Giants show mettle despite heartbreaking, 10-inning loss at Wrigley Field
CHICAGO — Once Victor Bericoto overran the ball in right field, there was no use going back for it.
Chicago Cubs third-base coach Quintin Berry’s stop sign flipped to a frenetic send. Dansby Swanson, the placed runner in the bottom of the 10th inning, scored the winning run. And the Wrigley Field faithful burst into joy at the surprise gift. In that moment, with the San Francisco Giants resigned to a 3-2 loss Saturday afternoon, the baseball might as well have been a used napkin or nacho tray.
Bericoto went back for it anyway. He carried the decisive detritus in the pocket of his glove as he jogged to the visiting dugout. Then he flung it into a ball bag.
Today’s game winner will be tomorrow’s fodder for fungoes.
A gentle breeze blew in from the north, and the Cubs had their hottest pitcher, right-hander Ben Brown, on the mound. There wasn’t much chance the Giants would bash seven home runs for the second consecutive day. After scoring 12 runs Thursday in Milwaukee and 18 in Friday’s series opener against the Cubs, the Giants needed to read from a different script if they hoped to extend a winning streak to four games for the first time this season.
They made it to the final page before Pete Crow-Armstrong shouted from the balcony. The Cubs’ leadoff man erased two leads with solo homers, tagging Landen Roupp in the sixth inning and then squaring one up against Keaton Winn with two outs in the ninth.
When the Giants failed to score their placed runner in the 10th inning, the Cubs promptly settled matters from there. Giants manager Tony Vitello elected for left-hander Sam Hentges to pitch to lefty-hitting Michael Busch with first base open, and the result was a single to right. Bericoto, a rookie who was in the game after pinch hitting in the top of the 10th, let the ball scoot under his glove and became a lonesome figure in the middle of a block party.
No loss sits well within the walls of a major-league clubhouse, especially one that slipped away with two out in the ninth. But the Giants have lost games in so many repugnant and remedial ways this season while relegating themselves to also-ran status in the National League. This was not one of those losses, and according to Vitello, that message was shared to the group when the last player trudged up the stairs from the dugout.
“You’re never OK with a loss, but I agree with the sentiments immediately in the locker room afterwards,” Vitello said. “We’re playing good ball, and we played good today, and the biggest thing is they absolutely battled their asses off. … I share the sentiments with what the leaders had to say in the locker room: Keep playing good ball like that, it’ll end up in your favor more times than not.”
When everything started to crater in April and May, the Giants weren’t playing just losing baseball. They were playing daunted baseball. They looked and acted like a team that didn’t trust itself. As a result, and this was true for the coaches as much as the players, a passivity seemed to permeate everything.
They are playing much more decisive and aggressive baseball now, starting with Roupp, who yielded nothing other than the PCA home run in 5 2/3 innings, limited the noncompetitive misses, threw his sinking, two-seam fastball for strikes, attacked lefties with his changeup and kept his infielders alert as they made one difficult play after another behind him. Roupp contributed his own defensive highlight, showing no hesitation after fielding a comebacker and whirling to second base to start a double play in the third.
The Giants couldn’t get much going against Brown, but once they finally led off an inning with a base runner, they acted aggressively. Jung Hoo Lee singled, got the steal sign and his first attempt of the year was a success. The Giants lined out twice, and Lee advanced no farther, but the stolen base was a feather in his cap after he’d taken off several times on this trip in Colorado and Milwaukee only to trot back after the pitch was fouled off.
“Hopefully this is the start of something,” Lee said through Korean interpreter Justin Han.
It was a continuation, at least. Lee had two of the Giants’ five hits and extended his hitting streak to 14 games in which he’s batting .500 (27-for-54). It’s the most hits by a Giant over a 14-game span since Buster Posey collected 27 hits from Aug. 27 to Sept. 12, 2014. Lee’s streak is the longest active run in the major leagues and the longest in Lee’s three seasons since he came over from the Korea Baseball Organization, where he won two batting titles. With his average up to .324, tied with teammate Luis Arraez for fourth among major-league players, he’s put himself in the early hunt for another batting crown.
“I feel like the titles are always decided on your last game when you play 162 games, so I don’t really want to be happy about it right now,” Lee said. “I just want to be consistent with how I’m hitting now and then see where I’m at at the end of the season.”
Lee is on his third wave of hitting coaches with the Giants, and all of them have tried to impress some version of the same message on him: Just because you can make contact on a pitch doesn’t mean you should swing at it. That message might be starting to stick. Lee, who doesn’t like to divulge much about his hitting strategies, revealed that he used his 10-day stint on the injured list to experiment with the Trajekt system and stand in against virtual pitchers. Han would randomly call up different opponents, pitch types and locations. Lee didn’t swing a bat. His only task was to call off whether they were balls or strikes.
“It helped out a lot,” Lee said. “When I was a rookie my sophomore and junior years in the KBO, not my best years, (I would) watch a lot of videos, and that’s how I improved on hitting. A lot of that is helping out right now, for sure.”
The Giants took the lead in the ninth when Lee singled, went from first to third on designated hitter Bryce Eldridge’s single to right field and scored on Matt Chapman’s sacrifice fly. Before Chapman stepped to the plate, though, Vitello made one extra move that had cascading consequences. He sent Jonah Cox to pinch run for Eldridge and gave the newly promoted rookie, who stole 27 bases in 34 attempts for Double-A Richmond, the green light to run.
Cox got a tremendous jump while stealing second base, which effectively freed up Chapman’s mind from any apprehension about hitting into a potential inning-ending double play.
The cascading effects? The Giants put Cox in center field, moved Drew Gilbert to left and took their leading home run hitter, Casey Schmitt, out of the game. Because Cox had entered for Eldridge, Vitello also sacrificed the DH. Taking out two of the Giants’ most productive hitters and giving up the DH, all for a pinch-running advantage and a defensive upgrade in the ninth? It was a gutsy move, and a decisive one.
It turned into a questionable move when Crow-Armstrong forced extra innings, Schmitt’s spot came up with one out, and instead of their most productive bat, the Giants had to send up pinch hitter Buddy Kennedy. Kennedy worked a walk, but Rafael Devers, who homered in the sixth inning, watched a third strike and Arraez ended a feisty at-bat with a groundout that ended the top half of the 10th inning.
Would Vitello, with the benefit of hindsight, rethink the decisions he made in the top of the ninth?
“If we were at home, it might be a little different,” said Vitello, who praised Schmitt’s progress as a newbie in left field but wanted his best defenders on the grass in the ninth. “The spot we want to be in is to finish that ninth inning. We’d be thinking about it a lot differently if a flare falls in or a base hit to left and we’ve got to throw a guy out at the plate.”
That’s not how it turned out. The Giants drew a line in the sand, and Crow-Armstrong cleared it, along with seven or eight rows of the right-field bleachers.
But it’s hard to fault any of Vitello’s decisions in the late innings. A manager isn’t so different from his players. You want them to act a certain way: decisive and undaunted.