Sergio Estrada-USA TODAY Sports
Ignoring the playoffs. Ignoring the three-game losing streak that preceded it. Ignoring where this season has gone and where it is going.
For one night, the Giants played a pretty beautiful game of baseball.
San Francisco turned three double plays, Brandon Belt was tremendous, Madison Bumgarner was entertaining – and brilliant – theater and the Giants just kept scoring in an 8-3 victory over the Padres on Friday night at Oracle Park in front of 34,293.
Postseason speculation for a team that improved to 66-68 is finished, but each victory surely matters to Bruce Bochy, who himself improved to 1,992-2,012 with 28 games left in the season and his career.
Belt and Mike Yastrzemski provided the only early runs Bumgarner would need – until the Giants piled it on late – the lefty stymieing San Diego bats whenever he wasn’t barking at home-plate umpire Manny Gonzalez.
In seven strong innings, the only time Bumgarner blinked was on a Manny Machado homer in the fourth. He allowed just four hits and two walks while striking out nine, his whole arsenal working. His 16 swinging strikes were the most since June 25, when he had 17.
Since that day, the Giants are 11-2 in Bumgarner starts, a span in which, in 80 innings, he’s put up a 2.81 ERA. No one blew Farhan Zaidi away at the trade deadline, a fact that looks worse for opposing general managers every fifth day.
If there were a not-aesthetically-pleasing aspect to the game, it came when the Giants were at bat. They struck out 11 times, 10 times in five innings against starter Dinelson Lamet. Three of those were Bumgarner’s, warring more with Gonzalez than Padres hitters. After the first – where Gonzalez punched him out on an attempted checked swing – he got in Gonzalez’s ear. After the second, a called strike three, he flipped his bat to the dugout and Gonzalez quickly walked away.
If Bumgarner’s temper was running high, the play of the guys behind him must have settled him. Belt played perhaps his best all-around game of the year, a dazzling pick of a Longoria throw as well as keying a double play in the fifth. He caught a Lamet sacrifice bunt in the air, spun around and fired to Mauricio Dubon, who got to first in time to double off the Padres.
Dubon was involved in three double plays, two with boyhood hero Brandon Crawford. Crawford ranged to his right to kick-start a slick one in the second inning, the first hookup between the two.
The Giants struck first, and immediately, with Belt hitting his second homer in as many nights, a two-run shot in the first. In his past seven games, the previously struggling Belt is 9-for-25 after going 3-for-5 with three runs scored and three RBIs.
Yastrzemski extended the lead in the fifth with an opposite-field shot – another that just kept going – for his 18th in 81 games.
The Giants added some insurance in the seventh, when Evan Longoria doubled in Yastrzemski. Joey Rickard (pinch-hitting for Alex Dickerson) singled in one run and Buster Posey lofted a very long single off the right-field wall for another. Pillar’s sacrifice fly completed the inning’s damage.
They kept the party going in the eighth, when back-to-back doubles from Belt and Longoria tacked on a couple more, the offense looking as if it didn’t want the night to end.