Let’s be very, very clear about where this post is going: The Giants probably weren’t going to win against the Pirates on Saturday. After Cole Tucker’s home run, the Pirates were 83-percent favorites to win the game. That’s based on the win probability of an average team with an average lineup. The 2019 Giants are not one of those teams. So in your gut, do you have them winning 17 of these games out of every 100? You do not. Seems high.
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And yet, there was a chance. A real bloop-and-a-bloop-and-a-blast chance. The Giants lost a 3-1 game with four innings left to play. While rainouts are completely understandable and necessary, that doesn’t mean it feels good to lose a rain-shortened game that was this close. Maybe this was the game that Pablo Sandoval hit a pinch-hit homer in the ninth, stayed in on a double switch, then hit a game-winning homer in the 12th.
Or maybe this was the game that Madison Bumgarner hit a homer when he entered as a pinch-hitter in the 21st.
Maybe this was the game that was won when Buster Posey hit an inside-the-parker that involved a bullpen cart, three squirrels, and a rift in the space-time continuum.
Or maybe this was just a game in which the Giants lost but hit a home run that was so gorgeous, so perfect, that it inspired sonnets.
We were robbed of baseball, in other words. Even if those four innings had a likely-to-guaranteed chance of being dull, there are four innings of baseball missing from our lives.
The Giants could have won. It was a close game — close enough to hope even the Giants could scrounge up enough runs together — and it made me wonder just how often this sort of game happens for the franchise.
The answer: not very often.
Let’s dig into the history of rain-shortened games and see when the last time the Giants were hosed this badly by nature.
The last time the Giants were involved in a rain-shortened game was 2013 against the Reds in Cincinnati. Mike Kickham started, and I would have bet the rest of my future income and every John Coltrane record in my collection that Mike Kickham had never started a game for the Giants. Well, he did. And he gave up seven runs in 2 2/3 innings in this game, raising his ERA to 13.94 on the season. Don’t worry: It would get back down to 10.16 by the end of the year.
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The Giants were losing 8-1 when the game was called in the sixth. It probably wasn’t a hard decision to call it.
The rain-shortened game before that was in 2011, and it was a memorable game because it was the certified Ryan Vogelsong Breakout Game. The Cubs couldn’t hit him, and it was then that we started thinking, “Wait a minute. This isn’t just a cute story where a former prospect came back to make a couple of starts. This might be something.”
Before that was a 4-1 win against the Nationals in 2009, one of the worst teams of the last 20 years. If the Nationals could have played just five innings in every game for the entire season, they would have done it. Mother Nature was just helping the good folks in the greater Washington area out.
The rain-shortened game before that one was a tiny bit harder to swallow. The year was 2002, and the Giants were expected to be contenders. They had started the season 13-8, and they were facing a Reds team that was also off to a hot start, at 15-8. The Giants were down 8-0 after just three innings — it was the second-worst start of Ryan Jensen’s career — and it looked like a foregone conclusion.
The Giants came back, if just a little. The final score was 8-4 after eight innings, and the Reds had a shaky bullpen. Still, they had a two-percent win expectancy when the game was called. It was not a tragedy the came was called, and they would win the pennant anyway.
The Giants had five rain-shortened games from 1977 through 2001, and they won them all. They won a 3-1 five-inning game against the Mets in 1993, a season in which they needed every last win. They won a five-inning game in 1984 that didn’t mean a danged thing. But they kept looking at the sky, hoping the rain would fall, and they were rewarded every time.
The last rain-shortened game played in San Francisco was in 1977, against the Mets. The Giants were leading 10-0, and it was the second game of a doubleheader. The crew chief would have been justified in just pretending that there was rain.
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“Yep. It’s a real downpour. Can’t play in this.”
“But there isn’t a cloud in the … ah, screw it. Yeah, this is getting sloppy, better cancel it.”
The best part? The Mets played the game under protest. From the Associated Press:
General Manager Joe McDonald, who was back in New York, watching the game on television, called Candlestick Park after the doubleheader ended and told Manager Joe Frazier to protest to the National League over the game being played in the steady rain, which apparently contributed to four errors by Mets fielders, who had trouble picking up the ball and keeping their footing on the slippery artificial turf.
Rain. Turf. Second game of a doubleheader. A 10-0 score. A protesting team. The paid attendance was 15,645, but you know that the attendance by the end of the game was Todd, Jeff, Maude, and Drunk Steve. What a mess. I wish I were there.
Also, the protest was hilariously upheld. The decision by NL president Chub Feeney was that the game should have been suspended, not called, and that play would be resumed before the start of a later game. That 10-0 game wasn’t finished yet, folks.
The Mets withdrew their protest two weeks before the game was scheduled to resume. This whole story makes me giggle, and I wish I were there. Not just at the game, but in the clubhouse when the GM was asking them to protest, in the front office when they realized they would have to finish a 10-0 game before another meaningless game in July, and in the commissioner’s office when the Mets realized their bluff had been called.
I’m sorry that I geek out about stuff like this, but hopefully one of you is with me about this being extremely amusing.
This brings us to the game that wins the award for Most Hosed By Rain In Franchise History. It came in 1965 against the Cubs in Chicago. After scoring four runs in the first with the help of a Willie Mays homer, the Cubs rallied back to take the lead, and the score was 7-6 into the bottom of the eighth.
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Then the rain started dumping. The Giants wouldn’t get the chance to tie the game in the ninth. They finished the season two games behind the Dodgers for the pennant, so it’s not like this game cost them the season. And yet …
Maybe if the Giants are a game closer in the standings, they play the rest of the season a little differently. Perhaps they catch the Dodgers and win their first World Series in San Francisco. Perhaps you’re never born. You never know what the cost of that rain really was.
So to answer the original question: Yes, the Giants have been hosed worse by rain before. But it was 54 years ago. Since then, the Giants have benefitted from a lot of called games, and they haven’t lost any super-close ones. Overall, they’re 11-9 in the San Francisco era in rain-shortened games. Don’t complain too much.
Besides, it’s not like they were going to win Saturday’s game. The odds were against them. The Pirates have a solid bullpen. And it probably won’t be the difference between a division title and a second-place finish. Nobody should be too upset that rain and the rules of the game conspired against them.
Still, the Giants were within two runs, and they were robbed of four innings. They probably won’t miss those four innings, but in the stray chance they’re a game back in September, remember this game.
It was the game Buster Posey was going to steal home in the ninth, after all. It was the game Buster Posey was going to steal home in the ninth, and you would have told your grandkids about it. Let’s just pretend that’s exactly what happened.
(Photo: Stan Szeto / USA Today)