The San Francisco Giants have been a comically atrocious team against left-handed pitchers this year, but if you only watched Monday’s game, you wouldn’t know it. They’ve been on a stupendous streak of having the ball take the wrong bounce, but if you only watched Monday’s game, you wouldn’t know it. They’ve excelled at finding ways to squander a strong starting pitching performance, but if you only watched Monday’s game, you wouldn’t know it.
The Giants haven’t been good this year, and they certainly
haven’t been enjoyable, but if you only watched Monday’s game, you wouldn’t know it.
I hope you only watched Monday’s game.
Whether it was your first game of the season or your 125th, you were treated to an entertaining, competitive, and competent baseball game for the Giants, as they kicked off a brutal road trip with a 4-3 victory over a San Diego Padres team that seems poised to win the division the Giants were once contending in.
It began with something of a statement.
Heliot Ramos, who has turned into a top-of-the-order on-base machine, but has struggled to access his power lately, got ahead of Padres starter Nestor Cortes 2-1. When Cortes challenged with a get-it-in, mild-mannered fastball, Ramos pounced on it, lining it over the left field wall.
The day before, when the Giants began their dominant stretch of two (2!!!) consecutive victories, they were treated to back-to-back home runs courtesy of Drew Gilbert and Tyler Fitzgerald. It was, remarkably, the first time all year that the Giants had hit back-to-back dingers. And it was, fittingly, the eighth and ninth-place hitters who accomplished the feat, which just felt so Giantsy.
It also felt Giantsy that they would pop the first pickle out of that jar and the rest would flow, and on Monday it was much more conventional: just two pitches after their top-of-the-order slugger put a ball over the fence, their pure-power first baseman, Rafael Devers, followed with a shot of his own.
But the Giants, remarkably, weren’t even done. With one out, Casey Schmitt — the unlikely position player to emerge as the cleanup hitter — ripped a double down the line. And the next batter, Wilmer Flores — nearly as devoid of his early-season power lately as Ramos has been, made it a delightful three dingers in one inning.
You almost had to feel for Nestor Cortes. He hasn’t been the same since last October, when he was asked to play the role of Madison Bumgarner but misheard and reprised Mat Latos instead. It took him all of four pitches this game to hear his first boo bird, and Duane Kuiper implored the audience at home to listen to the crowd after the second home run, so you can imagine how they sounded two runs and one big fly later.
But, in a fitting twist, Cortes settled into a role that would have drove you absolutely mad had the Giants not managed to put those first three balls over the fence. He ended up making it through 5.2 innings despite those early hiccups and, for all my flowery introductory sentences, he made the Giants look extremely Giantsy for most of that time. In the second inning they got two on with no outs, and Ramos and Devers again went back-to-back, this time with strikeouts for outs one and two to kill a rally. In the third inning they put two runners on with one out, but failed to score. In the fifth inning, Willy Adames led off with a single, but was back-picked at first, killing his own rally. Schmitt took his place by working a walk, but never moved over. In the seventh they squandered a leadoff walk by Devers, and in the ninth a leadoff single by Ramos.
For as much as they looked so different than the team that has made you pull your hair out all summer long, they still went just 1-6 with runners in scoring position. They still put runners on base in eight innings and only scored in one. They still found absurd ways to halt their own momentum.
You just either didn’t notice or didn’t care, because they hit enough home runs to win the game anyway, which is what good teams do. Good teams do bad things and hide them under good things. You’ve just forgotten that because it’s been so long since the Giants looked the part.
But while the trio of home runs against lefties sure was nice, the real litmus test for whether this was the rage-inducing Giants that you’ve unfortunately grown accustomed to or the new-look squad channeling their inner April and at least cosplaying as a team that will try to make a run came in the bottom of the second inning. After Robbie Ray had cruised to a shutdown first, he began the second by facing Xander Bogaerts, who put the barrel of the bat on a 3-1 challenge fastball.
The ball carried, and carried, and carried, as Ramos drifted back, and drifted back, and drifted back. Ramos was tracking the ball as though he had a beat on it, but you’ve seen this dance one too many time with the Giants, and 109 too many times with Ramos.
As Ramos reached his right hand out to find the impending wall, the ball finally returned to earth. The left fielder, opting against the usually-useless wide receiver hop, stood against the wall, calmly reached up over it, met the ball, brought his glove back, and then looked inside to find that the ball was not in his mitt.
