By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner
He was the question mark, the pitcher who had everyone wondering or even doubting. Ryan Vogelsong hadn’t won a game this year, hadn’t looked very good. But on a chilly night at AT&T Park, it all changed.
Vogelsong, who gave up six runs a week ago to the Los Angeles Dodgers, didn’t give up a single run to the San Diego Padres in this one.
© 2015 The San Francisco Examiner
By Art Spander
SAN FRANCISCO — This was lunacy. This was magic. This was destiny.
This was baseball at its best and worst, baseball of misplays, brilliance and autumn satisfaction.
This was the no-chance Giants doing what that they seem programmed to do, lurching through the first round of the playoffs, while their opponents, this time the Washington Nationals, wonder how life and sport can be so unfair.
They were lucky to be here, the Giants, needing a wild-card win — on the road, against Pittsburgh — to get to the National League Division Series. That enabled them to advance to the best-of-five against the Nats, who had the more wins than any team in the league during the regular season.
But this isn’t the regular season, this is the Giants’ season, as was obvious from the Mumm’s Napa sparkling wine being spritzed Tuesday night through a clubhouse reeking in grapiness and joy.
Yes, there were the Giants, celebrating their very bizarre, but very real, 3-2 win over the Nats, and the series victory, three games to one.
This was Hunter Pence crashing into the padding between the fourth and fifth archways in right field at AT&T Park to make a catch, which surely was shown on a dozen replays and should have been on a hundred.
This was beleaguered Ryan Vogelsong courageously going 5 2/3 innings in what some suspected might be the last game he would ever pitch for the Giants — of course, now it will not — and saying his thoughts were about getting teammate Tim Hudson into the next round for the first time in Hudson’s career.
This was the offensively challenged Giants, who kept leaving the bases loaded and had only nine runs in the four games, scoring on a walk, an unfielded bunt, a ground out and finally, breaking a 2-2 tie in the seventh, on a wild pitch.
“I have a gritty bunch out there,” said Giants manager Bruce Bochy. “I told them earlier, there’s nobody’s will that’s stronger than theirs.”
And probably nobody’s fans who were louder than theirs.
When the Giants went out for the ninth, under a full moon that had risen behind the centerfield scoreboard, AT&T Park was cauldron of noise.
And not long after the final out, a grounder to second baseman Joe Panik, the Giants raced around the extremities of the ballpark, slapping hands with fans who they could reach or waving gleefully at those in the upper decks.
“We were determined not to get back on the plane and go to Washington,” said Bochy of a possible fifth game.
Instead, they will get on a plane and fly to St. Louis, where Saturday they play the Cardinals in the opener of the best-of-seven NL Championship Series.
As if things couldn’t be any better by the docks of the Bay, the Cards earlier in the evening came from behind to stun Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers. As we know, many of the good people in Northern California so despise L.A. they’d just as soon the Dodgers lose as the Giants win.
On Tuesday, both took place.
What a screwball few days. On Saturday, Buster Posey gets thrown out at the plate trying to score from second, and the game goes 18 innings, the Giants winning. On Tuesday, Posey again gets thrown out at home place trying to score from third when Nats reliever Aaron Barrett flung one over the catcher’s head on an intentional walk.
“I was just trying to score, both times,” said Posey. He was ducking sprays of sparkling wine and trying to grab his twins, who along with the members of many Giants’ families had been brought to the clubhouse.
What a screwball few days. Tony Bennett, the 88-year-old crooner best known for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was brought in Monday to sing “God Bless America,” done before the home seventh of important nationally televised games.
He botched one of the verses, transforming “ ...oceans white with foam...” to what sounded like “ripe with gold.”
People laughed. People shrugged. A botch, but not nearly as critical as the botches made by the Nats, letting bunts roll untouched, bouncing pitches in front of home plate.
"I wish I knew the formula, the secret," Bochy said of the Giants’ success. "They seem to thrive on this type of play. They elevate their play. I tell them, 'It's in your DNA.' But I can't say there's a silver bullet. I've been on the other end, too, in these short series. There's no magic formula, trust me.
“It was one of the strangest games, how we scored. But that’s our way sometimes. We scratch and paw for runs. And we got a break.”
They also got a tremendous effort from Vogelsong, who, despite his struggles in the season, somehow got it done in the postseason.
