Guardians 8, Giants 1: Bryce Eldridge Hit His Fourteenth in Cleveland and That Was the Entire San Francisco Giants Offense

One run. One. A twenty one year old put a baseball four hundred and five feet into the night in the second inning and the other eight men in that lineup gave us nothing for the remaining seven and a half.

One run. That's what we scored on Tuesday night in Cleveland. One. Bryce Eldridge hit a baseball four hundred and five feet to dead centre field in the second inning, and if you got up during the fourth to make a sandwich you missed every single thing the San Francisco Giants offence did in three hours of professional baseball. Eight to one. Seven hits. Two errors. And a game that was effectively finished eleven pitches into the bottom of the first.

I am so tired of typing sentences like that one.

Start with the kid, because the kid is the only reason any of us watched past the fourth. Second inning, nobody on, and Eldridge got a pitch out over the plate and hit it a hundred and four miles an hour to the middle of the ballpark. Four hundred and five feet. Number fourteen. He's twenty one years old. He has played eighty two big league games, he's hitting .250 with a .343 on base and a .445 slug, and he has walked forty two times, which is a thing most twenty one year olds in this league can't do because they are too busy swinging at sliders in the other batter’s box. Two for four on the night. He looks like a hitter. He looks like the only hitter.

That isn't a compliment to this roster. That's an indictment of it. A rookie first baseman is carrying the only watchable at bats on a team with a hundred and twenty five games in the books, and the Eldridge column has been the argument on this site since July. He's going to be a problem for the rest of the league in about eighteen months. Right now he's a problem for us, because every night he does something and nobody around him does anything at all.

Now Carson Whisenhunt, and I want to be fair to him for exactly one sentence before I'm not. He's a young starter on a bad team in a lost August. Fine. Nine hits in four innings. Seven runs. Twenty seven outs are available in a baseball game and he recorded twelve of them while the Cleveland Guardians, who aren't the 1927 Yankees, hit line drive after line drive after line drive.

It was over in the first. Kwan and Ramírez get on, and Jo Adell hits a three run home run, his nineteenth, into the left field seats before anybody in that ballpark had finished sitting down. Second inning, Kwan and Ramírez get on again, and Adell singles them both in. Fourth inning, Adell singles again, Drew Gilbert kicks the ball around out in left, and everybody moves up a base for free. Then a ground out brings in another one.

Jo Adell drove in six runs by himself. The San Francisco Giants drove in one. One man in a Cleveland uniform had six times the offensive night that our entire roster managed. Sit with that for a second, because I've been sitting with it since the fourth inning and it hasn't gotten any better.

Foster Griffin. Look him up. A journeyman left hander went six innings against us and gave up one run, and the one run was a solo homer from a twenty one year old rookie. Five hits, two walks, six strikeouts. Then Cleveland ran three relievers out there for the last three innings and we did nothing against them either. One hit. Nine innings, seven hits, one run, against a pitching staff nobody outside Ohio could name.

The rest of the lineup, in the order I got angry at them. Rafael Devers went nought for four with three strikeouts. Victor Bericoto, nought for four. Andrew Knizner is hitting .000. Buddy Kennedy is hitting .111. Christian Koss is at .202. That isn't a slump, that's a roster. And then the two errors, because of course there were two errors, because this team has spent all summer finding new ways to give the other side extra outs and extra bases and extra innings.

Here's the part that makes me want to put a brick through something. Trent Harris and Reiver Sanmartin came in and threw four innings and gave up one run between them. Five strikeouts from Harris in two innings. The bullpen was fine. The bullpen has been the villain of this entire season and on Tuesday it was fine, and it didn't matter even slightly, because by the time they got the ball the game had already been handed over.

Fifty one and seventy four. Thirty seven games left in a season that stopped meaning anything at the deadline. This team is going to lose ninety something games, in a year where the manager was a first time hire, the best hitters got traded, and the one genuinely thrilling thing on the whole roster is a first baseman who hasn't been old enough to drink for very long.

I'm not doing the Vitello rant tonight. The Vitello case is still there and I still believe every word of it, but you don't manage your way out of nine hits in four innings and seven hits in nine. That's the roster. That's where the rebuild actually stands, and it's why an eighteen year old shortstop in Low A matters more to me right now than anything happening in the actual major league standings, which is a miserable thing to admit in August.

Watch the kid. That's the whole instruction for the rest of this season. Watch Eldridge, count the home runs, and try not to think about the other eight spots. The rest of the year is in the season hub, the roster is on the depth chart page, and everything else is on the Giants hub.

And if you want to feel better about it, don't look across the bay, because the Athletics handed a two run ninth inning lead back to Kansas City on the same night. It was that kind of evening for baseball around here.

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