The Giants played two series last week, one of them against a contender and one of them against one of the worst teams in the National League. They lost both of them. The last time they won a series was against the White Sox in the middle of August. The last time they won a series against a real team was against Detroit, on Aug. 10. The last time they scored more than five runs was on Aug. 15; it is now September.
The Giants are cooked. Let’s rank their wins over the last seven days (eight, with the holiday).
1. That one where they came back against the Brewers on the road.
2. That one where they beat the Marlins at home (like they’re supposed to).
Sometimes I make rankings that you can argue with. This is not one of those times. Every time the Marlins brought in a reliever, his ERA would be expressed in polynomials and his BB/9 was just an emoji of a man with his head stuck in the toilet. Then he would retire the side in nine pitches. It was an ugly week.
This weekly recap is gonna be a quick look back. It’s a holiday weekend as I write this, nobody wants to relive the past eight days of baseball and I have video games to play. You can skip to the beautiful home run at the end if you want.
First, though, I have a question. Can we pinpoint the moment the little timer popped out of the Giants’ turkey? When were they perfectly cooked all the way through, and did anyone remember to let them rest for 10 minutes so their juices could reabsorb?
I think I have the answer. It’s not from last week, which goes against the idea of a weekly recap, but humor me.
The official end of the Giants season
The Giants were on a roll. They were three games over .500 for the first time all season. They hadn’t lost a series in almost a month, and they had already clinched their third series win in a row. They were at home and playing a fourth-place team. They were down by a run entering the bottom of the eighth inning, and they were facing a reliever who was recently called up from Triple-A Toledo, where he had a 5.17 ERA. Matt Chapman did this:
It would have been a homer in seven parks, but that didn’t matter because a leadoff triple is almost as good as a solo home run, right? Right?
The next three Giants hitters who came up each put the ball in play. They traveled in the air a combined 31 feet, or halfway back to the pitcher. None of the balls left the infield. In a situation where a fly ball could have tied the game and given them a chance to sweep the series, they could not even muster a 200-foot flyout. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m willing to declare this the moment the season actually ended. The Giants lost their next three games against the team they were chasing for the final wild-card spot, and now we’re here.
Baseball seasons are so long, and they contain so many chain reactions and sliding doors. It seems silly to declare three unhelpful plate appearances in the middle of August to be the tipping point.
Yet can you deny the power of a stranded leadoff triple? Before it, Giants fans had hope. After it, they kept waiting for the next good thing to happen, and they waited an awfully long time. The tank was never fully refilled.
The worst call of the season
This also could have been the moment you knew it was all over, except I’m not going to blame the umpires for the Giants’ failures. They should have scored more runs against a depleted Marlins team. One blown call isn’t the difference in the season.
Look at this blown call, though. The leadoff batter reached base and attempted to steal second. Patrick Bailey made a stellar throw that got to second before the runner, but the second-base umpire said that Tyler Fitzgerald was blocking the bag.
It might have been, no hyperbole, the worst call I’ve ever seen in a major-league game. Tried for other words to convey my thoughts, couldn’t land on any.
We’ve all seen hilarious videos of a home-plate umpire blowing a strike call. I’m partial to this one:
Angel Hernandez calling balls and strikes in the NLCS? Don’t see what could possibly go wrong. pic.twitter.com/rKGOmw8ULX
— Grant Brisbee (@GrantBrisbee) October 19, 2016
But that’s still a human brain trying to triangulate the coordinates of a small orb traveling at 86 mph with movement. Ángel Hernández was still doing one of the hardest jobs in sports, determining if that small orb traveled through an invisible box. He failed in a way that’s funny almost a decade later, but that doesn’t mean the initial task wasn’t difficult.
The umpire for this call was Ryan Blakney. He’s an umpire I hadn’t thought about before, which is generally a good sign. He might be a solid overall umpire, and most umpires are excellent at what they do. It’s a ridiculously tough gig! Human eyeballs and brains are imperfect.
The degree of difficulty isn’t present with this call, though. It’s not as if Otto López — Giants’ spring legend — slid into Fitzgerald’s foot with a slide that was aggressively to the inside part of the bag. It’s not as if he had any difficulty reaching the bag at all. It’s not as if Fitzgerald’s foot is even in the middle of the base; it’s clearly to the inside part, even when looking at that screenshot, which is of an angle that makes his foot look more in the way.
It won’t matter in terms of the Giants’ overall success this season, and the larger problem was that the Giants couldn’t score runs against a guy whose 5.0 BB/9 ratio this season has improved his career numbers. But more than any other call I think I’ve ever seen — Wilmer Flores’ check-swing included! — I simply can’t process where this one came from. It’s like Blakney read “An Oral History of Middle Infielders Blocking Second Base” by Studs Terkel the night before and was on high alert.
Matt Chapman, thank you for not dying on this pitch
I spent all of my hyperbole coin on the last segment, so I’m not going to tell you that this was one of the most uncomfortable swings I’ve ever seen, even though it probably was. A video of the swing in question:
Watching that swing is legitimately worse than fingernails on a chalkboard for me. It’s so, so uncomfortable. I encourage you to slow the video down, frame by frame, to see when Chapman started his swing. It was almost to the plate, but he clearly read it as a slider, because he was tracking it like it was moving slower and about to hang over the plate. Nope. It almost killed him.
So the Marlins catcher, Nick Fortes, said, “A-ha. He’ll never expect a slider in the strike zone now,” and that lead to one of the only Giants’ highlights of the week.
Mostly, you should just be thankful that Chapman is still here instead of in emergency surgery to remove a baseball from his navel.
Home run of the week
It was the hardest hit, by exit velocity. It traveled the farthest. It was one of two that would have been a homer in all 30 parks, with Mike Yastrzemski’s leadoff homer on Sunday being the other. Let’s marvel at the athletic, easy power of Grant McCray.
Take a moment to realize how incredible it would be for McCray to reach the 80th percentile of his ability. Speed, power and defense all in the same player, which is exactly what the Giants have needed since 2016 or so. Nothing is guaranteed. There will be hiccups and missteps and calamities along the way for McCray, if only because there always are for a young hitter with a tendency to swing and miss.
But, man. Just imagine if this works.
Also of note, McCray moved into the all-time franchise lead for home runs hit by a player born in Montana, with three. He’s now 113 homers behind John Lowenstein for the all-time Montana dinger lead, which is exciting.
Also also of note, McCray moved into the all-time franchise lead for plate appearances by a player born in Montana the very first time he stepped into the box. He’s about 4,000 behind Lowenstein for the all-time Montana lead, so he’s got work to do. With a swing like that, and the obvious tools … man, he’s got a shot. He’s got a real shot, even if there’s a wide, forbidding chasm between here and 4,000 at-bats in the majors.
At least we can all agree that this is the best Montana player in the history of San Francisco sports. Give me one Montana-related athlete who can compare. I’ll wait.
(Top photo of Logan Webb on Sunday: Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