Ramos frantically pointed to the fans, indicating interference from a group of co-mingling Giants and Padres fans (have we no standards anymore?). As the umpires convened to call a review, the replays were shown to us all and … well … it appeared that Ramos simply forgot to catch the baseball.
Brief personal interlude time. A few months after I got my driver’s license, I rear-ended someone. I was cruising down a country road listening to Tupac (don’t ask me how I remember that detail nearly two decades later), and a minivan was stopped in the two-lane road, making a slow left-hand turn. I realized too late, slammed on the brakes, and, a second later, slammed into them, causing the first — and to this point, last — accident of my otherwise pristine driving career.
After returning home, I explained to my parents that the brakes had stopped working. It wasn’t an excuse; it was the truth, as my brain was currently understanding out. It was only when my dad, with far more grace than the situation mandated, softly pointed out to me that if I then drove the car five miles home safely and comfortably then the brakes were probably working just fine, that I accepted that perhaps my brain had been working overtime to find any explanation that would absolve me of the embarrassing responsibility.
I thought of that as I watched Ramos, with 40,000 in the stands and a dozen cameras broadcasting to a million fans all honed in on him, hold up his hands in desperate rationalization, pointing to the alleged offender while everyone watched the replay of him forgetting how to do the most basic element of the sport, the one we all perfected in some form or fashion before we were allowed outside the house without supervision.
But Ramos was exonerated (me, not so much; it’s been 19 years and my brother is entrusting both of his young kids’ lives with that same Corolla, which is still on its original brake lines, so I think I can finally admit that it was working just fine). As a second round of boos rained down on Petco Park, the umpires announced fan interference, and despite the baseball passing through the outfielder’s mitt and into the stands, Bogaerts was ruled out and Ramos, in a season brimming with defensive miscues, was awarded a putout for a ball he never caught.
The ruling did make sense. While it was not evident from the replays afforded to fans that anyone ever touched the ball, an over-eager fan did reach over Ramos’ mitt, surely offering not just a distraction but an obstruction of view. And indeed, MLB’s official explanation was that the fan “reached out over the field of play and interfered with a live ball” and “clearly prevented the fielder from making the catch.”
It was the right call, though I’m having a hard time taking my orange-colored glasses off to look more closely. But it was far from an expected call, so much so that as Kuiper explained that the ball must have hit the fan’s finger, he then added a hilarious disclaimer: “that’s the story I’m going with as my nose grows.”
And so it was simultaneously the correct call, and a break going the Giants way in a wholly foreign manner. This is what seemed to happen when the Giants were winning games, but it’s been eons since the Giants were winning games, and so these are the things that are supposed to go the other way. Ramos is supposed to end up with egg on his face, knowing in his heart that the ball was interfered with, but knowing that no one will ever know that. That’s how the story goes with this team, but it’s not how the story went on Monday. Instead he got vindication, which only grew with every groan as he tracked down a liner in the gap a few innings later, and singled to end a delightful evening in which he had a fair amount of fun playing with the crowd.
Still and all, with the baseball deities refusing to clock in for their daily shift of putting the Giants in a bad position, the team fell back on their old favorite role of doing it themselves. Ray had cruised through six innings, but in the seventh, things went in the wrong direction. Following a one-out double by Bogaerts, Jose Iglesias chopped a grounder to Casey Schmitt at third base. But Schmitt kicked it, tried frantically to recover, and threw the ball away. Iglesias was not only safe on a routine grounder, but standing on second, where he displaced Bogaerts, who had scored.
As so often is the case in baseball, Ray was capable of cleaning up any messes he created (which were far and few between, as he had allowed just one hit entering the inning), but struggled with other people’s. Shortly after Schmitt’s flub, Ray faced off against one of San Diego’s many deadline acquisitions, Ryan O’Hearn, who launched a ball into the seats, pulling the Padres to within one run.
It was an ugly and awful inning, though it was marked by a pair of statistical sillies: Schmitt committed two errors on one play, while Ray ended the night having allowed one home run, but zero earned runs. More importantly, it had all the makings of another textbook Giants collapse, in which the offense can’t quite add on and the bullpen can’t quite hang on.
But no. Ryan Walker, freshly re-instated from the Parental List, had an outing he won’t forget, and finished off the seventh for Ray before easily handling the eighth. Randy Rodríguez, who has been a tad shaky since becoming the closer, cruised through the ninth.
The Giants won. You’re not misreading that. The Giants won.