SAN FRANCISCO — Gabe Kapler had his share of philosophies that went against the grain or defied baseball convention or failed to find widespread adoption within the clubhouse. There are plenty of reasons why his tenure managing the Giants ended after three seasons.
But there also were times when Kapler was really, really onto something.
He believed in playing hard to the final out. He believed in keeping the pedal to the metal even in blowout games. He believed that there were residual impacts to making an opponent throw more pitches, deplete more resources and potentially take more options off the table for the next day. Maybe it’s not worth disrupting the gentlemanly concept of competition to bunt for base hits when you’re up 10 runs. Maybe Kapler believed in taking the concept too far. But his point holds: sometimes beating a last-place team isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to blow them out of the water.
The Chicago White Sox arrived on the shores of McCovey Cove this week having lost 24 of 27 games. They’d been outscored by 81 runs over that span.
The Giants did not blow them out of the water.
Oh, sure, the Giants won the three-game series. They squeaked out a 5-3 victory on Monday. They won 4-1 on Tuesday. But they used enough of their frontline bullpen fuel while protecting those two victories that neither closer Ryan Walker nor prime setup man Tyler Rogers were available on Wednesday. And the residual impact might have prevented the Giants from completing a sweep that might have been a prerequisite to their faint hopes of contending for a wild-card berth.
Right-hander Spencer Bivens entered with the bases loaded and the score tied in the ninth inning and allowed a pair of singles in a 6-2 loss as the Giants wasted Logan Webb’s eight strong innings and tumbled back to one game over .500.
Korey Lee gives the White Sox a 9th inning lead! pic.twitter.com/FBXwiOj2mz
— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) August 21, 2024
“Obviously we’re at a point in the season when we can’t let games slip away,” said Webb, who pitched through a respiratory illness and other nagging injuries that put him on a predetermined pitch count. “It was a much-needed win today to get the sweep and we came out flat. Plain and simple.”
There’s blame to go around. Start with this: Giants hitters scored 11 runs in three games against a pitching staff that has been more or less coin-operated all season. The Giants could be forgiven for struggling against Garrett Crochet, who leads major-league starters in strikeout ratio, but the White Sox are throttling the left-hander’s innings in the second half. The afternoon was wide open for the taking after the Giants scored a pair of runs against Crochet in the fourth to tie the score at 2 and drive him from the game.
But the Giants couldn’t touch four White Sox relievers and didn’t get another runner into scoring position until the ninth, when they were facing a four-run deficit.
“Offensively we’ve got to do a little bit more,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “It puts a lot of pressure on (Webb) when he’s got to keep going out there in a tie game.”
This is more than a three-game problem, of course. The Giants simply haven’t been a strong enough team to win with laughing gas. And the issue is getting worse, not better. Among their last nine victories, they’ve managed a winning margin of four runs or more just twice — and one of those came in a 10-inning game.
The impacts on the bullpen have been what you’d expect. Tyler Rogers leads the major leagues with 64 appearances, and entering Wednesday, he had thrown in three consecutive games over a four-day span. Walker is next with 63 appearances; Melvin tapped him for two innings on Sunday when the team had to go to the 10th to win at Oakland. So when Melvin had to use Walker to record a save on Tuesday, he knew he wouldn’t have the right-hander at his disposal on Wednesday.
And what about the decision to pull Webb after eight innings and 96 pitches, especially when he’ll get an extra day before his next start? It wasn’t much of a decision at all, Melvin said. Webb is bearing the brunt of all these close games, too. He’s leading the major leagues in innings for the second consecutive season. No pitcher compiles that kind of workload without some degree of wear and tear.
If the Giants fancied themselves a playoff team, then they needed to do more to reduce all those residual impacts.
In the simpler analysis, they also just needed to win more games. After Webb walked off to a standing ovation, he went into the clubhouse and caught some of the broadcast. He heard the announcers talking about the fact that the Giants have had 10 opportunities this season to complete a series sweep. They’ve lost in eight of those 10 games.
“Those come back to haunt you,” Webb said.
The Giants have swept just two series all season. They haven’t put together a winning streak of more than four games. No wonder the .500 mark keeps exacting such a strong gravitational pull.
When you put games away, when you run up the score, then you preserve resources and put yourself in a more advantageous position to win the next day. When you don’t put games away, then even the most outclassed opponent can still beat you with a coin flip in the ninth inning. And if you flip a coin enough times, then the ratio of heads to tails becomes almost indistinguishable. You’re almost bound to be a .500 team.
“It feels like every game is close for us,” Melvin said. “It’d be nice to score a bunch of runs and not have to use some of these (relievers). The two of them are tops in the league in appearances. There will be days they’re not available.”
And yet …
“Look, we felt we were in a good spot today to get through it,” Melvin said. “I felt good about Bivens. He’s done a nice job for us. He gets to 0-2 (against Korey Lee) and can’t get the last strike on him. The last pitch was probably more middle than he wanted it.”
Even if Webb weren’t dealing with some physical issues, taking him out after eight innings would have been a defensible decision. The White Sox had lefties due up in three of the first five spots in the order to begin the ninth. Melvin tapped Giants left-hander Erik Miller, who has held lefties to a .141 average and hasn’t given up a left-on-left home run all season, to start the inning. But Miller issued a one-out walk to Luis Robert Jr., who stole second base. With the base open, Miller pitched carefully to Andrew Benintendi while issuing a walk. Then Andrew Vaughn won a Cal vs. Stanford matchup when he grounded a single that shortstop Tyler Fitzgerald lunged to keep on the infield that loaded the bases.
After Miller struck out Gavin Sheets on five consecutive sliders, Bivens entered to face Lee. His 1-2 pitch was a fastball over the plate that Lee served up the middle.
Melvin didn’t want to shove Jordan Hicks or Landen Roupp into a bases-loaded situation for the first time. He couldn’t use Walker or Rogers. And there was one other right-hander he didn’t have at his disposal: deposed closer Camilo Doval, who was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento on Aug. 8. When a team options its closer, then it forces every other reliever to move up in the pecking order. A team cannot make a move that consequential without leaving its own residual impacts.
Doval is eligible to return on Saturday in Seattle. Melvin indicated that Doval would rejoin the team at some point on the team’s six-game road trip to play the Mariners and Milwaukee Brewers.
It’s the beginning of a rigorous schedule to end the season. The Mariners are enduring their own offensive struggles, but they have the best rotation in the American League and so the Giants likely will need to compete yet again in tight and tense fashion in order to win the series. The Brewers have been just as adept at run prevention while all but sewing up the NL Central. It won’t get easier from there, either. The Giants’ schedule in September is studded with teams in playoff position.
So the coaches and players understood that they needed to take advantage of this soft pocket against teams like the A’s and White Sox — not just by winning series, but by sweeping them. Preferably in convincing fashion.
Instead, the Giants left you even more convinced that they’re not capable of more than they’ve shown.
“This was an opportunity for us to get three above (.500),” Melvin said. “It’s a big swing from potentially three to back to one again. And now we’re going on the road. We really felt we’d end this homestand more than one game above .500.”
“We’ve just got to bring it every day,” Webb said. “The effort we had today was not great. That’s me, too, right? I gave up the leadoff triple (when the White Sox scored in the first inning). So we all have to put our heads down and we have to win every game. You can’t say that, right? But you’ve got to think that way.”
(Photo of Miller: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
