The first half of the Giants’ season was the most painful, torturous and unforgiving half of baseball in franchise history.
And then it lasted longer than it should have.
After San Francisco fell behind Miami 7-3 in the top half of the seventh inning, the Giants staged a miraculous four-run comeback in the late innings to tie the game and extend the first half of the season into extra innings that no one needed, wanted or even asked for.
Then, in a fitting way to finish off the first half, former Los Angeles Dodgers’ catcher A.J. Ellis launched a two-run pinch-hit home run in the top half of the 11th inning to give the Marlins a 9-7 lead, and Giancarlo Stanton smashed his second home run of the contest to cap off what became a 10-8 Miami victory.
Ellis’ home run off of Giants’ reliever George Kontos was his first career pinch hit home run, and came on an 0-2 pitch Kontos hung in the fat part of the strike zone.
Welcome to the All-Star break.
“It’s been a tough half, there’s no getting around it,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said. “How that inning went, we had an error that started by one of the best (Brandon Crawford), the 0-2 pitch obviously got away from George and we’ve made too many mistakes 0-2. Really you look at the game, how hard they fought to put themselves in a position to win the ballgame and I said this yesterday, we’ve been there so many times, we just can’t finish it.”
On Sunday morning, Bochy said he hoped his team would give fans and ownership a product to be proud of, and in the late stages of Sunday’s game, San Francisco looked like it might.
But in what’s rapidly developing into the worst season in franchise history, pride hasn’t exactly come in the form of victories, but rather late-inning comebacks that have fallen short. Such is life for a team that’s forgotten how to celebrate.
Facing a four-run deficit, the Giants’ late rally started with a Denard Span RBI double in the bottom of the seventh inning and continued into the eighth when rookie pinch hitter Miguel Gomez hooked a game-tying single through the right side of the infield to score shortstop Brandon Crawford.
After Hunter Pence, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford led off the bottom of the eighth inning with three consecutive singles, a Nick Hundley RBI single and Gomez’s first career Major League hit put the Giants in position to steal a game they had no business winning.
It turns out, they didn’t win it, they just couldn’t figure out how to put a catastrophic first half in their rearview mirror.
“The thing you have to keep doing and they’re doing it is when they got down, kept fighting,” Bochy said. “That’s a pretty big hole we dug and had to go against their best relievers and it put us in a tough position. Now someone has to come through and finish it off.”
So about the journey that landed this game in extra frames.
On Sunday afternoon, the Giants attempted to throw left-handed reliever Steven Okert the worst birthday party of his life, as Bochy called on Okert with the bases loaded and no one out in the top half of the seventh inning.
Before Okert had the chance to blow out his candles, Marlins’ first baseman Justin Bour looped a 0-1 fastball into left field to plate right fielder Giancarlo Stanton and center fielder Christian Yelich that pushed Miami to a 5-3 lead and a in a roundabout sort of way, a series sweep.
The two inherited runners Okert allowed to score weren’t charged to his ledger, but don’t worry, the Marlins put a bow on their birthday gift to him when shortstop JT Riddle drove in Bour on a sacrifice fly later in the inning.
After winning six straight games last week, San Francisco heads into the All-Star break on a four-game losing streak with five defeats in its last six contests. The sweep against the Marlins marked the Giants’ eighth straight loss against a sub .500 team from the National League East, as the New York Mets swept San Francisco at home two weeks ago after the Atlanta Braves took three out of four from Bochy’s ballclub on the road.
A year after the Giants entered the All-Star break with the best record in baseball at 57-33, San Francisco has now lost 98 of its last 162 games in what’s become a practically unfathomable demise.
After losing three consecutive games and failing to score more than four runs in any of those contests, the Giants showed early signs of life at the plate against Marlins’ right-hander Jose Urena on Sunday.
Following a 1-2-3 bottom of the first, Belt led off the second inning with his third double of the series, a laser down the right field line that gave San Francisco its first opportunity with a runner in scoring position.
In the ensuing at-bat, Crawford redirected a 95-mile per hour Urena fastball into the arcade high above the right field wall for his eighth home run of the season, a 418-foot shot that exited the bat at 105 miles per hour and was by far the longest ball Crawford’s hit in 2017.
Crawford’s blast staked the Giants out to a 2-0 lead, but right-hander Johnny Cueto failed to record a shutdown inning when the Marlins came to the plate in the third.
Three days after he was scratched from his scheduled Thursday start with an inner ear infection, Cueto took Matt Cain’s spot in the rotation and threw six innings of six-run ball against a Miami team that recorded 21 hits off of San Francisco’s starters in the first two games of the series.
Though Miami had a harder time barreling up the Giants’ starter, Cueto aided the Marlins’ cause by issuing six walks, the most he’s allowed since July 19, 2015 when Cueto was a member of the Cincinnati Reds.
After a Marcell Ozuna double tied the game 2-2 in the third inning, Cueto’s biggest mistake came in the top half of the fifth inning, when he hung an 0-1 slider to Stanton, one of the game’s premier power hitters.
As majestic as Crawford’s second inning blast was, Stanton’s fifth inning home run flew off his bat as if it was the latest satellite NASA was launching into orbit. The 443-foot home run was Stanton’s sixth longest of the season, and his 25th of the year. In the 11th inning, he flipped a solo shot to left for good measure.
Unfortunately for the Marlins’ star, he won’t have a Giants’ pitcher throwing to him in Monday evening’s Home Run Derby.
In the bottom half of the frame, it was the Giants’ turn to stage a comeback, as catcher Nick Hundley poked a changeup on the outside corner over the right field wall to tied the even the score at 3-3. Hundley’s at-bat featured the second home run by a right-handed hitter to right field at AT&T Park this series, a remarkable feat considering it had been nearly two calendar years since the last opposite field homer by a right-hander in San Francisco before Stanton turned the trick on Friday night.
Hundley’s home run kept San Francisco in the game, but in the top of the seventh, Miami attempted to blow the lid off the contest with the four-run frame that should have helped usher the teams into the All-Star break.
But instead, the Giants showed the fight their manager was looking for, and then collapsed in the same fashion they have throughout a first half that took far too long to end.