The Giants had gone 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position. They’d left seven on. Their three-run second inning didn’t hold, with St. Louis tying the game in the sixth inning at 3-3.
San Francisco, after reverting back to its struggling situational hitting, needed to find a way to score. In the bottom of the sixth, Mike Yastrzemski made it pretty simple.
Against reliever Génesis Cabrera, Yastrzemski turned on a high 2-0 fastball and parked it in McCovey Cove. His fifth career Splash Hit turned the electronic counter on the right-field brick from 92 to 93. It also gave the Giants a lead that would stick.
Yastrzemski and LaMonte Wade Jr. each homered, powering a Giants (16-12) offense that supported a strong spot start from Jakob Junis (5IP, 3H, 2R, 5K). San Francisco’s 4-3 win secured a series split against the Cardinals.
Six days ago, the Giants scored more runs per game than any club in baseball. Then they rattled off five runs in four games amidst a five-game losing skid. The batting order went into low power mode, leaving 28 on base and going 2-for-21 with runners in scoring position.
“One of the games we talked about last year, we can talk about it now as well, we won games with big innings,” Gabe Kapler said Friday, after SF’s fifth straight loss. “Walk, base hit, home run. Or walk, double, walk, big double or something. Scoring three or four in a single inning. Obviously those innings can carry over into the next inning and create a lot of confidence. We’re just not stringing those at-bats together consistently.”
Then the next day, the Giants hung 13 on St. Louis. They put up frames of four, four and three runs.
They only got one more of those big innings on Sunday, but got enough pitching to make it work.
It came in the bottom of the second, when LaMonte Wade Jr. scorched his first home run of the season. Junis had lost his season-long 11-inning scoreless streak by allowing a two-run shot to Yuan Yepez in the second inning. Wade erased the deficit in one swing.
The outfielder, in his third game of the season after a knee injury delayed his debut, crushed his homer 436 feet into the 415 section near triples alley. Then SF manufactured another run with a well-executed hit-and-run and sacrifice fly.
But aside from the second inning, the same issues that plagued the Giants during their losing streak returned. SF put runners in scoring position with less than two outs in four of the first five innings. They had only the three second-inning runs to show for it.
The big hit proved elusive. Any confidence from the second inning didn’t spill over, apparently.
In the fifth inning, Brandon Crawford and Darin Ruf failed to move the line with two runners on, then Mauricio Dubón flew out to strand the bases loaded. Dubón’s out made San Francisco 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position on the afternoon.
Then in the sixth, the Cardinals tied the ballgame when Luis González overran a fly ball in the left field corner. The miscue led to a ground-rule double and led to STL’s third run of the game.
Yastrzemski provided the exact response the Giants needed. It came in the form of a 413-foot mammoth home run that left his bat at 107.7 mph. The ball ended up in a kayak and the Giants had a lead.
Before Saturday’s 13-7 Giants victory, SF had lost seven of its prior eight games. In that span, San Francisco hit just four home runs.
Behind Yastrzemski and Wade on Sunday, plus the Ruf-Dubón-Flores trio, the Giants have exceeded that output in just a weekend. The long balls returned, and so did the wins.