The San Francisco Giants’ last win was a series opener against Washington on August 8th. Since then, they’ve been a discordant, disjointed bunch, losing a season-high 7 straight games, all at home, to match a low-light that had been shoved under the franchise rug for 125 years.
Are we looking for a scapegoat? Can we pin this raggedy tail on someone, please? Someone like Drew Gilbert, who is not our beloved Tyler Rogers and will never replace him, and made his MLB debut on that fateful Friday night
nine nights ago. Though this dismal stretch had felt like a curse at times, this kind of fecklessness took a whole team effort (with some tough breaks mixed in), and it took a whole team to snap the skid.
Pitching and hitting…that’s what fans finally got to watch on Sunday. Quality performances on both sides of the ball in the same game. And we especially can’t disparage the kid after today, who had been 1-for-20 in his career before he launched his first homer in the 7th then tacked on another hit and RBI with a 108 MPH single in the 8th to cap an emphatic 7-1 win at home.
Maybe the Giants were just waiting on Gilbert to get going. A boy named Drew. Surely he will lead us out of the depths. Gilbert take the wheel!
Sunday’s game ended comfortably, on an unfamiliar high, but up until the 6th inning, it had an uncanny familiarity to yesterday’s pitching duel. Logan Webb and Rays’ starter Ryan Pepiot were in lockstep with each other. Both had allowed just two-hits through 5 scoreless innings, each allowing just three batters to reach base.
Pepiot struck out 5 hitters his first time through the Giants order, generating 10 whiffs on 16 swings. 6 of the first 9 outs recorded were K’s, and he’d collect 8 by the end of the 5th. San Francisco went hitless in their first six at-bats with runners in scoring position.
Jung Hoo Lee, batting first, started off the afternoon with a lead-off double, but Pepiot managed the early traffic by getting Heliot Ramos to line into an unproductive first out. He then went right after Rafael Devers, coaxing empty swings on three straight fastballs from him, before striking out Willy Adames.
Yes, today is a new day — but only technically. Pepiot would sit down 9 straight batters before he allowed another baserunner. And in the 4th, after a lead-off walk from Ramos and passed ball allowed him to advance to second, that cloud of futility returned, bathing the plate in darkness. Devers followed up the scoring opportunity with a foul out. Adames smoked a sinking liner that Ha-Seong Kim snared before Dom Smith went down on strikes. More abysmal support behind dominant work from their starter.
Meanwhile Logan Webb was doing what he does best: keeping the ball around the plate, keeping it down in the zone and keeping the ball on the ground. His first time through Tampa’s line-up, he induced 5 groundouts. 6 of first 9 outs recorded were groundouts, and he’d collect 13 on the day, with just a single flyout and 7 strikeouts.
His sinker and change-up bore the brunt of the work on the day, establishing all cardinal directions of the zone: high and low, outside and in. His 45% chase rate on swings was his highest of the season with the main perpetrator of such wild swings coming from a 53% o-Swing rate with his offspeed.
But even with this excellence, recent history made it feel like Webb and the Giants were inching backwards towards the edge of a cliff. Webb had cruised through the first six innings of his last start against San Diego until it all unraveled in the 6th and the 7th. As the innings progressed, the dread built. Something was going to go wrong. Someone was going to slip.
For a second that person looked to be Jung Hoo Lee when Yandy Díaz drove the hardest ball of the day into triple’s alley.
Lee looked to be tracking it down, but the baseball kept carrying. He looked uncomfortable fighting the glare of the high sun and went into a slide. The ball clanged off his glove. A lead-off double for sure, the Rays first extra base-hit since Friday — but that seemingly certain outcome didn’t happen. The loose ball didn’t fall to the warning track but to Lee’s leg where he somehow trapped it mid-slide and kept it there.
When a baseball grabs that much leather, I imagine Lee would say he should’ve caught it. Any defender would prefer it if the ball just stayed in the glove, but the end justifies the means. Gloves are overrated. Limbs are interchangeable these days. Legs are an under-utilized defensive tool. Knees are just as good as hands.
And rewatching that catch, it’s wild how many deflections the ball took, how long it rolled along Lee’s left leg, how it managed a right turn at his knee and popped off his upper calf and back up into the air before the right leg clamped down on it.
But the absolute wildest, weirdest, possibly most bad-ass part of this play is the fact that Lee stands up before he grabs the ball with his hand. Like a magician ensuring the audience of no funny business before a trick, he gets onto his feet with his knees still clenched for everyone to see before he pulls the baseball out from between his legs.
A favorable break that Webb rolled with, getting Brandon Lowe to ground-out and Junior Caminero to swing over a change-up for his second (of four) strikeouts on the day.
But trouble brewed again in the 5th. Ha-Seong Kim ripped a one-out single to left for his second hit of the day, and a fielder’s choice throwing error by first baseman Dom Smith put multiple runners on base and a runner in scoring position for the first time. Webb fell behind in the count 3-1 to Everson Pereira and was forced to get a pitch out over the plate, and Pereira ripped the fastball right back up the middle…
On another day, with the way things have been going, that ball would’ve deflected off the base into no man’s land, or caromed off Webb’s side into centerfield to drive in a run while cracking a couple of ribs. Instead, the miraculous. Webb ducked the jam by ducking the low-liner that skipped right to Tyler Fitzgerald who easily turned the inning-ending double play.
Webb and the Giants bent but did not break defensively, and in the 6th, they finally broke through into daylight offensively.
Pepiot started to show some wear around the 80 pitch mark in the 6th. Ramos and Devers both rapped two-out singles before Adames walked on four easy-takes to set-up a showdown with Dom Smith (who had struck in both previous trips to the plate).
Manager Kevin Cash left Pepiot in to face Smith, an interesting choice considering he has always been quick and aggressive with swapping out arms in these kinds of situations. He had used all of his three bullpen lefties to leverage platoon advantages in the previous two games, so perhaps he didn’t want to use them if he didn’t have to, and maybe he liked Pepiot’s chances against Smith based on the previous two match-ups.
Whatever the thinking was, it didn’t work out.
Smith splintered his bat on a first-pitch fastball that dropped into open grass in right field. Ramos and Devers scored easily, and on the throw into second base, Adames aggressively broke for home. Though the throw from Kim beat him, an impressive slide allowed Adames to toe home before the applied tag. Smith took second on the 3-RBI single, which allowed him to score on a Christian Koss single, extending his RBI streak to four games.
It was Chandler who slipped. It was Pepiot who folded and didn’t make it through the 6th. I don’t mean to be mean — but it feels good seeing some other team implode.
When the dust settled after the pitcher’s duel, Webb was the last one standing. Taking the mound in the 7th after a long half-inning, he got right back to work. He fetched another groundout to first from Lowe. He struck out Caminero for the third time on another change-up before allowing a 2-out single to Jake Mangum. Only the third hit allowed on the night,and, I think, intentional. After handling the rest of the lineup, Kim, who had yet to be retired, was the last boss for Webb to vanquish. A big swing-through on an elevated four-seamer was the final coup.
Webb needed just 86 pitches to get through 7 scoreless. It was the ninth start this season that he completed seven innings pitched, and the first since his start against Cleveland on June 19th.
Gilbert and Tyler Fitzgerald went back-to-back to extend San Francisco’s lead to 6. The Rays would scratch an inconsequential run off Tristan Beck in the 8th, and Gilbert would get it right back with one of his own before Keaton Winn claimed the game for the Giants.
A win doesn’t mean winning — still feels good though.
