SAN FRANCISCO–Every so often you hear about those nightmare flights.
The flight is delayed, and then when it does finally take off, there’s a mechanical issue that forces the plane to turn around and return to the airport. Engineers take an hour and fix that issue, but then the coffee machine breaks, creating an electrical problem. More delays. Throughout the process, passengers grow restless waiting on the tarmac, the flight crew is weary, and everyone is generally in a horrible mood. The airline isn’t passing out free pretzels, either.
That type of flight manifested itself in the form of a baseball game on Monday night, as the Giants and Dodgers battled until 2:11 a.m. when San Francisco finally secured an 8-6 win.
The only difference between those flights and Monday’s game was that the Giants did sell alcohol while a marathon delay took place. That’s hard to come by on the tarmac.
“Honestly in my mind I didn’t think we were going to be playing tonight,” Giants’ center fielder Denard Span said. “Once it started to get around 9:45 and had another good conversation at my locker with Hunter (Pence), then Boch came in and said we’re starting at 10:50. I gave him two slow blinks. Then I said alright, here we go. Might as well just try to go out here and battle our butts off. That’s how that went.”
San Francisco and Los Angeles were scheduled to square off at 7:15, but just like typical end-of-day air travel, inclement weather altered the schedule. A 42-minute delay pushed first pitch back to 7:57, and that’s when Giants’ rookie Chris Stratton finally took the mound. It didn’t take long for Stratton to steal the show.
The 27-year-old rookie opened the game by striking out Dodgers’ left fielder Curtis Granderson with a nasty curveball in a 2-2 count. Like a television show that comes on after midnight, the spin rate on Stratton’s curveball was so dirty that fans began flooding the exits while shielding their faces from the action. It was either Stratton’s curveball, or a sudden precipitous downpour that caused fans to race for cover. And I think we know what the real issue was.
Like a flashing “BUFFERING” warning on a computer relying on dial-up internet, the storm clouds didn’t disappear. Before Stratton had the chance to lock horns with Dodgers’ shortstop Corey Seager, home plate umpire Sam Holbrook began herding cattle, and cleared the field. San Francisco didn’t immediately rush the tarp back onto the field, though. Instead, the Giants’ groundskeepers waited for that “BUFFERING” message to turn into the rainbow pinwheel you see when a Macintosh becomes overworked, and eventually, the tarp returned.
Around 9:05 p.m., the Giants’ brass flashed a message on the scoreboard that they would provide an update about the status of Monday’s game at 9:20. At 9:25, the scoreboard alerted fans the message that was supposed to come at 9:20 would now come at 9:45. At 9:45, the messages disappeared from the scoreboard altogether, and the storm overhead intensified. You know the schoolchildren who wait all day for the sky to clear so they can finally have an outdoor recess? At that point, the Giants and Dodgers were those schoolchildren, and their recess time looked like it would be rolled into a double session on Wednesday.
But alas, the yard monitors who showed up to watch after said children demanded action. Managers Bruce Bochy and Dave Roberts gathered with Holbrook and Co. , and so did Giants’ CEO Larry Baer and Dodgers’ Baseball Ops director Andrew Friedman. A game may have to wait another hour, but the message was clear: Let the kids play.
“It was going to clear up,” Bochy said, when asked what the group discussed. “We’re looking at a split doubleheader, maybe Wednesday. There was some rain coming possibly, so now you’re looking down the road and maybe a day off trying to get the two teams together. The radar showed that it was clearing up. It wouldn’t rain again. We couldn’t afford to lose another pitcher, Blach, so we hung in there. The fans hung in there and so we played the game.”
Those of you on the east coast who look forward to watching 60 minutes at the conclusion of major sporting events on CBS know the feeling. You don’t care about what’s hogging the airtime, you just want to watch the best magazine-style show television journalists have to offer. The fans who showed up at AT&T Park and stayed through what felt like an interminable delay didn’t care how long their show was pushed back on Monday. They wanted the show they originally tuned in for.