The 37-year-old, 0-4 with a 5.53 earned run average in September, held the Nats hitless until the fifth.
"That's what I expect out of myself in these games," Vogelsong said. "You can't treat it like any other game. I don't. Some guys do, but I treat it like the last game I'm ever going to pitch."
When he was replaced in the top of the seventh by Javier Lopez, after Pence’s great catch and a long out by Jayson Werth, the crowd began to chant, “Vogey, Vogey, Vogey.”
“Just a gutty effort,” said Bochy. “I’m proud of him. I really am. He really came through for us tonight.”
He wasn’t alone. At AT&T, maybe the oceans truly are ripe with gold.
By Art Spander
SAN FRANCISCO — The manager was talking about resilience. Bruce Bochy said he’s proud of the way the Giants, his team, came back when it seemed to have no chance. Yes, the San Francisco Giants are persistent, courageous, gutsy. But they’re not successful.
They rallied in the ninth. Scored two runs to send the game into extra innings, then lost in the 10th, then Tuesday night were beaten, 3-2, by the Chicago White Sox, who had dropped five of their previous six. Which doesn’t say much for the Giants.
Their race is all but run, resilient or not. They’ve lost five in a row. They’re six behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that never loses, as opposed to the Giants, who lately never win.
Six back, and in May the Giants were 9½ ahead. Sure it was early, but they looked like a contender, maybe a champion. Now they look like a team that is lucky to get a run.
Bochy was talking about the almosts, which is what happens when you’re not quite as good as you thought you would be, not quite as good as most of baseball thought you’d be.
Hunter Pence was on third in the bottom of the first with one out, but he broke slowly on a grounder to short and was cut down at the plate.
In the bottom of the ninth, trailing 2-0, with the bases loaded and none out, Joe Panik hit a smash up the middle, but White Sox second baseman Gordon Beckham made a spectacular diving stop and it was a 4-6-3 double play. Yes, San Francisco eventually tied, but it could have won in nine.
Still, could-haves and would-haves are the thoughts of teams that can’t find a way to win. They may not quit — nor do the fans, the sellout crowd of 42,317 at AT&T Park staying and screaming to an end that was bitter — but neither do they win.
“We could use a break,” sighed Bochy in his post-game remarks.
They could. They also could use some runs. They did avoid being shut out for a 14th time this season, and they were facing one of the best pitchers in baseball in Chicago’s Chris Sale, but a run here or there just isn’t enough.
Especially when in the first inning Ryan Vogelsong gave up two on a home run to Adam Dunn. One mistake. In another season, perhaps, that’s overcome. Not this season for the Giants, so painfully ineffective.
“We have to pitch shutouts,” Bochy said in a conversation before the game. It was an offhanded remark, but there is a great deal of truth. Because the other team pitches shutouts against the Giants.
Especially when Vogelsong is pitching by the Bay. He was gone by the time the Giants finally broke through, and this was the fifth straight home game in which Vogelsong received not one iota of offensive help. It also was the eighth time in 24 starts overall.
The Giants simply can’t score. Angel Pagan, Pence, Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval, the four men at the top of the order, had one hit apiece Tuesday night. It was a two-out single by Brandon Crawford, the No. 8 batter, that tied the game.
“Their defense beat us,” said Bochy. “That double play on the Panik ball was one of the best I’ve seen.”
Bochy is remarkable at keeping his cool. He doesn’t throw equipment. He doesn’t berate his athletes. He simply says things like, “This was a tough one,” and again, “We could use a break.”
No less, they could use some hitters. The strain on the pitchers must be enormous. And now there’s no Matt Cain, who at the least underwent successful surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow.
No Cain. No hitting. No runs. A bad combination.
Six games back of the Dodgers, and a month and a half to go. The talk is about a wild card, but if they can’t beat the White Sox, a team with a losing record, then whom can they beat? They were swept by the Dodgers, swept by the Kansas City Royals.
“I was hoping when Hunter (Pence) was caught at home it wouldn’t affect the game,” said Bochy, “but it did. We were behind 2-0 in the first and it would have been 2-1. I don’t think he read it right. He’s as good a runner as we have.”
Giants home night games are mostly as they have been. There’s the recording of Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night,” and close-ups of fans kissing. There’s the recording of Journey singing “Don’t Stop Believin.’”
What’s changed is the Giants can’t score and can’t win. Maybe it is time to stop believin’.
