One of the magical things about writing about baseball for a living is that, against all odds, every game seems to have its own story. 162 times a year the San Francisco Giants play someone, plus a few dozen more times in the spring and, on a few blue moon occasions, a handful of times after the regular season. And almost every time, a story somehow emerges. In great games and awful ones, through promising seasons and lost ones, baseball almost always delivers.
You’ve heard of scorigami. Well, this is a phenomenon I refer to as storygami.
And sometimes it fails. Sometimes they just lose in such bland fashion, in the midst of such a bland season, that I find myself itching to just clean the toilet so I can procrastinate writing about what happened.
That happened on Tuesday, as the Giants lost 8-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers in a game that was far more one-sided than the one-sided score suggests. The Giants just … lost. As you’ve come to expect them to do. As they’ve proven themselves far too capable of over the past few months.
Perhaps the story was that it was a doomed day for the Giants. It began, after all, with the news that Casey Schmitt has a torn meniscus, and will almost certainly miss the rest of the season. It continued with the sadness that Trevor McDonald will undergo Tommy John surgery, and will almost certainly miss the entirety of next season. It peaked with the revelation that Harrison Bader suffered an injury setback after the second serious scooter crash of his big league career. And then it nestled into bed with a long, lifeless, feckless, dreamless, hopeless, joyless loss.
Which I suppose we now have to talk about.
The Giants have a tendency to lose games in the first inning. Their pitchers are 18th in the Majors in first-inning ERA, while their batters are 25th in first-inning OPS. This tends to create three common outcomes in the first inning: the Giants set the tone for a loss; the Giants narrowly avoid disaster, suggesting that this is their lucky day and they have a trick up their sleeves; and the Giants narrowly avoid disaster, suggesting that this is their lucky day and they have a trick up their sleeves, only to point their finger and laugh at you for buying that nonsense.
This game was the third. It started in dubious fashion, when Landen Roupp gave up a ground ball to the first batter he faced, Brice Turang, but then failed to cover first base in time, resulting in a leadoff single. Jackson Chourio was next and settled for a more traditional single, putting two runners on with no outs.
But thanks to a pair of ground balls — one of which resulted in two outs — Roupp escaped the inning unscathed. And in the bottom half of the inning, after the Giants quickly had two outs recorded against them, Heliot Ramos hit a pop up in the infield that resulted in the most glorious and artful of pop up dances, before ultimately falling behind first baseman Andrew Vaughn, gifting Ramos a single. After Rafael Devers scorched a single of his own, the Giants had a pair of runners on base … and were so close to capitalizing on the Brewers’ gift.
This is where the game transitioned from the second of those aforementioned possible outcomes to the third. The Giants had escaped disaster, gotten lucky, and pulled a rabbit out of their hats, and you thought maybe they actually were going to play a decent game … and then Jung Hoo Lee struck out and it all came crashing back to reality.
From there, it was one disaster after another, but in deeply uninteresting terms. Following the Devers single, the Giants would turn the lineup over twice before registering another hit, when Willy Adames knocked a single in the seventh inning. By that point, the game was already over, due to a series of two-out flubs and self-made failures. In the third inning, it was a leadoff walk that Roupp issued that scored, after a two-out single. That gave the Brewers a run to get their engines started, and the next inning they would really take off.
It started off calmly enough, with Roupp retiring the first two batters of the fourth inning. But he would never retire the third. He walked a batter, gave up a stolen base, hit a batter, allowed an RBI single, gave up another stolen base, and walked another batter. And with that, his night was over, with just 3.2 innings in the books.
The two-out thunder cared not for the shift from Roupp to JT Brubaker, as Turang roped a two-run single on the very first pitch that Brubaker threw, cashing in a pair of inherited runners and pushing the score to 4-0.
A few innings later, Brubaker would, like Roupp before him, begin to leak oil with two outs. In the seventh, he quickly retired two batters, then gave up back-to-back singles. Tony Vitello, who currently has a misdemeanor charge for what he did to Keaton Winn’s right arm and a felony charge for his crimes against Matt Gage’s left arm, mercilessly pulled the plug at a season-high 57 pitches for Brubaker.
But the eyebrow-raising arm usage was only just beginning. In came Jason Foley, a perfectly acceptable choice for the situation, even though he promptly gave up a triple to score both of the runners he inherited from Brubaker before quickly ending the inning.
That seemed likely to be it for Foley, given a host of things I’ll get to in a minute, but no, he came back out for the eighth. No big issue there: he’d thrown just four pitches in the seventh.
Foley gave up a one-out double in the eighth, and then a single, and then a run-scoring fielder’s choice. The score was now 8-0, but hey … at least there were two outs. Except, as we’ve already learned, that’s where the Giants really failed to execute.
With a runner on second and two runs already in, Vitello opted to keep his righty on the mound. William Contreras mounted a six-pitch battle, which resulted in an infield single. And still Vitello kept Foley in. Christian Yelich took four straight balls from a pitcher who was clearly losing it. And still Vitello kept Foley in. Finally, after a five-pitch battle, Foley retired Vaughn, and ended the inning.
It’s here where I remind you that Foley made his season debut 11 days ago, after missing a season and a half with a major shoulder surgery. It’s also where I remind you that he had his rehab assignment shut down and restarted because his body was not reacting well to simulating a Major League workload in the Minors and his shoulder was barking. And it’s where I make sure you’re aware that this was just his fourth outing since returning from said major shoulder surgery that he was struggling to recover from.
He threw 29 pitches in the inning. It was his 215th career game, and at no point in those prior 214 games had he ever thrown 29 pitches in a single inning. The 33 pitches he threw across the two frames was the third-most he’d thrown in a Major League game, and the most in more than four years.
Here’s hoping he doesn’t suffer the same fate that Gage did. But even a blessed and lucky outcome can’t excuse the process that led to him alone on that dirt island.
Anyway, you made it this far in this article, so here, have a treat. Bryce Eldridge did something cool.
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