Two Swings and Landen Roupp Was All We Needed

Six hits, two of them homers, six shutout innings from a starter nobody outside the 415 is talking about, and one more ninth that had to get scary first. Giants 2, Cardinals 1.

Two hours and twenty five minutes. After what Monday night put us through, that felt like a favor.

Giants 2, Cardinals 1. Six hits. Two of them left the yard, back to back innings, and that was the entire offense. Landen Roupp threw six shutout innings, three relievers got the rest of it home, and I want to talk about the guy in the middle of it, because I don't think enough people around here have noticed what he's turning into.

Landen Roupp walked four guys and it never mattered

Two hits. That's what St. Louis got off him in six innings. Two.

He walked four, which is more than you want, and there were a couple of innings where I was doing the math on his pitch count out loud, which is a thing I do now, apparently, alone, in a room, in September. Eighty one pitches through six. Forty seven of them strikes. Nobody scored.

Roupp sits at 4.00 on the year and that number keeps coming down if he keeps handing us this. He isn't overpowering anybody. He got two strikeouts all night. He just kept putting the ball where the Cardinals couldn't do a thing with it, and every time he got in his own way with a walk he pitched right back out of it.

I've watched this rotation come apart all season. Webb carries it, Whisenhunt has good nights and bad ones, and everything after that has been a coin flip. Roupp winning a 2 to 1 game in September against a club that's still technically breathing is not nothing. Write the name down.

Eldridge, then Koss, and then the bats went to sleep

First inning. Bryce Eldridge turns on one and puts it 389 feet into left center. Number sixteen. He's twenty two years old.

Second inning. Christian Koss, hitting .219, in the lineup because it's September, drives one 373 feet to left. Number four.

That's the game. Right there, inside twenty minutes, before I'd finished settling in.

After that, nothing. Quinn Mathews retired most of what he saw the rest of the way, Gordon Graceffo threw two clean innings behind him, and this lineup managed four singles over the last seven frames and never got a runner past second base again. Devers 0 for 4. Knizner 0 for 4. It was not pretty and I'm not going to dress it up.

Koss finished 2 for 3 and was the best hitter on the field. I don't know what to do with that information either.

The ninth had to get hard, because of course it did

Roupp hands it off with a 2 to 0 lead. Raymond Sanmartin gets a clean seventh. Carson Seymour walks two in the eighth and I stood up, because at this point I've been trained.

Joel Kuhnel got the last out of the eighth and came back for the ninth. Saggese grounded out. Winn flied out. One out to go, two run lead, and I actually let myself breathe.

Then Nathan Church lines a single to left. Then Bryan Torres grounds a single through the right side, Church scores, 2 to 1, tying run standing on first base.

I said something out loud. I'm not writing it down.

Ivan Herrera grounded to Koss, Koss threw across to Devers, and that was it. Kuhnel gets the save. My blood pressure will recover sometime around Thursday.

27,787 on a Tuesday for a team that has lost 85 games

Seventy two degrees, partly cloudy, a ten mile an hour wind doing whatever it felt like. Almost twenty eight thousand people came out to watch a 61 win club play a 72 win club in the second week of September. That tells you something about this town that I don't think gets said enough.

61 and 85. That's the record. It's bad. It's been bad since June and this season ended a long time ago in every way that shows up in a standings table.

But that's two straight over St. Louis after the eleven inning thing on Monday, and the shape of it could not have been more different. Monday we needed everything anybody had. Tuesday we needed two swings and a starter who wouldn't break.

Eldridge has sixteen homers. He's gone deep in back to back games. Keep watching him. He's the reason to turn this thing on in September, and he's going to be the reason to turn it on in April.

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