Willy Adames Grand Slam Powers Giants Past Mariners 7-0 to Open the Second Half
A grand slam off the bat at 106 mph, a Bryce Eldridge bomb, seven shutout innings from Landen Roupp, and a shutout in Seattle. If you wanted a sign that the second half might be different, we just got one.
I have spent a lot of these columns being honest about how hard this Giants season has been to watch. So let me be just as honest now that they gave me something to smile about: this was a good night. A really good night. San Francisco walked into T-Mobile Park out of the All-Star break, ran into a division contender in the Seattle Mariners, and left with a clean 7-0 shutout. No drama, no late collapse, no wasted starting pitching. Just a full nine innings of the kind of baseball we have been begging this team to play. If the second half is going to look like anything, let it look like this.
The night belonged to Willy Adames, and it is about time. He has taken his share of grief this year, some of it from me, because a big free-agent bat is supposed to change games and for long stretches he has not. Well, on Friday he changed one. He came up with the bases loaded and hammered his seventh career grand slam, a laser off the bat at 106 mph to right-center that was never in doubt. It was his second slam of the season, and get this, the eighth grand slam by the Giants this year, the most this franchise has hit since 2015. That was a championship-era roster. This one is climbing back into the light, and the guy we paid to carry the lineup just carried it.
What made it feel bigger than one swing is that Adames was not doing it alone. Bryce Eldridge got there first, turning on a pitch and driving a two-run homer, his ninth of the year, over the fence at a park that does not give hitters anything. The kid keeps showing up, keeps looking like the middle-of-the-order bat this organization has promised us he would become, and every time he goes deep it feels less like a flash and more like a foundation. Watching Eldridge and Adames both leave the yard in the same game is exactly the picture the front office has been selling. On Friday, for once, the picture was real.
And none of it means anything without pitching, which is why Landen Roupp is the quiet hero of this one. Seven innings. No runs. Two hits. That is an ace's line at a hostile ballpark against a lineup that can hurt you, and Roupp did it with the kind of calm that this rotation has badly needed behind Logan Webb. His second strong start of July drops his ERA to a respectable number and his underlying stuff looks even better than the ERA. When a young arm gives you seven zeros and hands a shutout to the bullpen with the lead already fat, you do not just win the game, you win the next couple of days too. A rested pen and a starter you can trust every fifth day is how good teams string wins together.
Even the little things went right, and I want to give the rookie his due. Drew Cavanaugh reached base four times behind the plate, two walks and two singles, and threw a runner out for good measure. That is a complete game from a catcher, the sort of unglamorous night that never makes the highlight package but absolutely wins baseball games. His on-base number keeps ticking up, and a catcher who can control the running game and grind out at-bats is worth his weight in October. Add it up and the Giants got contributions top to bottom, which is the part that has been missing all year.
This was the third win in a row, and the fourth in five games, which means the team that limped toward the break is walking out of it with a little life. I am not going to sit here and tell you the whole season just flipped on one shutout in Seattle. The math is the math, and there is a lot of ground to make up. But momentum is a real thing in this sport, and there is a difference between a team that shows up hoping not to embarrass itself and a team that shows up expecting to win. On Friday night, for the first time in a while, this looked like the second kind.
Credit Tony Vitello too, because his message coming out of the break was to treat the second half like a fresh start, and the group actually played like they heard him. New leaf, clean slate, go take it. That is easy to say and hard to do, and yet there they were, jumping on the Mariners early and never letting them breathe. A manager can only set the tone. The players have to answer it, and this time they did, in front of a national audience, against a good team, on the road.
So no complaints from me tonight. I have written the funerals for this season more than once, and I will write more of them if this team earns it. But I will also give credit when it is due, and it is due here. Adames finally looked like the bat we paid for. Eldridge keeps growing up in front of us. Roupp gave us seven zeros. The rookie catcher did all the dirty work. And the Giants opened the second half with a shutout instead of a shrug. Do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and we will talk about what it means. For one night, it just meant we were fun to watch, and honestly, that was more than enough.
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