Gavin Williams Struck Out Eleven, the Giants Lost the Finale, and They Still Left Cleveland Having Won the Series
Three run first, a Willy Adames homer that travelled four hundred and eighteen feet, five hits total, and a road series won by a team that's twenty four and a half games out. Both of those things are true.
You take the series. That's the honest headline here, and it's the one nobody around here's in the mood to write, because taking a road series in the third week of August at fifty two and seventy five is like winning an argument you already lost in April. But they did take it. Eight to one on Tuesday, one to nothing on Wednesday behind a shutout that had no business happening, and then Thursday the bill came due in the first inning and never got any smaller.
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 2 |
| Cleveland | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | X | 5 | 9 | 0 |
The first inning was the game. Landen Roupp got three outs eventually and it cost him three runs to do it, on a Jose Ramirez single, a Nolan Lowe sacrifice fly and a Patrick Bailey base hit. Three nothing before the Giants had swung at anything that mattered. Against a pitcher having the night Gavin Williams was about to have, that isn't a deficit, that's a verdict.
Eleven strikeouts in five and two thirds. Williams struck out eleven of the seventeen outs he recorded. Read that again. San Francisco put five hits on the board all night and four of them came off him, and one of those four went four hundred and eighteen feet to right center in the fourth with Rafael Devers standing on base, which is the only genuinely fun thing that happened.
Willy Adames is doing this again. Two run homer, no doubt about it off the bat, and it accounted for the entire offensive output. That's the second straight series where he has been the only reliable source of hard contact in the middle of this lineup. It's also the second straight series where being the only reliable source of hard contact has been worth exactly one loss and one win.
| Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landen Roupp, SF (L, 7 and 13) | 5.1 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Sam Hentges, SF | 0.2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Carson Seymour, SF | 1.0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| JT Brubaker, SF | 1.0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Gavin Williams, CLE (W, 12 and 7) | 5.2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 11 |
| Cade Smith, CLE (S, 32) | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
Roupp is now seven and thirteen. Four walks in five and a third is the part that should bother you more than the four runs, because only three of them were earned and the two errors behind him didn't help. He has been serviceable for long stretches of a season nobody is watching, and he has a record that makes him look like a disaster, which is roughly the experience of every Giants starter this year.
The bullpen was fine, again. Hentges, Carson Seymour and JT Brubaker covered the last two and two thirds and gave up one unearned run between them. The relief corps has quietly stopped being the problem, which matters, because for about six weeks in the middle of the summer it was the entire problem. We got into that in the Colorado wreck, back when they were handing away thirteen run nights.
Where the season actually is. Fifty two and seventy five. Last in the National League West. Twenty four and a half games behind the Dodgers, which isn't a gap, it's a different sport being played in the same division. There are thirty five games left and the only real question is which of the young players get to spend September finding out whether they can do this.
What's worth watching from here. Bryce Eldridge had a hit and is still the reason to turn the thing on, and we made that argument at length in the Eldridge column. Devers scored the only run he was involved in. Josuar Gonzalez is eighteen and playing shortstop somewhere in this system, and an eighteen year old shortstop is the piece on that. The list of things to care about in a fifty two and seventy five season is short, but it isn't empty, and it's all on the season hub.
And the honest part. Winning two of three in Cleveland in August is a nice night for the people who still travel to see this team and means nothing to the standings. What it does tell you is that the pitching, which was supposed to be the one thing carrying this roster, is still functional: one run allowed on Wednesday, four on Thursday with only three earned. The offense is the thing that has been broken since May, and where the rebuild actually stands covers exactly how long the repair is going to take.
Across the way, it was worse. The A's got swept in four in Kansas City, and the sweep in Kansas City is the receipt on that one. Two teams from this corner of the country, both of them out of it in August, one of them not even playing here any more. The rest of it lives on the Giants hub.
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