On-Air Now
On-Air Now
Listen Live from the Casino Matrix Studio

Bumgarner shoves Cubs aside, helps Giants clinch second straight series

By

/


SAN FRANCISCO–There were days when a Madison Bumgarner start at AT&T Park against the defending World Series champions had serious implications.

And perhaps, in a micro sense, Wednesday was one of those days.

After taking two out three from the second-place Arizona Diamondbacks over the weekend, the Giants sent Bumgarner to the hill on Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to take two of three from the Chicago Cubs, the first-place team in the National League Central.

Bumgarner, never shy in the face of a big moment, delivered an outing the Giants have come to expect from their ace, as his effort helped San Francisco to its second-straight series win in a 3-1 victory.

After Jarrett Parker delivered an RBI single in the bottom of the seventh inning to keep Bumgarner in line for his first win since July 25, and just his second of the season, Hunter Pence provided the offensive highlight of the day for a Giants team that’s seeing the ball better in the late innings.

In the bottom of the eighth, Pence hit his 10th home run of the season, and second at AT&T Park, high above the right field wall in a part of the park that only three right-handed players, including Pence, have reached since the end of the 2015 season.

For Bumgarner, Pence and the Giants, it’s a shame Wednesday’s game didn’t have greater big-picture implications.

“I’m just going to say it as simple as it is,” Bumgarner said. “We’ve got to go out and try to win the game that we have that day and there’s no other way around it. There’s no way to make it sound sexy or anything like that. I mean, that’s it. We have to go try to win that game. It don’t matter if it’s against the Dodgers, Astros, Cubs, whoever. We have to try to win that day.”

The Giants entered Wednesday’s matinee contest with the opportunity to win their fourth contest in the past five days, and their sixth game in the first week and a half to start August.

“Trying to play good baseball and really enjoying it,” Pence said. “Everyone’s getting after it and we’re kind of clicking and pitching good, playing good defense and swinging the bats well.”

Only once this season have the Giants won six games before the midpoint of a month, and that was back in May, when San Francisco won its sixth game on May 14.

Any way you swing it, the Giants have underwhelmed this season, and even though Wednesday’s game against the Cubs did not matter in a macro sense, especially in the wider baseball universe, it was still the Giants against the Cubs, and still an opportunity to affirm that San Francisco has been playing better baseball of late.

Furthermore, Wednesday was another chance for the Giants to evaluate Bumgarner, who has pitched well of late after struggling –by his standards– in his initial return from a shoulder injury that sidelined him for nearly three months.

After tossing seven innings in back-to-back outings against the Dodgers and Diamondbacks last week –both in Giants’ losses– the team’s ace threw seven more solid frames, allowing just four hits while striking out seven Cubs on a chilly day at China Basin.

Bumgarner made just a lone mistake on Wednesday, a first-pitch, middle-in fastball with two outs and no one on base against Cubs’ center fielder Albert Almora, Jr. in the top half of the third inning. It was a get-me-over fastball at 90 miles an hour, an obvious lapse for a pitcher who spent much of the day on cruise control, and Almora smoked it one-third of the way up the left field bleachers.

Almora’s home run was the third hit of the game for the Cubs, who would have just three runners reach base over the final four innings of Bumgarner’s brilliant outing.

That home run followed the Giants’ first run of the game, which came in the top half of the second inning on an RBI single to right field from second baseman Joe Panik.

With two outs and two on, Panik yanked a Kyle Hendricks offering into right field to plate Pablo Sandoval and give the Giants a 1-0 lead.

Sandoval’s opposite field single with one out helped ignite the Giants’ first rally, but it was his fifth-inning diving stop that marked his best play of the day.

With the bases empty and two out in the top of the fifth, Ben Zobrist tapped a grounder to the left side of the infield that Sandoval snagged with a headlong dive. Short on time, Sandoval flipped to his knees and fired a one-hopper to first baseman Ryder Jones that barely beat Zobrist to the bag.

Sandoval’s stop aided Bumgarner’s effort, and the Giants’ offense wound up picking up their pitcher in the bottom half of the seventh. After Bumgarner was removed for a pinch hitter, Denard Span, Ryder Jones and Parker recorded back-to-back-to-back singles that pushed the Giants to a 2-1 lead.

After starting the contest 0-for-2, Parker’s RBI single through the left side of the infield scored Span to give him his second go-ahead hit of the week, as his walkoff single on Saturday night against Arizona lifted the Giants to their second win of an eight-game homestand.

“His (Parker) confidence is where it needs to be right now and he’s had some tough at-bats against lefties,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said. “That’s a tough lefty he was facing there at the end and he put the ball in play. Went the other way, didn’t pull off of it so that’s a great sign. This game is all about confidence.”

The 2-1 advantage was all San Francisco needed to fend off a Cubs team in the heat of a division race on Wednesday, and it was the type of victory that suggested that maybe –just maybe– if everything goes right for the Giants next season, they will be able to contend after all.

“It’s nice to have two good series like that and really, a pretty good homestand,” Bochy said. “We played the type of ball that really, we needed to play. We pitched well. Our starters gave us a chance even the first game of this series. That game could have gone either way. Both teams pitched well. We scrapped and we scratched and clawed for runs.

Of course, there are a wide range of issues San Francisco needs to address this offseason to make that a possibility, but at least for the time being, the Giants can take comfort in the fact that core players got the job done against contenders like Arizona and Chicago, even when, on a macro sense, the club had nothing to play for.