Yeah, ummm…, the Giants didn’t win this one.
If you watched the whole game, I’m sorry, but the writing was on the wall pretty much from the National Anthem.
The Padres are the hot team. They’ve got something to play for in terms of the postseason. The Giants are a loosely affiliated gaggle of guys. They have Robbie Ray — for now, at least — and he pitched Thursday, so… someone else had to touch the baseball. The pitching corps drew straws, Carson Whisenhunt got the short one, and after the Giants went down swinging against San Diego’s opener, Bradgley Rodriguez, he threw one pitch to Fernando Tatis and knew how this game was gonna go.
Advertisement
View Link
It wasn’t that Tatis punched it over the wall and Whisenhunt and the Giants were immediately down a run (that would come soon enough). Giving up a solo shot there maybe would’ve been better. If you’re a pitcher with some mental fortitude you can wipe the memory of that solo homer pretty quickly: first pitch, bad pitch, got lucky, back in the wind-up, lotta game left. Whisenhunt wasn’t so lucky. Tatis hung over his shoulder, sat in his peripheries, as a constant reminder and stressor that would last the entirety of his outing.
What was so dispiriting about Tatis’s double was how his bat didn’t just make contact with the ball — it swallowed it whole before spitting it into the right-center gap at 108 MPH. The fastball Whisenhunt threw too — it was like he knew it was coming, and the fact that it was off the plate away didn’t seem to concern him either. Whatever it was and wherever it was located, he was going to drive it. The relationship dynamics became abundantly clear: Whisenhunt may hold baseball, but Tatis, and the rest of the Padres hitters, were in control.
Luis Rengifo dug into the box with a similarly aggressive game plan. Look for the fastball early in the count and pounce. Whisenhunt obliged, as if he was taking requests, serving up another first pitch heater that Rengifo had no problem dumping into the outfield for another single.
Advertisement
Two pitches in, and the Padres had claimed the plate as their own. Whisenhunt became understandably anxious around the zone. Like a dog with a shock collar testing the border of their domain, the moment he released the baseball, he winced in pain.
San Diego scored two runs in the 1st — not a soul-crushing deficit, but tonally, the number on the scoreboard loomed large. Whisenhunt felt winged. He needed to adjust. He threw just one four-seam fastball in the 2nd. He started using the sinker and slider more, and working his signature change-up into at-bats quicker. That helped a little, but Padres batters kept turning into runners. Those stressors bent the game to their will. After a pair of singles, they scored their third run on an odd 3-6 double play in the 3rd that ended the inning, but because Rafael Devers fielded the grounder on top of first base, the play at second became a tag play, not a force, leaving the inning’s door open for Jackson Merrill to sneak through right before it closed.
View Link
In the 4th, number 9 hitter Jase Bowen delivered the knock-out blow by annihilating a slider for the Padres’ fourth run. Whisenhunt wobbled on the mound for two more batters, but walked them both before Tony Vitello mercifully led him back to the dugout to watch Ty France add two more runs to his pitching line with a two-out single. Whisenhunt allowed 6 earned on 7 hits and 4 walks over 3.1 innings pitched.
Advertisement
By the end of the 4th, a dozen Padres had reached base. As for the Giants? Just one.
Christian Koss rolled a two-out single into left off southpaw Yuki Matsui. That proved to be half of San Francisco’s entire offensive output in the evening. Matsui responded by baffling the never baffled Luis Arraez with an elevated slider to end the 3rd.
After the 4th, the contest, if it could be called one, was essentially laid to rest. Down 6 runs with just a single single to their name, the Giants line-up dutifully laid down in the hole that had been dug. The rest of the game was spent burying them.
Germán Márquez did most of the shoveling. The veteran pitcher previously of Colorado, who has boasted a 6+ ERA in each of his last two seasons, took over for Matsui and pitched five scoreless innings. He allowed just a single and a walk, earning a save in a game that the Padres had won in the 1st inning.
Read the full article here