San Francisco Giants Morning Minute: Giants Fall in Game of Inches
The San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs battled through a tight contest in game one, but the Giants came up on the losing side of a game of inches.
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With Johnny Cueto and Jon Lester taking the mound for game one of the NLDS, it figured to be a tight game. Both pitchers delivered, dueling through the night as the offenses struggled to figure out the hurlers. The San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs battled it out, but the Giants came away on the bad side of a 1-0 game.
Cueto and Lester traded zeroes for a long time. Cueto went the distance, striking out 10 while allowing just three hits and no walks. He kept the Cubs off-balance, using his always-deceptive motion and mixture of speeds to get grounders and weak flyballs. His counterpart did much of the same. Lester went eight extremely strong innings, giving up five hits while walking none and working out of trouble through the early innings. The only extra-base hit he surrendered was a double on a misplayed ball off the bat of Angel Pagan.
Behind the pitchers, the defenses played a spectacular game. Gorkys Hernandez, playing in center field as part of a platoon, robbed extra bases in the third inning by covering a ton of ground and making a sliding grab on the warning track. Kelby Tomlinson, another platooner, took away a pair of hits with diving grabs to his left. One, off the bat of Ben Zobrist in the fourth, kept a run off the board.
Cubs’ catcher David Ross gave his pitcher plenty of help. In the first, he gunned out Hernandez as he tried to steal second. In the third, he picked Conor Gillaspie off of first base on an attempted bunt play. The guys playing behind the pitchers (on in Ross’s case, in front of the pitcher), like the pitchers themselves, came to play.
In the end, it came down to a game of inches. The game’s lone run came off the bat of Javier Baez, and for a short while, it looked like it wouldn’t be a run at all. Cueto missed his spot with a fastball, and Baez turned on it. While the ball soared into the sky, Baez postured for a second before going into his home run trot.
Judging from the reaction, one would have thought that ball would find itself on Waveland Avenue. Judging from the way the ball come off the bat, that thought should have been reinforced. Instead, the wind knocked the ball down, as it had been doing all night. Left fielder Pagan settled on the warning track, and thought he was “right under it“. He reached his glove up, but the ball was taken from him by the netting that shoots out from the wall. That netting put the run on the board, and put the Giants in a hole.
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Facing Cubs’ closer Aroldis Chapman in the ninth, the Giants had their backs against the wall. Hernandez led off, and put up a good fight in his at-bat. He worked the count full, and Chapman threw him a borderline pitch to the outside. Hernandez started his swing and tried to hold up, but first base umpire Alan Porter rung him up.
It was one of those extra-close calls. It looked like Hernandez might have held up from the naked eye, but it was darn near impossible to tell. If he had held up, that puts a speedy runner at first as the potential tying run. Instead, he became the inning’s first out.
Who knows how if that inning would have played out any different. Posey’s double, which he roped into the gap in left-center, probably scores him from first. But maybe the double doesn’t happen. Maybe Chapman pitches differently to the Giants’ catcher, and Posey doesn’t get that pitch to drive. There’s a lot of ways that inning could have played out if not for the strike-three call, but no one will ever know.
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No matter that, the Giants head into game two facing a deficit in the best-of-five series. The Giants have been in holes before, and have climbed their way out before. They’ll need to do it again to have a shot at another championship.