The Giants return home with a bad taste in their mouths
Afternoon baseball on a Thursday. Getaway day, and the San Francisco Giants had no interest in prolonging their longest road trip of the year.
First pitch was thrown a minute early—1:09 Mountain Standard Time. Home plate was platter sized. Pitchers were throwing strikes and hitters were putting the ball in play. Just 37 minutes ticked off the clock (commercial breaks included) before a third of the game’s nine innings were in the books.
Colorado’s Chase Quantrill needed 41 pitches, allowing a walk and two singles, to get through three innings. Keaton Winn was even more efficient: tossing only 34, surrendering just a single to shortstop Ezequiel Tovar.
And just as quickly and efficiently, the game exploded.
Two pitches into the 4th, Michael Conforto launched a solo home run to left to break the zero-zero tie. It felt like an uncomplicated continuation of the previous nights’ two wins. San Francisco broke through with the initial lead and would continue to tack-on and secure their first sweep of 2024, their first three-game win streak of the season. Yes, not super meaningful against these Rockies, who are as low as their stadium is high, still searching for their 10th win of the season, but San Francisco was in no place to be picky.
CONFORTITUDE NATION, STAND UP pic.twitter.com/TWZnPBs3h9
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) May 9, 2024
At least that’s how it was supposed to shake out…instead that exploded too.
Two pitches into Winn’s 4th, Ezequiel Tovar rolled into third with an easy triple. One pitch later, he was home on Ryan McMahon’s single. Two pitches later, McMahon had claimed the lead on Elias Díaz’s double. A pitch after that Díaz swapped spots with Sean Bouchard. Two more offerings, and Brendan Rodgers’s single had put runners on the corners.
It was at this time that pitching coach Bryan Price felt it prudent to visit the mound. A tad tardy maybe, but I can’t knock him: the Rockies four hits and three runs went down in about the same time it took me to pour myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and get back to the couch.
It probably wasn’t much of a conversation. Price gathered the infield at the mound to give Winn a breather, a moment to recover from the shock, and get his legs under him. He was seeing stars and still in a spot: three runs in already with men on the corners and nobody out. But this was Coors Field: a two, three, four, five run lead has been known to topple as easily as a house of cards. And with Winn’s splitter, trading two-outs for a run not only seemed viable, but a welcome trade. As the pitching coach filibustered, the invariable optimist Hunter Pence commented that Price had a knack for “locking in” his congregants during these meetings.
I imagine Price may have felt somewhat similarly as he walked back to the dugout. He took away Colorado’s momentum, stole some time for his young starter while allowing the scrambling bullpen to warm. Well done, Bryan!
Alas, two pitches later, Price still catching his breath in the dugout, Brenton Doyle launched a three run homer to center.
9 pitches. From the middle-of-the-road sinker to Tovar to the middle-of-the-road splitter to Doyle, Winn threw 9 pitches. Triple, single, double, double, single, home run. The Rockies bagged 6 runs on 6 hits in…9 pitches. His fastballs were down, his splitters were up—Winn threw batting practice in the 4th, and the excuses that assuaged him (or mostly us) in Philly weren’t there. No deluge of Spring rain, no head cold, just a complete dissociative breakdown, a pitching fugue state, in which Winn appeared to have no feel for his mix, or location, or even the basic understanding that if he threw the ball, the batter would try to hit it.
The young starter sported a 3.18 ERA and sub-1.00 WHIP before the Giants left on this road trip. In Winn’s last two starts, he’s allowed 12 runs on 12 hits in 4.1 innings while his ERA and WHIP have ballooned to 5.63 and 1.23.
The afternoon’s nonsense didn’t end with Doyle either. After two merciful outs, a Charlie Blackmon triple ended the day for Winn and Tovar bookended the rally with an RBI double. 7 runs in the frame for the Rockies (besting San Francisco’s 6-run 2nd from yesterday) on 8 hits, 6 of them for extra bases. The Rockies would tally two more runs in the 6th and 8th as Quantrill and two relievers would keep the Giants off the board for the remainder of play.
A 9-1 loss ending a 3-7 road trip. Could this be the most demoralizing of the whole demoralizing bunch? Unforgivable given Colorado’s record, yet maybe softened by the fact that they still won the series, or the unpredictability of Coors that we all know so well?
No—the Giants had an opportunity to feel better about themselves after the beating in Boston and Philly by beating up someone smaller than them in Colorado, only to reveal more of their own flaws than the flaws of their supposed “lesser” opponent. They may have won the series, but they got their bell rung in the final round, and now fly home with a sore jaw and swollen lip not even an airport Jamba Juice smoothie can soothe.
Surely the Giants are better than the Rockies, but after this trip, they’re closer to Colorado than Philly by a long shot. There are only two teams yet to win three games in a row this season. We know the Giants are one, can you guess the other?
Helium Ramos pic.twitter.com/50cYJ2goUS
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) May 9, 2024