Woo wows; free bases cost Giants the game

Mariners’ starter Bryan Woo cruised while Ray, Hjelle were burned by BBs and HBPs

If the 2024 San Francisco Giants and the 2024 Seattle Mariners were to play a season’s games solely against each other, both teams would end with a .500 record.

A long desert of tit-for-tat, of minuscule gains written in mutable grains of sand, stretching towards a horizon perpetually in the distance. A hellish landscape, really, that might feel a bit like this year. Progress in one area undermined by digression in another. The end of August, 132 games, played and where are they now?

The Giants drew the short straw, winning the even game in an odd-game series. The Mariners took the third game by one run, and took the series by one game. If there were to be a fourth, San Francisco would probably find a way to scratch a ‘W’, and do it by the skin of their teeth.

East Bay native Bryan Woo threw 7 innings, allowing just 2 runs on 3 hits with 0 walks and 7 strikeouts. He threw a season-high 94 pitches and nearly every one of them were picture-perfect. Woo’s only mistake wasn’t really a mistake at all—just an excellent swing by Heliot Ramos on a perfectly located high-and-inside fastball. Ramos beat the scouting report, lifting his 20th homer of the season to give the Giants an early 2-0 lead in the 1st inning.

The homer didn’t do much to put the wind in San Francisco’s sails. Woo would allow just three more hits—all singles, two of them on the infield—over the next six innings without allowing a Giant cleat stepping on second base.

Though he throws a heater nearly 75% of the time, don’t let Woo’s heavy fastball usage fool you. The difference between his riding four-seamer and sliding sinker—both coming in averaging around 95 MPH in velocity—make for two distinctly frustrating and indiscernible offerings. The fact that he has pinpoint accuracy compounds the headache. Umpires go where he wants to go, and the hitter gets dragged along kicking and screaming. The roof of the box lifts with his four-seam, the corners expand. Mix in an occasional slider and off-speed and Woo has quietly pieced together an impressive rookie campaign.

After Sunday’s outing, he owns a 2.05 ERA over 87.2 innings (16 starts). He’s currently one of the best pitchers in baseball at avoiding the barrel, generating weak contact from hitters, keeping opposing hitters in the ballpark and not handing out free bases. All of these skills were on full display against San Francisco.

Woo only pitched himself into four 3-ball counts. His offerings peppered the zone nearly 60% of the time while Giants hitters looked at 19 called strikes. Though not known for his swing-and-miss stuff, Woo outdid his season numbers with a 32% Whiff rate (up from 20%), while his four-seam generated an empty swing 41% of the time (up from 23.6%).

Woo wowed and wooed me to say the least. I’m sure his efficiency and effectiveness made most Giants fans green with envy as his counterpart Robbie Ray offered up somewhat of an antithesis, continuing a weekend trend of arrhythmic wildness that ultimately led to the Giants’ loss.

Blake Snell walked 6 in his start on Saturday. A 40+ pitch 3rd inning was his last frame, leaving Spencer Bivens and a strained bullpen to account for the remainder of the game. They managed it, but they didn’t want to do it again on Sunday…

They had to do it again on Sunday.

A complete game shutout under a hundred pitches is called a “Maddux”. An outing where you allow more walks than hits and don’t get past the fourth inning should be a Snell. Robbie Ray thossed a Snell on Sunday, allowing 1 run on 1 hit with 3 BB, 1 HBP and 4 K over 3.0 IP.

It wasn’t completely on Ray. He left the game with nobody out in the 4th after straining his hamstring, leaving Sean Hjelle to hastily find a charge PitchCom and start to warm up. Though he had settled in somewhat, Ray had already thrown 60 pitches to get to that point, and needed 25 pitches and a double play to hobble through the 1st.

Over the first two games of the series, San Francisco pitching had handed out 17 walks while allowing just 13 hits. The problematic trend continued in the finale with the Mariners collecting 7 hits while the Giants gave up 7 free bases on 4 walks and 3 hit batters. Gifts that proved to keep on giving.

Three of the four base runners that crossed the plate for Seattle reached base by way of the walk or hit-by-pitch. Lead-off man Dylan Moore, who was hitting on the interstate at the time of first pitch, walked twice, stole three bases, advanced another 90 feet on a wild pitch in the first three innings. He scored in the 1st to quickly halve San Francisco’s early lead.

Long reliever Sean Hjelle plunked both Randy Arozarena and Jorge Polanco in the 6th, and both touched home in the inning. Arozarena on a 6-4-3 double play ball off the bat of Mitch Haniger, and Polanco on Josh Rojas’s RBI single off Taylor Rogers who was brought on for the left-on-left advantage.

Seattle’s team batting average entering Sunday’s game was .216, the worst in baseball by ten points. The Mariners hit just three extra base-hits all weekend, all 7 of their hits on Sunday were singles. Meanwhile San Francisco collected 10 XBH with 4 doubles and 6 home runs. Despite all that display of power, the Mariners outscored the Giants in the series by a run. That obviously had something to do with their timing (like their 6-consecutive hits in the 8th on Friday), but singles like Cal Raleigh’s and Rojas’s this afternoon won’t typically lose you a game if runners weren’t given a free pass in front of them.

But it’s not just not walking batters, it’s getting them out. It’s finishing at-bats emphatically. Robbie Ray is typically one of the best in doing just that, and the Mariners, with their league-leading 27.1 Strikeout-%, are typically good at assisting pitchers in doing just that. Alas, two trends that were bucked early in today’s game.

In a 1-2 count, Ray couldn’t elevate his fastball high enough in the zone and Raleigh dropped in front of Heliot Ramos for a key run in the 1st. Moore had reached base after Ray couldn’t convert early count leverage into a K, and he’d do it again in the 3rd, turning a 1-2 count into a 9-pitch walk in which he’d eventually make his way to third before the inning’s end.

In their two-run 6th, Justin Turner knocked a single with two-strikes that advanced Seattle’s third run into scoring position, and in a 1-2 count, Rojas delivered the hit that drove in the decisive fourth run off Rogers.

Situational hitting, “small ball” —call it what you will, but it loomed large for the Mariners in this series and on Sunday. Ramos put a better swing on a good pitch and Grant McCray launched one in the 8th, but neither proved to be the big hit the Giants needed.

With the lead down to one run, reliever Collin Snider gave out the first two free passes on the day to the Giants, but unlike Seattle, they couldn’t capitalize. With the tying run on second, and finally getting their first at-bats with a runner in scoring position, Ramos K’ed on three pitches and Michael Conforto grounded out to first.

Again a lead off walk to Matt Chapman in the 9th from Andrés Muñoz led to nothing. Chapman advanced to second on a ground-out, he stole third, and that’s where he stayed when Mark Canha struck out to end the game.