At 10:50 p.m., the Giants returned to the field to continue the top half of the first inning. It was actually just in time for replay officials at Major League Baseball’s offices in New York to return from last call.
Nearly three hours after Stratton struck out Granderson, Bochy elected to start with a fresh slate, opting to call on rookie reliever Ty Blach to finish off the first inning. Speaking of Stratton, he was as efficient as a golfer carding a 59. He struck out every batter he faced.
“Once it got close to an hour,” Bochy said, when asked at what point Stratton’s night was over. “With the added pitching that we have here, it just wasn’t worth the risk. He said he had never done it before. That played a part in it. But I just didn’t want to take a risk with the kid. Then, when it went past an hour, that was a no-brainer. But I pretty much had my mind made up.”
Blach entered the game with the type of energy you’d find from a salesman at a car dealership on the final day of the month, and for awhile, it was exactly what the Giants needed.
“Anytime you get to play this game, you bring the energy and the guys did an awesome job tonight just battling the way they did,” Blach said. “To come out firing like they did and then to battle back, that was awesome to see.”
After Blach set down the first two hitters he faced, Span clobbered a two-run home run into McCovey Cove in the bottom half of the inning and proved that good things can happen in a city after 11 o’clock at night.
Span’s homer came at 11:03 p.m., and marked his fifth career splash hit. It also marked his 12th home run of the season, a new career-high, and came when he was hitting in the third slot in the order for just the second time in his career.
“My whole mentality tonight was just like ‘F’ it,” Span said. “It’s late, I’m hitting third, I’m like, is this a real game? But I got the text from him earlier before I came to the ballpark today and I thought it was a joke at first. They said that they wanted to shake it up. They shook it up tonight and it worked out.”
In the second inning, left fielder Jarrett Parker added to the lead, crushing a solo shot to right field. In the third inning, the rich got richer when Joe Panik knocked in Hunter Pence after the Giants’ right fielder led off the inning with a triple. But suddenly, the rich were heavily taxed, and they lost their economic advantage.
In the top of the fourth, Blach’s caffeine high ended with a crash, as the Dodgers tallied four runs, including two on a game-tying single from Seager that spelled the end of Blach’s evening. In the fifth, the Dodgers took the lead, as Yasiel Puig hit a ball to the glove in left center field. Not the gigantic glove that rests a comfortable 500-plus feet from home plate, but to the only remaining fan who actually brought a glove sitting three-quarters of the way up the left fielder bleachers.
By the time the top of the sixth inning rolled around, the Giants had already come storming back to take the lead. The details, though, are unimportant. All you need to know is that by this point in the game, Bochy and Roberts had committed to setting a Major League record for most relief pitchers used after midnight.
Perhaps the surest sign that the Giants and Dodgers angered some sort of higher power came in the sixth inning, when Monday’s (Tuesday’s?) game force fed Sports Illustrated its weekly “Sign of the Apocalypse.” With the score tied 6-6 and the temperature resting at a comfortable 66 degrees, Puig, who wears No. 66 came to the plate for the Dodgers. On the third pitch of Puig’s at-bat, he flew out to the right fielder, an “F-9” in the scorebook. F-9 minus the three pitches he saw equals six. The Warriors blew a 3-1 lead. Something like that.
In the bottom half of the inning, the Giants did temporarily restore a sense of balance to a ballpark overtaken by demons, as Pence singled home Sandoval to give the Giants a 7-6 edge. San Francisco wound up tacking on another run, and eventually, as hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents lay sleeping, the Giants captured a win. And in the process, they sent their rivals from Southern California to their 16th defeat in 17 games and their 11th straight loss.
Try as I might, it is quite literally impossible to place the Giants-Dodgers odyssey into proper perspective. The game finished later than any previous contest in San Francisco baseball history, and included more than three and a half hours of rain delays. The only possible parallel that might make sense is that nightmare flight. The one that’s so shockingly different than any other traveling experience that the uniqueness of it becomes a headline.
This edition of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry featured everything you could possibly imagine. And then it finally featured some baseball.