SAN FRANCISCO
So this is what it looks like.
So this is what you see when a Giants team that has done nothing but be on the good side of winner-take-all playoff games since 2012 suddenly becomes a loser-taking-.
You see Chicago Cubs celebrating on the field at AT&T Park after a sick ninth inning comeback that made Giants fans upchuck.
You see the Giants plod from their dugout to a silent and morose clubhouse after blowing a 5-2 lead in the blink of an eye and instead losing the game, 6-5.
You see this happen thanks to a ninth-inning parade of defective Giants’ relief pitchers who, if they were smart phones, would be the ones that keep exploding in flames at the worst possible times.
You see the Cubs scoring four runs off five different Giants arms that could not get three measly outs as the AT&T Park crowd gasped and sagged.
You see the Giants exiting the postseason after losing the National League Division Series to the Cubs in four games rather than going back to Chicago for an ultimate Game 5 to decide the winner.
You see a great starting pitching performance by Giants’ starter Matt Moore be totally and completely forgotten.
You see no reason why any of this had to happen because there was no excuse for what happened, even if the Cubs batters deserve credit for forcing the issue. Their attitude is much like the Giants of 2010 and 2012 and 2014.
“I think the game of baseball is a game that is 27 outs–we can’t give up because we’re down,” said Cubs outfielder Javier Baez, who wound up driving in the winning run on a perfectly placed ball up the middle against Hunter Strickland, the last of the Giants’ five relievers used in the ninth.
Yes, as advertised, there was a curse looming over this series. But the curse was no billy goat from Chicago. It was the Giants’ bullpen from hell.
If only Moore had been able to stay in the game for the ninth instead of being removed after throwing 120 pitches over the first eight innings. But manager Bruce Bochy made what seemed to be a sensible move at the time, realizing that Moore had to be getting fatigued and relying on his entire relief corps to close out the game with the generous three-run lead.
After all, who says Moore would have rolled through the ninth? He had thrown more than 120 pitches just once this season. If Bochy had left Moore in for the ninth inning and he had given up a few hits to the Cubs and triggered a comeback, Bochy would have been criticized for that, too. And aren’t relief pitchers paid to, you know, retire batters?
“I would like to think you’re going to get three outs there,” said Bochy about the horrendous ninth. “We couldn’t do it.”
In the end, the Giants’ undoing in October looked suspiciously like their undoings in August and September, when their relief pitchers blew nine saves and transformed a team with baseball’s best record into a team that had to claw and make the playoffs on the season’s final day. So why should we be surprised that the same issues surfaced when so much was on the line in the postseason?
And yet . . . well, the carnage was not merely stunning. It was preposterous and almost laughable. For the Giants to lose Tuesday’s game, those five different relief pitchers had to all go out and fail miserably to do the one job they had. Five. One after another. In sequence. Derek Law. Javy Lopez. Sergio Romo. Will Smith. Strickland.
One by one, they were brought into the game by Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy. One by one, they gave up a single, then a walk, then a double, then a single, then a hard-hit ball that was a potential double play but became an uncharacteristic error by shortstop Brandon Crawford, then a single . . .
To be sure, Giants fans did their best to remind the Cubs that they were supposed to be cursed and supposed to fold and supposed to blow the series after winning the first two games in Chicago. Those AT&T fans were primed and ready to get under the Cubs’ skins, especially after Monday night’s spectacular 13-inning victory by the home team. One customer showed up with a live billy goat, exemplifying the bad juju that had been placed on the Cubs in 1945 when a Chicago tavern owner with a pet goat had been kicked out of Wrigley Field at the World Series and in retaliation uttered a curse that supposedly would keep the team from winning a championship forever. As a double whammy, another Giants’ fan sat in the box seats with a billy goat mask crammed over his head.
Cubs manager Joe Maddon, in a startling admission, admitted afterward that during the seventh or eighth inning he had started to feel dread about the prospect of a Game 5 on Thursday night with Giants’ ace Johnny Cueto on the mound. Surely, some of the Cubs players saw the goat mask. Surely, they had to be starting to wonder about it all. But then they saw the Giants’ bullpen door open and maybe they stopped wondering. And over the next 20 minutes or so, the Giants were done and gone.
“It’s a weird feeling,” Bochy said. “It kind of gives you an empty stomach.”
You see an empty winter ahead with that empty stomach, which after all of those full autumns since 2010, is the weirdest thing of all.
