Giants fall to Diamondbacks 5-2

Sep 25, 2022 - 3:51 AM

The San Francisco Giants dropped game two of the series to the Arizona Diamondbacks tonight, 5-2.

The Giants got on the board first, in the top of the fourth inning. With two outs, Brandon Crawford singled, before David Villar walked, advancing Crawford to second. He was knocked in on a single from Jason Vosler. The only other run for the Giants was on a booming leadoff shot from Mike Yastrzemski in the sixth inning, his third in five games.

Unfortunately, that was all there would be from the Giants offense, as they were held to just four hits, two of them from Yastrzemski.

Alex Cobb has kind of been the king of bad luck this season and that was no different tonight. Through five innings, Cobb allowed five runs on five hits with three strikeouts and two walks. But that really doesn’t tell the whole story.

Let me tell a side story here. I do a Minecraft competition on Saturdays where the sessions usually last 12 hours and you compete in different challenges to score points throughout the month-long event. One of those challenges this week was parkour, where you have to make a series of complicated jumps to reach the end of a course. Some people are really good at this. I am not those people. It was a lot of repetitive failure on a course that was marked as “easy” and should have been pretty routine.

It just so happened that I was doing this during the fourth inning, when Cobb was doing the baseball equivalent of a parkour course and having about as much luck as I was. Should have been straight forward, right? Groundball pitcher, pitching for groundballs, gets groundballs, and gets no outs. Groundball, single. Groundball, single. Groundball, single. On and on it went, and he was not helped in any way shape or form by his defense.

It started out with three straight singles to Pavin Smith, Daulton Varsho and Christian Walker, the latter of which scored Smith. After getting Ketel Marte to line out for the first out of the inning, Cobb walked Josh Rojas to load the bases.

And that’s when things got weird.

Alek Thomas hit a ball that bounced towards Wilmer Flores at first, who opted not to step on the bag for the force out, but instead elected to get the force out at the plate. Joey Bart did not get the memo, however, because he was not on the plate, and the throw pulled him up and he opted to go for the late tag on Varsho rather than stepping on the plate. So they took what could have been an inning-ending double play and ended up getting zero outs on a fielder’s choice with bases loaded.

Not ideal.

Carson Kelly followed this up with a sacrifice fly that scored Walker, and Geraldo Perdomo singled in the speedy Rojas and Thomas to give the Diamondbacks their fifth run of the inning and the game.

Some other noteworthy things from the game: Thomas Szapucki pitched two scoreless innings, but exited quickly in the eighth inning with right hip tightness, which brought in Jharel Cotton, who allowed a hit and a walk but struck out three.

Also, as it is Saturday and you deserve nice things, the defense wasn’t all doom and gloom tonight. Have this amazing play from Brandon Crawford, as a treat.