Two Hits. The Giants Got Two Hits in Pittsburgh and I Watched Every Pitch

Blade Tidwell walked five, six Pittsburgh pitchers combined on a two hitter, and San Francisco dropped the series to a 69 win team. It was a 12:35 start on a Thursday and I still found a way to be annoyed about it.

Two hits.

I want to sit with that for a second before anybody explains anything to me. Two hits. Against Lake Bachar and five guys I've never heard of in my life, on a Thursday afternoon, in front of eleven thousand people in Pittsburgh. Two.

You know what makes me the maddest? I watched it. All of it. On my phone, propped up against a coffee cup on my desk, sound off, because that's what a 12:35 eastern start does to you out here. I could have done literally anything else with that hour and a half. My wife asked me what I was doing and I said "nothing" because the true answer was too embarrassing.

The first inning, or, how to give a team two runs without letting them hit

Horwitz singles. Fine. That happens.

Then Blade Tidwell walks Lowe. Walks Reynolds. Bases loaded, and he walks Oneil Cruz, and a run just strolls in like it's going to get a sandwich. And then he hits Jake Mangum with a pitch and another one comes home the same way.

Two runs. One hit. I was standing up by the end of it, on a Thursday, in my own house, over a phone screen the size of a playing card, and I want you to understand nobody on that Pittsburgh team did anything. They stood there. That's it. That's the whole at bat sequence. They stood there and we handed them the game.

And then, because this team exists to make me look unreasonable, Tidwell throws four straight scoreless innings and finishes with five strikeouts and two hits allowed over five. The kid is 25. The arm's fine. He just couldn't find the plate for twenty minutes and it cost us the afternoon before I'd finished my coffee.

How many times this year. Go on. Count. I've been writing about walks on this staff since June and I'm out of ways to say it.

Then we threw the ball away, because of course we did

Sixth inning. Mangum lays down a sac bunt, Sanmartin fields it, and throws it into whatever they've got out there past first base. Cruz scores. Then Triolo hits a grounder, Furman makes the play, out at first, inning's basically over, except Pittsburgh challenges it and gets the call flipped and now Mangum's crossing the plate too.

So let me just add this up for everybody. Four Pittsburgh runs. Produced by: a walk. A hit by pitch. A throwing error. And a force out that only happened because a replay booth said so.

Not one of those is a base hit. Not one.

I can lose to a good team. I've been losing to the Dodgers my whole adult life and I've made a kind of peace with it. This is not that. Nobody beat us today. We just kept handing it over in little pieces until there wasn't any game left.

Jung Hoo Lee, and I swear nobody outside the 415 has any idea

Seventh. Cox on, Hill on, and Lee lines one into the right field corner past Reynolds and Cox scores, and I actually said something out loud at my desk. Furman grounds out to first, Hill comes home. Four to two. And for about eleven minutes I was completely gone, doing the math, thinking we've got Devers coming up again, thinking this is exactly the kind of dumb game we steal.

We did not steal it.

But that was his 28th double. Twenty eight. He's hitting .283 and he's driven in 51 runs on a lineup that hasn't scored since roughly the Fourth of July, and he has been the single most pleasant thing about this team since the break, and he does all of it without ever once being loud about it. Line drive the other way, hard out of the box, over and over, in front of nobody, for a team going nowhere. I love watching him play. That's the only unambiguously good sentence in this column.

Devers went 0 for 4 with three punchouts, and I'm only bringing it up because I have personally argued with three separate coworkers about this man's 32 homers and 83 RBI and how he's been carrying the entire offense. He has been. He just wasn't today, and on the days he isn't, we're Lee and eight guys hitting .230.

And now the part where I look at the standings, which I keep telling myself not to do

58 and 83. Twenty five back of the Dodgers. The wild card elimination number is six, which means the season is formally dead by the middle of next week whether anybody swings a bat or not.

One more thing and then I'm closing the laptop. Ryan Walker gave up the fifth run in the eighth on a sac fly and his ERA is 7.16. Seven point one six. Nineteen walks in 32 and two thirds. That was our closer. Whatever is wrong with him hasn't been fixed since May, and at this point I don't think anybody in that organization is even trying to fix it before next spring, and it drives me up a wall that we're just going to run him out there for nineteen more days and call it development.

Six Pittsburgh pitchers threw a two hitter at a major league lineup today in front of 11,578 people, which is about the population of Sausalito.

Nineteen games left. There are exactly three reasons to watch: Lee, Eldridge, and finding out which of these young arms is real. That's it. That's all I've got.

And I'll be watching every one of them, on my phone, propped against a coffee cup, telling my wife it's nothing. Cincinnati next. Ask me Friday if I care.

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