SAN FRANCISCO — There’s not much Bruce Bochy hasn’t seen in his 10 years managing the Giants. He has the perspective of three championship runs, and Sunday gave him 800 wins’ worth of perspective.
That’s plenty for Bochy to reflect upon, and realize how emblematic the Giants’ walk-off win was. Both of his entire tenure with the team, and specifically this year’s group.
“It was appropriate to have this kind of game, a torturous game,” Bochy said, leaning on an old catchphrase. “It looked like we had things under control, and then things started to get away from us.”
The Giants blew three leads. relied on two bench players to string together a ninth-inning rally, and still won. Three pillars that represent the last decade of Giants baseball pretty well.
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Conor Gillaspie stroked a ninth-inning double with Ramiro Peña on second base, and the Giants (49-28) spilled onto the field to celebrate their seventh walk-off of the season. The 8-7 victory was the Giants’ 49th of the season, catapulting them atop the National League in wins. The recipe was almost entirely familiar, Johnny Cueto’s (11-1, 2.42 ERA) six runs notwithstanding.
Angel Pagan scored three runs in his 4-for-5 game, asserting himself as the lineup’s catalyst once again. It’s a role he’s long been familiar with since the Giants acquired him in 2012, but this season’s provided a new hole for him to fill. Denard Span unseated Pagan atop the lineup, forcing him into unfamiliar spots.
But with Span’s month-long slump stretching into Sunday, Pagan essentiallt served as the team’s leadoff hitter from the No. 2 spot. He hasn’t missed a beat since coming off the DL, hitting .355 from four different spots in the order.
“I always tell Bochy I’m in my motorhome,” Pagan said, “ready to contribute from anywhere in the lineup.
“Any spot that I’m in, I’m just going to go up there with the best approach possible.”
Pagan reached base in three of the four innings the Giants scored in, rallies that leaned primarily on singles, walks and hit batsmen. Phillies starter Aaron Nola plunked three Giants in three innings, stirring up the Giants and Cueto. They scored four times in the third inning, punctuated by back-to-back hit by pitches to Peña and Gillaspie.
That helped the Giants. Who actually hurt them was Cueto, who retired two hitters on three pitches to start the fourth inning, but retaliated by pegging Maikel Franco. Warnings were issued, and that’s when Cueto undid himself.
“The umpire that changed the whole rhythm I had going,” he said through a translator
The right-hander didn’t get a couple of close pitches, allowing the Phillies to score a pair of two-out runs in both the fourth and fifth innings. But the Giants picked up Cueto. First with a Brandon Crawford go-ahead single in the sixth, and again when Pagan smashed a seventh-inning double after Cueto gave up a home run.
That was the last breath of offense from the regular starters. Then the dial turned to Peña in a tied ninth inning. He skied the ball deep down the right-field line, hesitating out of the box because he thought it was foul.
“Then I saw it start come back toward the line,” Peña said, “and I was like, ‘OK, I gotta go.’”
He skidded into second base with a triple-turned-double, as Bochy put it after the game, and set Gillaspie up for his walk-off. Neither hitter began the season on the Opening Day roster, but that didn’t matter on Sunday afternoon. They were the tandem to clinch win No. 49.
That’s more than a few shy of Bochy’s mark, and he admitted he might not be able to take 1,783 more of these games to become the Giants’ all-time win leader
Said Bochy: “I don’t think John McGraw has anything to worry about, I know that.”