Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
LOS ANGELES — None of it made sense.
Buster Posey was gone. Brandon Crawford was stapled to the bench against a lefty. Jeff Samardzija away, getting an MRI, a day after demonstrating how an aging pitcher is supposed to look against the All-Star Dodgers bats.
And then there was Johnny Cueto, still loose, his stuff a tick up, his mechanics the type of art that barely exists in baseball anymore.
Clayton Kershaw was supposed to be the pitcher who dominated Saturday. A couple Giants crushed him. Cueto, in his 300th career start, had hopes of being the first Giants pitcher to earn a quality start in the Giants’ 16th game, which also makes little sense.
And yet there was Cueto, twirling and shimmying and guile’ing his way toward a no-hitter in the sixth inning, when Kike Hernandez lofted a ball to left that Hunter Pence never saw. The lazy flyball dropped far behind Pence, Hernandez wound up on third, the no-hitter was gone, and somehow the energy was out of a Dodger Stadium ballpark that only had fake energy to begin with.
Absolutely classic Hunter Pence moment – loses fly ball by 30 feet to blow Johnny Cueto's no-hitter pic.twitter.com/tXaxDlOdcW
— CJ Fogler #BlackLivesMatter (@cjzero) August 9, 2020
And because nothing made sense, Cueto just kept throwing. He came up lame on a Mookie Betts pop-up in the inning and took a couple practice pitches.
And because nothing made sense, Gabe Kapler, who has been careful at all turns with his staff, let him pitch, after 91 pitches, to Justin Turner with two on. Two pitches later Cueto had surrendered his first legitimate hit, and the Dodgers were circling the bases. Cueto did not get that quality start.
One of the strangest games in recent memory featured the Giants bruising Kershaw, Cueto flirting with a no-hitter that the Los Angeles skies took away and the Giants somehow escaping, 5-4, at Chavez Ravine. And that’s what made perhaps the least sense: The Giants won on a day that very much felt like a loss.
The Giants (7-9) are now 2-4 on a critical road trip that will go from Los Angeles to Houston after Sunday’s matinee. After Saturday, Pence cannot get away quickly enough.
For so long the game seemed to come from Kapler’s dreams, Cueto pausing and starting and whipping 93-mph fastballs and an assortment of offspeed pitches, the Dodgers in front or behind and never in between. He only struck out three but toyed with LA for much of the night, the Giants’ defense surprisingly solid until the ball that disappeared.
Pence, playing in left a night after Darin Ruf got the start and made an error, prompting Ruf to be switched to DH, stared upward while shuffling his feet and raising his palms in confusion. The ball and baseball history dropped about 20 feet behind him, beginning one of the most disheartening frames that you will see.
The Giants’ bullpen bailed Cueto out in a way the skies would not. Tony Watson got a key out and Tyler Rogers six of them to preserve the lead. Trevor Gott notched his fourth save of the season, allowing the potential tying run to get on but stranding Turner at first. The Dodgers finished with two hits, just the ninth time in the San Francisco era the Giants have held the Dodgers to two hits or fewer in LA.
Forgotten, somehow, is the amount of history the preceded the history that did not happen.
Austin Slater went deep twice off Kershaw, one of just seven players to do so against the all-timer. Mike Yastrzemski, the only lefty in the Giants’ lineup, homered, too, the first time the Giants have hit three homers in one game against the lefty. The Giants knocked Kershaw out after just 4 1/3, four-run innings, Donovan Solano’s and Yastrzemski’s back-to-back, Kershaw-chasing doubles provided a four-run cushion that sure felt as if the game were out of reach, as Cueto reached for history.
The no-hitter, though, would be literally out of Pence’s reach.