No-hit for 5 innings, SF Giants still find a way to beat Mets
NEW YORK — Held hitless for five innings, looking hapless for the better part of Saturday afternoon’s matinee, of course the Giants still found a way to claw their way to extra innings and pull out another comeback win.
That is, after all, about all they have done this week.
Trailing after the seventh inning for the fourth consecutive game, the Giants pulled out an incredulous fourth consecutive comeback win, 7-2, over the Mets in 10 innings and achieved something almost as unbelievable, guaranteeing they will return home Monday holding no worse than a .500 record.
“It’s just kind of what we’re doing right now,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We talk about it every day: the 27th out. Until then, every at-bat means as much in the first as it does in the ninth. We seem to have a little flare for the dramatic here recently. … The talk in the dugout late in games is, ‘Here we go again.'”
After erasing deficits of at least four runs the past three days, the 2-1 hole they faced after Sean Hjelle served up a solo shot to Brett Baty in the seventh inning might not have seemed like much to overcome. But after being held hitless by Luis Severino for five innings, it wasn’t clear whether the Giants’ magic had run out.
As fans streamed for the exits in the top of the 10th, many of the 32,971 on hand apparently came to terms that it had not.
Pinch-hitting on a bum hamstring, LaMonte Wade Jr. tied the score in the top of the ninth against Edwin Díaz with a line-drive into right field that brought home Ryan McKenna, in the game as a pinch-runner for Wilmer Flores, who led off the inning with a single, and Brett Wisely knocked in their automatic runner to begin extra innings with his third hit of the game.
The Giants piled on for five runs in the 10th, with Mike Yastrzemski delivering the knockout blow on a bases-clearing triple off left-hander Josh Walker. Each of their wins on their season-long four-game streak have featured rallies of at least four runs in the eighth inning or later.
It is the first time since 1997 and only the ninth time in franchise history that the Giants have come from behind to win in four consecutive games on the road.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the clutch knock from Wade an inning earlier.
“A big hit can ignite you,” Melvin said. “Wade comes off the bench, he wasn’t even going to play today except to just hit, and gets another huge hit like he tends to do. And then after that, once we tied the game, we had a really good feeling that we were going to win the game based on what’s transpired the last few days.”
Wade was thrown out trying for second base and could have aggravated his left hamstring in the process. Before the game, Melvin said Wade “stretched his hammy” while reeling in two throws in the ninth inning the previous night but considered the issue to be “minor.”
While Melvin said afterward “I wasn’t comfortable with that,” Wade confirmed that his hamstring was fine and expected to be ready whenever he’s called on next.
“We’re never out of the ballgame,” Wade said. “This offense, nobody wants to give away at-bats. Everybody’s tring to move the line and keep it going for the next guy behind him. We’re just a resilient team and we’re never out of a game.”
For as successful as the Giants have been recently upon forcing starting pitchers from the game, that didn’t appear to factor into their plan of attack against Severino, who held them hitless for five innings and needed only 36 pitches to make it through the first four frames.
“He just fills up the zone,” Melvin said. “So to get behind 0-1 all the time (doesn’t make sense). He started throwing his breaking ball for strikes I think once he identified that we were trying to be aggressive on the fastball early. He’s just a really good pitcher and you’ve got to try to take your best shot at him, and that was to be more aggressive.”
Six of the first 10 Giants batters to come to the plate swung at the first pitch, and 10 of their plate appearances ended within three pitches.
By the end of the fourth inning, the Giants’ starter, Jordan Hicks, had thrown more than twice as many pitches.
“It did feel like those first two, three innings were like sit down and two minutes later I felt like I was back on the mound,” Hicks said.
The crowd let out a collective groan as Wisely poked a two-strike sinker over a leaping Baty at third base and into left field for the Giants’ first hit of the afternoon. Severino’s hopes of perfection were spoiled an inning earlier, when he lost Matt Chapman for his first walk — and the Giants’ first base runner — of the game.
“(Severino’s) stuff was so good, it was electric today. I just tried to be really, really simple and I swung at a pitch out of the zone I probably shouldn’t have swung at,” Wisely said. “But luckily made contact with it and got it over the third baseman’s head, broke up the no-hitter and I felt like that kind of got the team going and got some energy in the dugout.”
If it felt familiar, well, the Giants went hitless for five innings against Severino when the Mets visited Oracle Park last month, eventually cracking him for three runs and pulling out a win, albeit in less dramatic fashion. In his next start, Severino took a no-hit bid into the eighth inning against the Cubs.
The Giants still have not been held hitless for an entire game since Homer Bailey did it to them at Great American Ballpark on July 2, 2013.
The Mets didn’t need to wait longer than Hicks’ first batter to put one in the hit column, getting a leadoff double from Francisco Lindor for the second consecutive game. But unlike the previous night, the Giants’ starter reared back to record a pair of strikeouts and stranded Lindor on third base.
With a full stomach and healthy blood sugar levels, Hicks’ velocity rebounded from the dip it took in his last start when he lost his breakfast prior to first pitch and wasn’t able to fully replenish during the game. Topping out at 98.2 mph and averaging 95 with his two-seamer, Hicks struck out eight and generated 19 swings and misses while limiting the Mets to a lone run over five innings, identical results to his last start but coming in much different fashion.
The 19 whiffs were a season-high for Hicks, with nine coming on the splitter he used to put away half of his strikeout victims.
“I felt like the splitter was really working today,” Hicks said. “And then the sinker off that. Really just establishing the sinker in the zone and getting splitter swings and misses. But I had a couple four-seams swings and misses for strikeouts, and that pitch is really coming around.”
Besides Lindor’s leadoff double, the only hit the Mets mustered off Hicks was a solo shot from Starling Marte in the second inning that amounted to their only run against the Giants’ starter. An expletive escaped Hicks’ lips as soon as Marte connected with the hanging sweeper, left over the plate for one of his few mistakes.
“It’s probably going to be haunting me in my dreams the next couple days,” Hicks said of the 0-2 offering.
On board with their first hit, Wisely came around to score their first run on a two-out single from Patrick Bailey, who only a pitch earlier missed out on a mammoth two-run blast when his fly ball sailed into the second deck of the right-field stands, just right of the foul pole.
Also dropping a single into shallow right field to lead off the eighth, Wisely contributed three of the Giants’ eight hits after getting the start at shortstop in place of Marco Luciano, who has swung the bat well but committed his fifth error in his past five games upon taking over at short after a string of substitutions.
With Wade unable to play the field, the defensive shakeup moved Wisely to first base, a position unfamiliar enough that he had to borrow Flores’ mitt.
“He’s really done a nice job for us since he’s gotten here,” Melvin said. “Playing a little bit out of position at short at times and very much out of position at first at the end of the game, but just the way our bench was set up today, we had to do some unorthodox things.
“When you win wild games like that, sometimes guys are going to play out of position a bit.”
Four of Luciano’s miscues have come in the ninth inning or later, including his latest, when he wasn’t able to handle the toss from Thairo Estrada on a potential double-play ball in the bottom of the ninth, though this one didn’t come back to bite them as Luke Jackson got Lindor to ground out and Pete Alonso to fly out to end the inning.
“What do you want me to say? He’s working hard out here,” Melvin said before the game. “Defensively it’s been a tough stretch for him but he’s just continuing to work.”
Up next
RHP Logan Webb (4-4, 3.03) vs. LHP Sean Manaea (3-1, 3.11) in the series finale, with first pitch scheduled for 10:40 a.m. PT Sunday.