Rockies 13, Giants 7: Rafael Devers Hit His Twenty-Fifth, We Led in the Sixth, and the Pitching Staff Set Fire to the Whole Afternoon

A seven to six lead going to the sixth. Then seven unanswered to the worst team in the National League, in our building, on a Sunday, in front of thirty two thousand people who paid to watch it.

I want to be clear about what happened here, because the final score doesn't do it justice. We led this game. In the fifth inning we were winning it seven to six against the Colorado Rockies, who came into today with fifty wins, who are the worst team in the National League, who we had just beaten by six runs less than twenty four hours earlier. Rafael Devers had already hit his twenty fifth home run of the season. Eleven hits. A four run inning. And then the sixth inning started and this pitching staff handed the game over the way you hand a stranger your wallet.

Seven unanswered runs. Thirteen to seven. At home. On a Sunday. In front of thirty two thousand and sixty three people who could have done anything else with their afternoon.

Start with Devers, because it's the only thing worth being happy about. Second inning, two on, and he put one into the right field seats. Three hundred and eighty feet. Number twenty five. Kennedy and Gilbert came in ahead of him and just like that we were up five to four after being down four to one. That's a real season he's having in a park that eats left handed power for breakfast, and the Oracle Park page explains exactly how hard that's to do here. He deserves better than the three hours that followed.

Blade Tidwell walked five men in four and a third innings. Five. I don't need a pitcher to be good in August on a seventy three loss team. I genuinely don't. I need him to throw the ball over the plate against a lineup that has lost seventy four games. Six earned runs, three hits allowed, five walks. You have to work at it to give up six runs on three hits. That takes commitment.

And then the bullpen, which I'm going to describe slowly. Sam Hentges came in and gave up two. Fine. Then Jonathan Brubaker came in and didn't record a single out. Not one. Zero innings pitched, two walks, two runs. He threw a wild pitch that scored Veen to tie it, and then he hit Carrigg with a pitch, with the bases loaded, to give Colorado the lead. That's how we lost the lead in this baseball game. A wild pitch and a hit batsman. Nobody hit anything. We just gave it to them.

Then Reiver Sanmartin gave up another, and Moniak singled to left and two more scored because somebody kicked the ball around behind him, and Keaton Winn gave up two more, and by the time Brendan Sullivan hit a three run homer in the seventh the afternoon had stopped being a baseball game and become a public event. Four relievers. Two and two thirds innings. Seven earned runs.

Here's the part that actually stings. Their bullpen threw five shutout innings. Colorado's starter gave up seven runs in four innings and their relief corps, a group of men most of you couldn't pick out of a police lineup, came in and shut us out the rest of the way. Frasso, Mushinski, Herget, Agnos. Five innings, three hits, nothing. The worst team in the league has a bullpen that can hold a lead and we don't. Sit with that one.

The series. Freeland beat us Friday. Logan Webb gave us seven to one on Saturday, which was the one afternoon this weekend that felt like a professional baseball operation. And then this. We lost a home series to Colorado. In August. There are fewer than forty games left and we're fifty one and seventy three, which puts us exactly one game ahead of the team that just came into our park and did that to us.

What I'm not going to do is blame Vitello for this one. I've spent most of this summer doing exactly that, and the Vitello case is still the argument I'd have on any other day. But you can't manage your way out of a reliever who can't find the plate. He put four arms in the game and every one of them made it worse. At some point the roster is the problem, and the roster is what the state of the rebuild has been about since the deadline.

What it means, if it means anything. Devers is going to finish with thirty or more home runs in this ballpark and almost nobody outside this city will notice. Eldridge keeps hitting. Gilbert keeps hitting. There are pieces here. And every third day something like this happens and reminds you that pieces aren't a team, and that the single most expensive thing to fix in baseball is a bullpen, and that this front office hasn't seriously tried to fix it in three years.

The rest of the season is in the season hub, the roster is on the depth chart page, and the rest is on the Giants hub. I need a minute.

Update, August 17. Tony Vitello didn't sugarcoat it afterward. He called it a junior high performance, and Buster Posey has confirmed he's back next season.

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