Baseball is a silly sport.
It’s a cruel sport. A humiliating sport. A difficult sport, an exciting sport, an entertaining sport, yes, yes, but at its core it is a silly sport. Round balls, round bats. Managers in their 60s wear the same pajamas as the players they try to manage. It’s a sport where a player can do exactly what he wants and be disappointed. It’s a sport where a player can fail at what they’re trying to do and be a hero.
The San Francisco Giants lost 3-2 to the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on Friday night, a game they deserved to lose. The Giants went into the ninth inning hitless. At Coors Field. Against a starting pitcher who came into the game with a 7.00 ERA in 14 winless starts. A team deserves to be eliminated the following season if that happens. It’s like the fateful roll of the dice in Robert Coover’s 1968 novel “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” You just have to accept the cruelty that rarity dictates. Rest in peace, 2024 season. And possibly the 2023 season too.
It was also a game the Giants should have won. It’s a silly sport. It’s a complicated sport. It’s a brutal sport.
The Giants are now the 28th team to score two or fewer goals at Coors Field out of the 10,365 games played there. If you consider that a baseball game requires two teams, the probability of two or fewer hits is 20,730. So 0.1 percent of the time it happens every time. This is the Coors Field Guarantee.
However, the Giants issued seven walks on Friday night, so they actually scored two runs on those two hits. They had a chance to win. They were three outs away. They had a chance to do something that had never been done before: go to Coors Field as the visiting team and win by two goals or fewer.
In hindsight, the Giants probably would have preferred to score more than two goals. Maybe three. Even four! Then it wouldn’t have been Logan Webb’s problem when he finally gave up a run in the eighth inning, which was his 200th inning of the season. That’s an innings total that could have put him at the Cy Young lead if he had pitched behind normal run support.
More hits might have given Camilo Doval a cushion, especially after a leadoff double in the bottom of the ninth. If the Giants had more than a one-run lead, that double is just dirt on his shoulder and he can just pitch normally.
Instead, Webb pitched eight full innings, allowing four hits and one run and earning a no-decision. Doval pitched a third of an inning and allowed two hits, the same number the Giants had in nine complete innings. It did not work.
With one out and two on, Rockies first baseman Elehuris Montero hit a ball straight into the cursed earth and it landed in left field. Every other ball had a launch angle as if it were a groundout. Of the balls in play that night with an expected batting average of .200 or less, only one was hit, and that was Montero’s. However, there was a gap and Mike Yastrzemski still had the opportunity to equalize from second with a perfect throw.
He made a perfect throw.
(MLB.com)
But baseball is hard, tricky and cruel, and he passed Patrick Bailey, a catcher who was in the minors for the first 1 1/2 months of the season and still has the highest defensive rating of any catcher in baseball. Are there ten people more qualified to turn that tricky, perfect throw into an out? The fact that it is controversial at all proves the point. It could have worked. If you’re feeling ungenerous, maybe you can say it should have worked. However, Bailey failed to control it and not only did it score the deciding run, it skipped past and allowed the winning run to be scored.
Lest you think I’m making the Giants seem like unlucky losers, let’s be clear: THE GIANTS HAVE TWO HITERS. Two! At Coors Field! Channel your best Sam Kinison or Lewis Black voice here if it helps. Two hits! They deserved to lose, possibly by double digits.
However, this is all just a reminder of how close the Giants were to actually winning the game. It would have been one of the stupidest wins in a stupid sport since the Rockies joined the league. This is the worst Coors loss in Giants history, along with Spilborghs, Neifi and Nolan Arenado slamming for the cycle because he hates dads everywhere, but don’t forget the Giants have a history of silly Coors wins. Barry Zito’s shutout was the first win of the 2012 season, and it wasn’t the last, but it may have been the dumbest. The Giants needed every last win in 2010, and in late September they got one at Coors by just three goals. They defeated the Rockies in Coors in September 2021 when they needed every single win to win the NL West.
The Giants lost their all-time heartbreakers in Coors. They also won incredibly stupid games there, and after the eighth inning there was a realistic chance they would win a 1-0 game even though they didn’t have a hit. I’m not sure what your favorite Giants game of all time is, whether it’s Madison Bumgarner coming out of the bullpen in Game 7 or Will Clark in center against Mitch Williams, but winning a 1-0 game, without hitting Coors, it would be in my personal Mount Rushmore.
However, don’t forget that the Rockies also did a lot to win the game. Chase Anderson was practically wild, but he rattled the Giants. Nolan Jones drew a nine-pitch walk against Doval, and it was one of the best at-bats you’ll see in a ninth inning:
(MLB.com)
Yes, Jones earned that walk and it resulted in a win. Baseball is a silly sport, but sometimes it’s a simple sport. Take the 100 mph plans outside the strike zone, foul the ones in the strike zone, and maybe good things will happen.
The legacy of this game is still unclear. With the competition on a winning streak and a well-timed losing streak, this game doesn’t fall into the pantheon of despair. It’s not reminiscent of the Neifi game and is still miles away from the Spilborghs game. If the Giants make it to the postseason by even one game, this game will be a footnote. A hilarious footnote. Two hits!
However, it has that potential. The Giants had a chance to win a game they didn’t deserve but desperately wanted. Now they have more games at Coors Field, followed by games in Arizona against a direct competitor that is playing well, followed by four games at Dodger Stadium, followed by a very annoyed San Diego Padres team with nothing to lose, followed by three more games against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Otherwise the problem is difficult to detect.
The Giants deserved to lose. They could have won. It was a complicated game in a silly sport. And now they have 15 games left to put this game behind them and get into the postseason. They just have to make this silly sport work for them.
Don’t forget that it is also a cruel and humiliating sport. And far too often an annoying sport. When the Giants’ schedule was announced last year and you saw a September series at Coors Field, I’m not sure what else you could have expected.
(Top photo of the Rockies’ Charlie Blackmon scoring in the ninth inning against Giants catcher Patrick Bailey: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)