SAN FRANCISCO — With the National League’s stolen base leader at first base, Johnny Cueto bolted off the mound. He charged at Jonathan Villar between first and second, a textbook maneuver to instigate a rundown. But Cueto had no interest in handing off the ball.
He slapped his glove on the Brewers speedster, causing him to fall down in the base path, then tagged him with the ball and showed it to the umpires. That was only the second out of the game. But more than anything, that play was who Cueto is. The fun-loving, improvisational right-hander who’s used his antics to get outs. More outs than any major-league pitcher not named Clayton Kershaw.
“He’s a really fast and a really good runner, but I got his timing down,” Cueto said playfully through a translator, later joking about not using his shoulder shimmy in the “perfect game” for it.
Despite keeping his equilibrium, Cueto (10-1, 2.10 ERA) still managed to throw seven innings, and the Giants (41-26) bulldozed the Brewers (30-36) for 10 runs to sweep the series on Wednesday afternoon. The 10-1 victory kept the Giants six games ahead of the Dodgers in the NL West standings, and bumped the team’s record to 12-2 with Cueto on the mound.
His gem made him the first Giant since Jason Schmidt to win 10 or more of his first 14 starts, and was one of several decorated stat lines on the Giants’ box score. Four players tallied three hits, and the Giants totaled 42 total hits in the three-game series to raise their team batting average by six points (.256). Several of those came in a 17-batter, two-inning span when the Giants exploded for eight runs while watching the Brewers’ defense fold in on itself with three errors.
That staked Cueto to an eight-run, fifth-inning lead. A lead he’d have to allow more than seven starts worth of runs to blow.
“He was Johnny today,” manager Bruce Bochy said, “and did a great job.”
The Giants picked Cueto up early, starting with a pair of runs knocked in by Buster Posey with the bases loaded in the third inning. He finished the afternoon 2-for-4, and the series 8-for-12. It’s hard to recognize the player who had his swing sapped by nerve irritation in his right thumb just a week ago.
He’s got a profound influence over the rest of the lineup, almost a sort of trickle down effect that creeps into other bats when he finds success. It marks no coincidence that that Gregor Blanco lined three hits to break out of a 30 at-bat slump, and Matt Duffy revived his swing while hitting behind Posey in the series.
“To see Buster get going the way he did was a really good sign,” Duffy said. “I think a lot of us feed off him, look up to him. When he’s putting together the at-bats that he did, that’s big for everybody.
“He makes everyone around him better.”
That also includes Cueto, who’s thrown to Posey in all but one of his 14 starts. The 5-foot-11 right-hander unleashed his final pitch — a perfectly placed 83 mile-per-hour change-up with two runners on in the seventh inning — to strike out Villar and quietly celebrate on his way back to the dugout.
It felt like a big moment, especially on a homestand that’s featured six extra-inning or one-run games. But Cueto had a seven-run lead. The Giants’ offense melted any pressure blanketing the game, but Cueto’s flame was still lit.
No amount of runs could’ve doused it, because that’s Cueto. The guy who will single-handedly charge at the best base stealer in the National League, and the guy who will treat the most insignificant moments like big ones. The Giants wouldn’t have it any other way.
“That’s how you have to pitch,” Cueto said. “I had to tell myself that it was a tie game and (I) have to pitch like that.”
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