Early contact seemed to promise an offensive outburst. Like a summer storm, clouds gathered their arms and threatened rain in the 1st. Distant light flashed, thunder rumbled under the evening’s dark breath. Luis Arraez and Rafael Devers peppered extra base hits off faraway walls in center and right-center. Loud doubles that would’ve disappeared over walls in the majority of Major League parks. Jung Hoo Lee smoked a liner past Braves’ starter Reynaldo López’s ear that seemed destined for the outfield
— if not for Ha-Seong Kim’s ensnaring lunge into the gap.
Instead of a second run scoring, the Giants first half-inning ended, and the burgeoning storm dissipated — because there are no summer storms in San Francisco, just the smothering, knock-down damp of the marine layer. Rare is the release, when the heavens open up and rain buckets down, refreshing everything below. There is no cool, just blanket-wrapped-around-the-knees cold in San Francisco.
Devers’s RBI double scored Casey Schmitt from first in the 1st, and that was it for the Giants in Friday’s 3-1 loss to the Braves.
There certainly could’ve been more production. More bang and boom, but the order went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position. They left 9 runners on base, not to mention the outs they ran into on the base paths.
Excited after his lead-off double, Arraez either misread the ball off Bryce Eldridge’s bat, or lost where shortstop Kim was positioned behind him, but the decision to bolt for third on contact got him thrown out there for the first out of the first inning. While Devers’ double did make-up for some of that mistake, the gaffe just felt all too familiar. A here-we-go-again type thing, a reminder that the game of baseball was a buttered watermelon for this team: one second it can be safely secured in their hands, the next, it’s split open and splattered over the pavement.
The disappearing baserunning act returned in the 2nd. Willy Adames was doubled up by centerfielder Michael Harris after he couldn’t scramble back to first in time after a botched hit-and-run play. He picked up where the ball was struck too late, hesitating for a moment near second, thinking the bloop might drop, before cartoonishly turning-tail when he realized the trouble he was in.
That was a tough position to be in — but those are the kinds of cruel breaks a team gets when they’re knee-deep in the muck. Aggressive plays turn around and bite the hand. Leadoff knocks are somehow just outs yet to be recorded. Extra base hits have a rapdily expiring shelf-life. Meanwhile, for the NL East leading Braves, baserunners seem to multiply. Dinky flares turn into runners in scoring position. As Duane Kuiper put it from the booth: Atlanta was winning the battle of 90 feet. Sandwiched between Arraez getting thrown out at third and Adames getting thrown out at first, Austin Riley’s one-out bloop single became an unearned double after starter Trevor McDonald balked him over into scoring position. Immediately after Dom Smith slapped a single up the middle to tie the game.
In the 3rd, Atlanta would take the lead on another gift of 90 feet after Arraez scuttled a routine double play with a throwing error that skipped past Devers at first into the visiting dugout. Instead of two outs and the bases empty, Mauricio Dubón stood in scoring position and continued to advance around the bases on a groundout and Ozzie Albies’s single. Albies would add on again in the 5th with a sac fly set-up by a Dubón infield single and a Matt Olson double — the Braves’ first, and only, extra base hit of the game.
The ball was hit hard, the wind wasn’t making things easier — still, it seemed catchable. Lee, patrolling centerfield, was asked to go to the wall again and couldn’t. He appeared to get spooked by the fence and pulled up short. Maybe that was wise in the long-term, it’s just the tentativeness isn’t what the Giants needed in the short-term.
That double shouldn’t have been decisive. After the 5th, Atlanta’s offense produced little while clouds gathered and darkened overhead for San Francisco. Facing a two-run deficit, the tying run was either on base or at the plate for a hitter in every home frame but the 9th.
Catcher Drew Cavanaugh, in his MLB debut, and number-9 hitter Victor Bericoto did their job. They helped load the bases with one-out in the 5th and reached second-and-third with one out in the 7th.
Both times Bryce Eldridge stood at the plate with a chance to tie the game (or more) with a hit, or at the very least, score a run with something as simple as a fly out. Both times he came up empty. Eldridge couldn’t lay off the disappearing sliders from Hurston Waldrep in the 5th and went down chasing. In the 7th, in an unfavorable matchup against lefty Dylan Lee and not wanting to go too deep into the count, he swung at the first pitch he saw and popped it up to second. Schmitt couldn’t pick-up his teammate and deliver a knock of consequence in either instance.
McDonald finished his night with a nasty front door sinker to bag Riley, pitching into the 6th for the first time in four starts while snapping a string of games in which he walked at least three. The outing was a step in the right direction for the starter after a handful of rough-and-ragged appearances. A trio of relievers — Matt Gage, Sam Hentges, and Adrian Houser — also held their ground over the final 3.2 innings. Frustratingly, considering the hole the team was already in when they took over and what happened on Thursday, the ground they protected so admirably wasn’t worth much.
The pitching did a decent job of holding the Braves at bay, but the bats couldn’t find a way to storm back or storm ahead. The result: another disconnected performance for these Giants.
