There are two types of comedy (note: there are probably more, but work with me here). There’s comedy that is about setting up expectations for an audience before subverting them with the unexpected. Then there’s comedy that plays with the audience’s expectations, that pokes and prods it, teasing it just long enough for a tickle of doubt to form before the inevitable happens. This is the kind of humor behind cartoons like Tom and Jerry, or classic Looney Tunes’ rivalries. There is a hunter and hunted,
and try as the hunter might, the hunted is never caught. The comedy doesn’t lie in the fact of their failure, but how they fail.
Watching the San Francisco Giants right now is like watching Tom trying to catch Jerry, Sylvester eat Tweety Bird, Daffy outwit Bugs, Wil E. Coyote rundown the Roadrunner. It’s cartoonish how close, and yet impossibly far, this team is from playing winning/compelling baseball. That fact has never been more evident then what happened in Wednesday’s 3-2 loss to the Diamondbacks.
After 56 games, after going 9 for their last 18 and falling more than 10 games below .500, after losing the first two games of the series against Arizona, staring down the barrel of a second series sweep to them in a single week, the expectations were low. We all turned on the tube this afternoon wondering how Tom was going to get a frying pan in his face this time.
Then Luis Arraez punched a 2-RBI single in the 3rd for an early lead.
Then Trevor McDonald beat his previous game’s 4th inning demons by working around a lead-off hit batter, his sinker breaking through the front and back doors of the strike zone for called strike after called strike.
Despite our better judgement, the strong foundations are reasonable and low expectations were built on started to wobble.
Perhaps this was some weird meta-episode where Sylvester actually grabs Tweety, that the canary stays helpless and trapped in his grasp, that he doesn’t chomp down on his thumb, but maybe, finally…and nope. Of course, yeah. The grandma. We forgot about the umbrella-wielding grandma. An infield single to lead-off the 6th was all it took for Arizona to wiggle free. Corbin Carroll beat out what would’ve been a double play ball to any other runner in the league, finding himself at third on a subsequent Geraldo Perdomo single before touching home on Adrian del Castillo’s flip single into left.
Half-a-lead lost, San Francisco initiated their patented self- sabotage like Wil E. Coyote waddling out crate after crate of cheap ACME TNT.
Desperate for an unproductive out or groundball, McDonald over-cooked a slider that missed the plate by five feet. The wild pitch allowed both runners to advance, setting up Ildemaro Vargas’s game-tying sacrifice fly.
An inning later, McDonald and reliever Matt Gage, laughably found themselves in the exact position as the 6th. One out, two groundball singles — but this time Tony Vitello decided to intervene. Handsome and self-assured, he strolled to the mound and gestured to the bullpen for the lefty Matt Gage. This was the move that would solve all of their problems, that would keep the Giants in the game, he thought to himself…before walking into a glass door.
Gage threw one pitch to Corbin Carroll, and then tasked with fielding the grounder rolling up the line, the big southpaw got his limbs confused. He bent down and just straight-up whiffed on the 5 MPH dribbler.
Gage did the hard part. He coaxed a legless swing from a hot hitter on a well-placed slider. Jerry was sold. The mouse was sniffing the cheese in the trap, and then Tom, rubbing his paws together nearby, got spooked by his shadow. He jumped in fright and somehow his tail landed in the trap instead. The error again gifted Arizona a runner on third with less than two outs, and Perdomo capitalized on the mistake with another sac fly to take the lead.
And even after all that — the groundball singles finding holes, McDonald’s wild pitch, the ineffectual pitching change, the glove biff — there was more embarrassment to reap. Because a team so flummoxed and hapless as the Giants are right now, there will always be one more toe to stub. There will always be a lower bottom, and that bottom came in the 8th, set-up, rather cruelly, when the offense was given an unexpected gift.
As if dropped from the heavens, Willy Adames’s pop fly to left dropped safely to outfield grass after Ryan Waldeschmidt lost the baseball in the sun.
San Francisco’s line-up had only reached base once since Arraez’s two run single in the 3rd inning. Starter Mike Soroka had retired 11 batters in a row before exiting after the 6th. 16 hitters went hitless before Adames’s sun double. Far from deserved, but a lucky break that suddenly put the tying run in scoring position. For all the baseball I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lifetime’s worth these past 50 games, I admit there was a moment when the doubt lifted. The tease again! That tickle! Something good, something different, might possibly could be maybe who knows happen here! The whole team felt it too. They licked their lips. The bird was just sitting there, just past the window within reach, they just had to pounce, to reach in and snatch it —
SLAM! Window frame shut, right on the fingers. Not even close. Adames was out by a mile, cut down by a janky relay, and a problematic send.
Third base coach Hector Borg has drawn too much attention to himself this year. One could put together a lowlight reel of the decisions he’s made in the first third of this season. He held Drew Gilbert when he should’ve scored against Philly in the 10th. He got Jung Hoo Lee thrown out, and banged up, at home trying to score from first against the Dodgers. Perhaps he was maybe riding high off his aggressive send of Adames that paid off in the 3rd, but this decision proved disastrous because it reeked of desperation. Waldschmidt was clearly there to back-up Arraez’s single. Adames wasn’t able to make a definitive move to advance until he confirmed the ball touched grass. He had no jump, no momentum — but he still got the wave because of how dire things had become. Arraez’s hit was just the lineup’s fifth in the game — and he had three of them. A MLB-leading fifth sweep loomed. That recklessness is exactly the problem. You start to fear the worst. You question whether another opportunity will arise, you remember the flak you got for holding Gilbert in extras. You even doubt with Casey Schmitt, one of the hottest hitters in the league, next to the plate, because there is no future, no guarantees. The Giants’ mindset has become now-or-never, do-or-die.
So the tying run is cut down at the plate. That’s bad — but it’s not the worst.
This is the worst.
The Giants just ran full speed into a wall they thought was a tunnel.
