Long gone are the resilience of the Giants extra innings win against Pittsburgh, the heights of Borucki, the hip-thrusting pleasures of LA. Oh, how a three-game winning streak makes fools of us all, and how a three-game losing streak lays bare.
A three-game losing streak…or a three-run homer.
It was the cantankerous and eyebrow-y manager Earl Weaver who built his Baltimore dynasty of the early 70’s around the three-run homer. The concept is simple: one guy gets on a base, then the guy after that gets on a base, and then the pitcher
becomes so frustrated by all these guys getting on base that he loses focus, loses command, and grooves a fastball to a guy named “Boog” who launches it out of the park.
What, dear reader, makes a Boog a Boog?
A Boog is out of the shallow 6 feet range in terms of height, and able to stand and breathe comfortably in the deep end of most motel swimming pools. A Boog is like a bowling ball on a mattress, the movement of their mass pulls surrounding objects helplessly towards them. When a Boog steps into the batter’s box, attention gravitates into their orbit. Defenders on a Boog’s pull-side feel the effects of the Hitchcock Zoom: They physically step back from the plate and yet the Boog somehow grows.
Nick Kurtz is the A’s Boog. The reigning Rookie of the Year is no longer a rookie but still hitting like he deserves all the end-of-the-year hardware. The 23 year old has the longest on-base streak in the MLB right now at 38 games. He’s pretty much good at everything in terms of what we value in a hitter these days…and he looks the part too. 6’4’’, 240 pounds — completely different from the A’s catcher and number-2 hitter behind Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, who’s just as good offensively, with a .337 average that leads the American League while his 1.007 OPS ranks fourth, but is only 5’11’’. Not a Boog.
Kurtz, on the other hand… It felt like every time he took to the box you could hear Duane Kuiper or Mike Krukow suck their teeth and adjust their weight in their swivel chairs.
“And here comes the big, strong first baseman” Kuip whistled once.
“Uh oh, the big boy,” or “That’s a big boy right there” is maybe what their thoughts whistled more than once.
That’s the Boog effect in a nutshell.
The top of the order was the gauntlet to get through for starting pitcher Tyler Mahle. Kurtz to start, followed by Langeliers: A Boog, and a Boog-lite. Surprisingly, Mahle handled them well in their first two meetings. He got Kurtz with a 92 MPH fastball that rode the back of an 85 MPH splitter before Langeliers popped out in foul territory in the 1st.
A nice relay home from Jung Hoo Lee to Luis Arraez to Daniel Susac (with a lovely cross-body pick) ended the 2nd and kept a second run from scoring on Jeff McNeil’s double with the top of the line-up left waiting on deck.
In the 3rd, Mahle would give Kurtz nothing in the zone, exploiting his 35% whiff rate, to chase a shoe-top splitter, while Langeliers once again popped up to Rafael Devers in a hitter-friendly count.
Things were going well for the most part. The Giants had a (slim) lead. Mahle was collecting K’s without getting himself into too much trouble with the walk. But that’s the thing with three-run homers — it really just takes one to ruin your night. What’s going to get remembered in a 1-for-4 night with 3 Ks and 3-run homer?
I know what Mahle will remember. And I know what Mahle regretted the moment the baseball left his fingertips.
And that regret stemmed from frustration. He hadn’t dispatched a light-hitting bottom of the line-up when he could’ve. Soft singles from Lawrence Butler and Jeff McNeil had him in one-out, runners-at-the-corners bind with the Boog coming to the plate. This is the exact situation pitchers want to avoid: the game-changer at the plate with an opportunity to change the game. Earl Weaver gleefully combed his sideburns in his grave, just as he drew it up half-a-century ago.
Instant regret. Instant shame. Mahle had no more fight against Kurtz. He didn’t throw the first pitch cutter, but disowned it. His back was to the ball before it had even reached the plate.
The pitch-type wasn’t the problem necessarily. Mahle had thrown only two cutters to Kurtz over the 11 pitches previous. It’s not a primary weapon and third time facing a batter, as a pitcher you tend to shake things up in order to not get too predictable. The cutter, fine, but where it was placed, oof. Center cut, on the outer-third where Kurtz could be a little patient, get his hands extended, and torch it to left-center.
The inning, the start, the game went belly-up real fast. Langeliers would follow that homer with another single that led to the A’s putting another run on the board. They’d score four runs on six hits in the 5th, raising Mahle’s season ERA to 5.59. The right-hander has now given up 5 earned runs or more in four of his nine starts.
The A’s bottom of the order did their job against Mahle. Number 9 hitter McNeil roped a 2-out RBI double for the first run of the game. His single in the 5th put runners on the corners and turned the line-up over for the big boy, Kurtz, and the big boy did his big boy thing.
More than the Giants could say. The scoring opportunities presented themselves for San Francisco, but no matter how many supposed “big boys” they sent up to the plate, they couldn’t come up with a comparable hit.
With runners on first and second, Bryce Eldridge smoked one in the 4th at 106 MPH — so hard second baseman McNeil couldn’t get out of its way. With one out in the 5th, Lee and Arraez on base, Matt Chapman continued his vexing freefall with a soft toss foul out to first before Rafael Devers foul-tipped a 3-2 cutter into the glove of catcher Langeliers.
A double by Willy Adames went for naught in the 6th after Eldridge’s hard-hit ball got slowed by a reliever Joel Kuhnel’s heel. And after knocks from homer boys Harrison Bader (2-for-4) and Luis Arraez (4-for-5), Chapman once again couldn’t move the needle. His foul that missed being a 2-run 2B by half-an-inch might as well have been a yard. While the rest of us watched the ball teeter between fair-or-foul, Chapman barely left the box. He knew. The way things have been going for him — what was the point. Resigned to his fate, he struck out a couple of pitches later before Devers rolled out to first to end the inning.
Four innings in a row with a runner in scoring position and nothing to show for it. They collected two homers from unlikely sources (Arraez’s homer was his first since September 23, 2025) but two solo shots does not equal one 3-run homer. This arithmetic has been clear to great baseball minds since the late-60s. The Giants could only get table clearing hits from the table-setters, and when the table setters set the table, the table clearers were…just sitting there, I guess.
The difference: the Giants were 0-for-7 with RISP; the A’s, 4-for-6. An offense with no Boog.
San Francisco is now 0-for-20 when scoring 2 runs or fewer, and 1-9 in interleague play, and back to nine games below .500.
