The Bullpen Gave It Back Twice and Devers and Eldridge Won It Anyway

Another ninth inning handed straight back, another lead gone in the tenth, and the two guys this franchise is actually built around would not let it end. Giants 5, Cardinals 4 in eleven.

Three hours and twenty nine minutes. That's what it cost, on a Monday night, in the second week of September, for a sixty win team playing out the string. I watched every pitch of it and I'd do it again tomorrow.

We won 5 to 4 in eleven innings. It should have been finished three separate times before that, and each time somebody in a Giants uniform found a new way to hand it back, and each time Rafael Devers or Bryce Eldridge went up there and took it again. I'm going to be honest about which half of that I want to talk about.

Devers and Eldridge are a real one two punch and I want them together for a decade

First inning. Turner Hill on, Devers lines a double to right, run scores, 1 to 0 before I'd finished pouring anything. Third inning, Eldridge sac fly, 2 to 0. Fifth inning, Devers on second, Eldridge doubles to center, 3 to 0.

Devers finished 2 for 3 with two walks. Eldridge finished 2 for 4 with three driven in. Every Giants run through five innings came from those two, back to back, one after the other, and it happens so often now that I've stopped being surprised by it and started being greedy about it.

Devers is at 35 homers and 92 driven in with an .864 OPS, in a season where the team around him has won sixty games. Eldridge is a rookie first baseman with 15 homers, 48 driven in and an .810 OPS in 99 games, and he is twenty two years old.

You know what that is. That's the middle of a lineup. That's the thing this organization has been pretending it had ever since Posey stopped catching. Put a couple of real arms behind those two and I don't want to hear another word about a rebuild.

The ninth. Again. Always the ninth.

Logan Webb gave us six innings, three hits, eight strikeouts, one run on a Burleson homer. Trent Harris got through the seventh with two punchouts. Up 3 to 2, six outs to go, and I'm sitting in a chair I hadn't moved out of since 5:10 doing the thing where you pretend you're relaxed.

Dylan Smith comes in.

You already know.

Baez singles. Saggese singles. A bunt pops up for the first out, which felt like a gift, and then Smith walks Bryan Torres to load them up. Fermin lifts one to Turner Hill in left, Baez trots home, 3 to 3, and I said a word my mother would not like.

That's the blown save. Another one. I have genuinely lost count and I refuse to go look it up, because looking it up would ruin a night we actually won.

The tenth was somehow worse. Burleson starts on second as the free runner, Walker grounds him over, Leo Bernal drops a fly into right, and now we're losing 4 to 3 in our own park with a lineup that had gone quiet for four straight innings.

Then Eldridge, and the worst double play I've seen in a month

They walked Devers on purpose to get to the rookie. Of course they did. Eldridge lined the second pitch he liked into center, Hill scored, 4 to 4, and I was standing.

Cox bunts them over. They walk Jung Hoo Lee on purpose too. Bases loaded, one out, winning run ninety feet away, Drew Gilbert up. This is the part where a team with sixty wins finds out what it is, and I had already decided we were going to score, which is exactly the kind of thing I say out loud in an empty room in September and then have to live with about four seconds later.

Gilbert chops one straight down. Catcher grabs it, steps on the plate, throws to first. Devers out at home, Gilbert out at first, inning over. We challenged it. It stood. I sat back down in a way that made noise.

How do you lose a game like that and then not lose it? Ask Jason Foley, who threw two innings on nothing but nerve, gave up the tenth inning run and then put a zero up in the eleventh with a walk sitting in the middle of it.

Shay Whitcomb, hitting .152, ends it

Nate Furman starts the eleventh on second. Drew Cavanaugh, a catcher who had struck out twice already, lays down a bunt and gets him to third.

Up comes Shay Whitcomb. He's batting .152 on the year with three homers and a .506 OPS, a guy who is on this roster because it's September and there's nobody else. He'd already singled twice tonight. He grounds one to short, Saggese has no play at the plate, Furman comes home, and 25,833 people who had been sitting there three and a half hours made the kind of noise you forget that ballpark can still make.

Whitcomb went 2 for 5 with the game winner.

I love this stupid sport.

60 and 85 now. Nothing about that number is good and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But we beat a club that's still technically breathing at 72 and 73, we did it with our two best hitters carrying the entire thing, and the guy hitting .152 drove in the winner.

The bullpen will do this to me again this week. I've known that since April, the same way I knew it when the eighth inning took a six shutout inning start away from us in Queens a day earlier. What I didn't know was whether anybody in that lineup would keep standing back up.

They did. Two of them, over and over, for eleven innings, in a game almost nobody outside the 415 watched. Devers and Eldridge. Write those two names down.

More coverage: Giants · MLB · Bay Area Sports Blog home