tyler Rogers, decked out in New York’s classic colors of concrete and Barney purple, facing off against the top of the San Francisco line-up.

I admit, my stomach churned in confusion at the sight. I was pulled in opposing emotional directions, my desire for the Giants to win and Rogers to do well suddenly at odds. I caught myself hoping for Rafael Devers to foul a pitch into his face. I caught myself feeling that reflexive exasperation at seeing 83 MPH fastballs wreck such havoc on swings. I wanted to shout at the TV: Come on! He’s throwing wiffle balls, just hit it!

Proximity and familiarity apparently does not breed success. Giants hitters, despite playing behind him all season, were no better at hitting the submariner than perfect strangers. The inning was T. Rogers to a T. A ground ball kicked off first base for a lead-off single by Heliot Ramos that led to nothing. Three lightning-fast swings from Devers, Willy Adames, and Matt Chapman followed and produced plastic contact. A mighty Devers hack at 3-1 sinker managed to send the baseball a mere 300 feet, the fly out leaving his bat only slightly faster than Rogers’s sinker.

A scoreless 7th against his old team in a 12-6 rout — Rogers’ tenure in New York had begun.

Shawn Estes said it best in the post-game wrap: “This was a Mets team just tired of losing.” New York had been swept by the Padres before dropping Friday’s game. They had enough of their four-game skid, and the determination from the core players in their batting order to end the dubious streak was palpable. Pete Alonso set the tone with a 3-run homer in the 1st inning. Brandon Nimmo and Francisco Lindor went 6 for 8 with 7 runs batted in. 8 of their starting 9 bagged a hit, and all of them spent the majority of their time at the plate grinding out long at-bats, spoiling good pitches, putting the ball in play, and/or finding holes in the defense.

That peskiness was on full display from the get-go when Lindor forced debut starter Kai-Wei Teng to throw 10 pitches in an eventual walk that preceded Alonso’s 250th career home run.

For a moment, after rebounding from Nimmo’s HBP and Lindor’s BB with a four pitch K of Juan Soto, Teng looked like he might’ve found a way out of the early jam. But in a 1-2 count, he served up a four-seam fastball that Alonso anticipated. The slugger had clearly picked-up on an early pattern by Teng. The young right-hander is a spinner. He likes to work backwards in counts by establishing his breaking pitches early. Curveballs, sweepers and sliders set-up and give his 94 MPH fastball a little more zip, and that’s exactly what Alonso got in a 1-2 count. Location wise, the offering wasn’t terrible. The pitch was up and a little inside, but with count leverage, the fastball needed to be further up and further in. A decent pitch punished by a welcome to the big leagues swing.

I’d argue Teng pitched better than his 5 ER over 3.1 IP pitching line though. With only 11 big league innings under his belt, and none as a starter, I think he did well getting ahead early in the count and mixing around his arsenal which generated a decent amount of whiffs (9) and called strikes (14). I’d agree with Hunter Pence’s praise of Teng’s body language on the mound. He didn’t seem to flinch after the 3-run homer punctuated a 29-pitch 1st, and followed it with a 12-pitch 2nd that included two strikeouts and an easy come-backer. In the 3rd, after Dom Smith erased New York’s early lead with a 2-run homer, Teng surrendered some all bark but no bite contact that stranded two runners for a shutdown frame.

Before the game, Bob Melvin expressed hope that a 60-70 pitch cap on the day would be enough for Teng to give them four or five complete innings, but after the long 1st inning that looked unlikely. The bottom of the line-up working another walk and one-out single in the 4th eventually got the best of him Melvin called it a day at 67, and called on lefty Matt Gage, who gave up back-to-back RBI singles to Nimmo and Lindor that swelled Teng’s earned run total to five.

The Giants bullpen just couldn’t hold the line. In a left-on-left advantage, Gage got beat by Nimmo, whose RBI single knotted the score at 4 runs apiece, and set up Lindor’s cheeky bunt single that reclaimed the lead for good. Spencer Bivens got picked and pecked for two runs on a walk and three singles in the 6th, before Tristen Beck gave up 5 over the final two innings.

Overall, New York worked five walks and two HBPs while striking out only 6 times. They went 8 for 17 with runners in scoring position. 10 of the Mets 13 hits were singles, and until Lindor’s double in the 7th, their only extra-base hit was Alonso’s 1st inning homer.

Disregarding the final score, there were some positives on the offensive side for the Giants as well. Their approach against Senga and his 9 Run Value “ghost fork” worked well…as in, they did well avoiding the pitch all together and punishing his other offerings. Four of their five hits against him went for extra bases. Dom Smith followed Friday’s game-winning pinch hit knock with a game-tying rope — his third homer of the season.

Casey Schmitt flipped Senga’s infamous offspeed down the opposite field line for a lead-off single in the 2nd and later scored in a two-hit afternoon. Jung Hoo Lee also collected two hits, including a leadoff double in the 4th and a single against the same-sided Gregory Soto in the 6th. In his first start of the year, Grant McCray bagged his first two knocks of 2025. He smoked an 108 MPH RBI single over Juan Soto’s head to give the Giants their only lead in the 4th and a triple in the 9th, (though his impatience in the 2nd led to a rally-killing double play in the 2nd).

A day after recapturing some of the spirit that fueled their early success in 2025, San Francisco found themselves flattened by a bus. The Mets are on a mission. They have direction and momentum. Their line-up, bullpen and manager are rehearsing for the postseason, while the Giants have found themselves at a bleak and familiar intersection.