If the Giants’ 2017 season has felt like a never-ending bad dream, Thursday evening’s 10-9 defeat against the Colorado Rockies was their worst nightmare.
After falling behind 9-1 by the end of the third inning at Coors Field, San Francisco’s Major League-worst offense embarked on a miraculous eight-run comeback to tie the game 9-9, only to lose on a walk-off single.
For a team that has taken gut punch after gut punch this year, Thursday’s loss was the round in which it stood back up and put up a fight, only to be knocked back into the ropes and left for dead.
In the midst of their third consecutive loss and their fifth in sixth games, the Giants lost catcher Buster Posey and Eduardo Nunez to injuries within five minutes of one another.
Trailing 9-1 in the top half of the seventh, Nunez, who celebrated his 30th birthday on Thursday, raced up the first base line to beat out an infield single for his first hit of the night. Moments later, he called the Giants’ medical staff over, and needed to be removed from the contest. Some birthday gift.
Two batters later, Posey stepped to the plate and smashed his ninth home run of the season, knocking in Nunez’s replacement, Gorkys Hernandez, and cutting the deficit to 9-3. But as Posey rounded the bases, he developed a noticeable limp, and he too needed to call it a day.
While a league-worst offense has doomed the Giants for much of the 2017 season, both Nunez and Posey entered Thursday evening hitting over .300. For much of the year, the pair has provided San Francisco with its only offensive production, and as the team’s tailspin continues, their injuries –and the manner in which they were hurt– are emblematic of the type of season the Giants have endured.
Fortunately for the Giants, after Thursday’s game, Bochy told multiple reporters that he didn’t expect either player to be out for more than a few days.
When the Giants arrived at Coors Field on Thursday, they did so trailing the Rockies by 15.5 games in the National League West. By the end of the third inning, the deficit the Giants faced on the scoreboard could be characterized much like the gap they faced in the standings: Insurmountable.
But at Coors Field, no lead is safe, and the Giants put that theory to the test.
Though Posey’s home run only cut the Rockies’ advantage to 9-3, manager Bud Black’s reason needed to record just eight more outs to record its 43rd win of the season. It’s a good thing the Rockies had six runs of cushion.
Led by a home run from Posey’s backup, Nick Hundley, a pinch-hit RBI single from Giants’ pitcher Ty Blach (Yes, you read that right), and a three-run home run from shortstop Brandon Crawford, a five-run eighth inning gave San Francisco a breath of fresh air it probably didn’t know existed a mile above sea level.
With the Giants short on position player depth following their two injuries, skipper Bruce Bochy was forced to get creative. He responded by shifting left fielder Austin Slater into Nunez’s spot at third base, and by using Blach as a pinch-hitter for reliever Josh Osich.
While Blach’s third career RBI was unlikely, the Giants saw him drive in a pair of runs earlier this season. A three-run home run? Now that’s a sight to behold.
With San Francisco trailing 9-5 in the eighth inning, Crawford snapped a season-long drought for the Giants by helping them become the final team in the Major Leagues to launch a three-run home run.
Posey hurt rounding the bases? Blach delivering a clutch base hit? No, it was Crawford’s three-run jack that was the most improbable event of a comeback effort that was every bit as wacky and wild as you’d expect from a classic Coors Field thriller.
Entering the top half of the ninth inning down 9-8, San Francisco staged its last stand, as Slater led off the frame with his fourth hit of the night and came into score the game-tying run on a Hernandez sacrifice fly.
With another starting pitcher, Jeff Samardzija, pinch-hitting for reliever Bryan Morris, center fielder Denard Span took a heart-stopping gamble. On a 2-2 pitch in the dirt, Span scampered for the plate from third base and was thrown out as pitcher Greg Holland’s tag just nicked the top of Span’s cleat to thwart the final threat.
After completing the most unlikely comeback of the season, all it took for the Giants to fall was a slow groundball through the left side of the infield off the bat of Ramiel Tapia to score Mark Reynolds and send Colorado home victorious.
After a miserable homestand at AT&T Park for the Giants, the Rockies welcomed the Giants to an eight-game road trip by torching left-hander Matt Moore for eight earned runs over Moore’s three innings of work.
Moore entered Thursday’s contest with a career 12.34 earned run average in three starts at Coors Field, and rather remarkably, Moore’s numbers in Denver worsened against a Rockies’ offense that used the first few innings as extended batting practice.
Before Moore even recorded an out, the Rockies had the scoreboard operator’s hands in a frenzy as Colorado jumped out to a 3-0 lead behind runs batted in from D.J. LeMahieu, Nolan Arenado and Mark Reynolds. Arenado’s RBI double marked his 50th career extra base hit against the Giants.
The notorious Giants’ killer added two more run-scoring doubles on the evening, giving him 30 doubles in 76 career games against San Francisco. Along with LeMahieu, who added four hits on Thursday, Arenado carried a Rockies’ offense that wound up needing 10 runs to cut down the Giants on Thursday.