Webb and Flo

Just two baseball guys baseballing

Friday night’s 9-1 rout of the No-Place-Designation-but-West Sacramento-Sacramento-soon-to-be-Las-Vegas-I-guess Athletics was a discourse between two players, a classic back-and-forth display between man with bat and man with ball.

This is how it went: starter Logan Webb, who allowed one run over 8 complete innings, would throw a baseball and an A’s hitter would pound it into the ground where it was scooped up by a Giants infielder and shuffled on to first. Then about every third inning or so Wilmer Flores would send a baseball into the first or second row of the left field bleachers for a home run.

Flo homered not once, or twice, but thrice, to become the fourth Giant in franchise history to sock three homers in a game while picking up 8+ runs batted-in.

The night’s RBI total shot Flores up the league leaderboard, tying him with Aaron Judge for the Major League lead at 41 — the only other player with as many home runs and RBIs in a single game this season.

Flores originally didn’t factor into Friday’s billing. The match-up presented more as a showdown between arms: Webb with his dominant sinker and heightened K-total, against A’s J.P. Sears, who not only spun one of the best sweeper’s in the game, but also boasted recent ownage over the Giants. The lefty threw 14.2 innings across two starts last season against San Francisco, allowing just one run and striking out 18. Not only had Sears been tough against everyone he faced, he seemed to be a particularly tough match-up against the Giants line-up given recent history as well as their known troubles against lefties.

But that all changed in the 3rd when the bottom of the order set the stage for Flores’s heroics. Patrick Bailey led off the frame with a single. Tyler Fitzgerald, who had just spent two weeks forced to sit on his hands as a rib fracture healed, worked an impressive and disciplined 8-pitch walk in his first plate-appearance back. Heliot Ramos followed suit by taking an inside 3-2 fastball to load the bases.

Enter Flo.

Director Sergio Leone once said Clint Eastwood has two expressions: one with hat, and one without — I feel that with Flores when he steps into the batter’s box. He’s a mask. His eyes read as slightly worn, tired. They come set on the pitcher and rarely wander. The only thing that moves once his feet are planted is his mouth as it chews a piece of gum. If there are nerves, or other sensations or emotions flowing through Flo in those moments, it seems to be all transferred into the movement of his jaw. This is his hat. He chews when he digs in, pumping his bat a couple of times (perhaps to remind the umpires four seasons on that this is where the barrel stopped in 2021). When the pitcher enters his wind-up, he shifts onto his back-leg and the jaw stops. He can not chew gum and swing a baseball bat at the same time — but all that stored energy, all that baggage from a decade plus of success and failure, is transferred into his swing. Slow, but direct as everything Wilmer does.

Four pitches into his showdown with Sears, Wilmer had to defend a 2-2 count. He fouled away four more pitches before taking a letter-high fastball inside to put the count at capacity. With nowhere to put him, Sears challenged him with a 92 MPH fastball over the heart of the plate — proving to be less of a challenge and more of a tee. The tenth pitch of the AB and Flores didn’t miss. 107 MPH off the bat but not skied into the air. A no-doubter that only traveled 379 feet — as humble as a round-tripper you can get in this league. It kicked off the top of the wall and disappeared into the stands. Flores slowed his hustle into the preferred jog as he approached second, back to chewing his gum again.

In the 6th, a Bailey walk and Ramos single set up Flores’s second. His 3-run homer off reliever Michel Otañez gave him his 9th of the year, and he became the first Giant since Hank Thompson in 1953 to have a grand-slam and 3-R homer in the same game. His solo shot in the 8th made it a night to remember. The 8 rib-eyes was a career high for Flores, and his first tater hat-trick of his career.

A meat-and-potatoes display for a meat-and-potatoes guy.

On the other end of the line, Webb turned in his seventh quality start of the year. The 8 complete innings was the longest of his season so far, and third outing in a row in which he threw at least 7.

For Webb, it was a return to a more vintage, or recognizable form. Not that his elevated K-rate is a bad thing by any means, but it typically isn’t the way he gets outs. Going into Friday’s start his K/9 rate was more than a strikeout higher than his career rate with 65 Ks in just 55.1 IP. But on Friday, Webb bagged just 4 strikeouts in his 8 innings of work, reverting back to his preternatural ability to dictate contact. He induced 17 ground-outs from opposing hitters, and the sole fly out he recorded didn’t come until the 6th inning. He stranded a runner on third three times in the first five innings, getting a grounder each time to end the scoring threat.

That kind of ball-in-play quantity inevitably creates the opportunity for the defense to shine, and for the first time in weeks, with Fitzgerald back in the fold, San Francisco had their starting infield around the horn. They didn’t disappoint. Willy Adames made a nice pick at the knees to save a run and end the 2nd. Fitz made a sliding backhand up the middle to take away a hit in the 4th. Matt Chapman pulled off a nifty glove flip for a force out at second in the 5th.

But it wouldn’t be a classic Webb outing without some bad luck, some weakly hit balls in play placed perfectly into the gaps or tapped so poorly they reward the hitter.

Though the starter managed to close out the 8th by turning a come-backer into a double play, Webb watched his pitch count eclipse 100 as the A’s doubled their hit total of the day with two singles: Luis Urias bounced one too high off the dirt in front of home plate for Webb to make a play, and the other off the bat of Max Schuemann went through a gaping hole on the right-side provided by the defensive alignment.

Mosquito singles that set-up the most irritating moment of the night for the Giants. On the third consecutive grounder of the inning, the baseball deflected off Flores’s glove, then deflected off Fitzgerald’s as he tried to readjust to the ball’s altered path; and then with Urias breaking for the plate, Fitz spiked the throw home that still beat the runner to the plate, but Bailey couldn’t handle the hop, allowing the A’s first and only run to score.

The official scorer ruled the ball in a play a hit, an RBI and a knock to Webb’s unblemished pitching line even though the baseball barely left the infield, touched three different defender’s gloves and Urias would’ve been out by a mile if Fitz’s relay home wasn’t a ground ball of his own, or if Bailey had waited to secure the throw before applying the tag. In summation: four players touched the baseball on that play and the one who actually did his job got dinged.

After such a dominant start and a clean defensive game — a bit of a bummer to watch that clown show on an insignificant play soil an all-together clean outing from the Giants ace, who has just a 0.64 ERA over four home games (28.1 IP) this year.