All the Giants had to do was play mediocre September baseball.
If they’d won just half their games in the most important month of their season, they’d have a wild card spot. They’d have a fully healthy lineup and a puncher’s chance. They’d be postseason contenders, instead of just boring.
But the Giants have floundered, and now they’re buried. In a six-game road trip to Denver and Phoenix, the Giants won a single game. They lost the tiebreaker to Arizona. They dropped to the outskirts of the wild card race. With the chance to fly, they flailed.
Alex Cobb is shut down, Gabe Kapler is left to talk about “scaling conversations,” and the veteran position player core charged with guiding the Giants have no more time to turn things around.
San Francisco’s playoff odds have plummeted toward zero. With the 7-1 loss to the Diamondbacks, the Giants (76–76) are back at .500 — where they have been for the past two seasons — and in need of a miracle to achieve their annual goal of reaching the postseason.
The Giants are now 14-18 in games Logan Webb, a legitimate Cy Young candidate, started. They have gone 5-25 in their last 30 road games, a historically miserable stretch of play away from home.
“Obviously, these were must-win games,” Kapler told reporters in Arizona postgame. “Going back several games, those were also must-win games. Now, the math is not on our side, and every game is one we have to win.”
Brandon Crawford, who could be in the final weeks of his Giants career, left Wednesday’s game after the second inning with right hamstring tightness; he said postgame that he tweaked it running down the line in the second inning.
The injury turned out to be worse than the cramp he thought it was. Crawford, who is hitting .197 in his 13th year, was on the Giants the last time they won a postseason series, in 2014. Given the timing of his hamstring injury, an IL stint could end his illustrious Giants career.
In Crawford’s first inning out of the game, the Diamondbacks pulled out to a 3-1 lead. LaMonte Wade Jr. started the game with his eighth career leadoff home run, but Arizona answered with small ball in the bottom of the first and more speed in the third.
Corbin Carroll, like he did Tuesday, was everywhere. The National League Rookie of the Year favorite started 3-for-3 with two runs and two steals. Later, he added a solo home run, as part of a four-run inning, becoming the first rookie ever to reach 25 homers and 50 steals in a season.
Webb wasn’t at his most efficient, but still limited Arizona to three runs over six innings. He induced 11 groundouts to zero flyouts, surrendering only one extra-base hit.
As soon as Webb departed, the Diamondbacks pounced on rookie reliever Ryan Walker, scoring four earned runs before the cross-firing righty could finish an inning.
Webb’s distinctive strength is his ability to pitch deep into games, even without his best strikeout stuff. It has made him MLB’s innings leader and a viable NL Cy Young candidate despite his club’s inability to win games he starts. Wednesday was the 15th time in 2023 the Giants have scored two or fewer runs behind Webb.
In that sense, Wednesday was a microcosm of the season. Webb pitched great, but not fantastic, in front of a team unequipped to match more dynamic opponents (the Giants scattered three total hits compared to Arizona’s 14).
How will the Giants change that going forward? Barring astonishing collapses from multiple teams ahead of them, they have 10 games more than they’d hoped to start answering that.