SAN FRANCISCO – The city that knows how. That’s the slogan of this town, the one of little cable cars and World Series titles. A little too much, perhaps. Or maybe not enough.
This is a city in love with its hills, its food, its views, its bridges, even its fog.
A city of diversity and lunacy, where a century ago a man named Norton declared himself Emperor and the hallowed Rudyard Kipling described the citizens as mad.
A city of hippies and gays and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. And the latest vintages from Napa.
And, now, maybe most of all, of the San Francisco Giants.
The once-again-champion San Francisco Giants.
They weren’t supposed to be there, on top of the baseball world. The Detroit Tigers were the favorites, the overwhelming choice.
The Tigers had – have – Miguel Cabrera, the first Triple Crown winner in 47 years. They had Justin Verlander, arguably the best pitcher in baseball. What they also have now are the blues.
How did it happen? The sporting mavens will spend the winter trying to explain. They’ll decide the Tigers again were burdened with too many off days between the league championship series and the World Series.
Or the baseball gods were totally on the side of the Giants, pointing out Angel Pagan’s ball, which ricocheted off third for a double, or those Tiger line drives that kept ending up in Pablo Sandoval’s glove.
The Giants, we’ll be told, caught lightning in a bottle, and if the teams played again next week, Detroit would win, instead of – how embarrassing – getting swept by a team that hit the fewest home runs in baseball during the regular season.
It’s all true, and who cares? In 2010 it was Brian Wilson closing things out in Texas. This time – with Wilson missing almost from the start of the season because of arm surgery – it was his doppelganger, Sergio Romo.
This team lost Wilson. This team lost Melky Cabrera – and for a while Guillermo Mota. Pablo Sandoval underwent surgery on a hamate bone. Freddy Sanchez never made it out of spring training. Tim Lincecum went from Cy Young winner to Mystery Man, although in the postseason some of that mystery was solved.
But it wasn’t what the Giants didn’t have, it’s what they did have. Which, as that song from the musical “Damn Yankees’’ told us, was heart. Along with some wise thinking just before the World Series by manager Bruce Bochy’s wife, Kim.
Remembering that the Bochys attended the pre-series gala in San Francisco two years ago, and the Giants won, she persuaded him, a bit superstitiously, to take her to this year’s gala, last Tuesday at the Fairmont Hotel, the one night off between the NLCS win and the start of the World Series.
Watching him for a few minutes, you sensed Bochy would rather be somewhere else, but she thought he shouldn’t change the routine from 2010. He didn’t. In the end his team didn’t.
In four games the Tigers, so powerful on offense, scored a total of six runs, three in the first game, three in the second, which the Giants won, 4-3 in 10 innings. Good pitching always will beat good hitting. The Giants’ pitching wasn’t good, it was great.
Add the 27 innings from the last three games against the Cardinals in the NLCS, a total of 64 innings, and the Giants allowed only seven runs.
“Unbelievable,” Vida Blue, the pitching great of the 1970s, said on CSN Bay Area.
“You don’t need a superstar at every position. Just tell a guy, you’re my shortstop, you’re my first baseman and go out and play.”
When you’re playing for Bruce Bochy, who treats everyone with respect, it’s easier.
“Our guys had a date with destiny,” Bochy said on postgame TV. “What made them special was they were such an unselfish group. They played for each other and the fans.”
The fans. San Francisco had its virtues, but one of them wasn’t the way it went about supporting teams. We were blasé, unemotional.
The 49ers helped change the image. Winning five Super Bowls will get attention. Then two years ago, Giants general manager Brian Sabean, whose handiwork can be seen on the roster, said, “This is a baseball town.”
It hasn’t stopped being one. The Giants sold out every game the last two seasons. On Sunday night, an estimated 10,000 people showed up at Civic Center Plaza to watch Game 4 on a very big-screen TV.
You have to be happy for all of them, in their orange and black, in their Panda outfits – fittingly, deservingly, Sandoval was the Series MVP.
You have to be happy for Barry Zito, who stoically accepted many seasons of boos.
You have to be happy for Ryan Vogelsong, who two years ago seemed at the end of a career that was spent mostly in the minors or in Japan.
You have to be happy for San Francisco, for the whole Bay Area.
The good guys won. Great Unexpectations.
By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
SAN FRANCISCO -- A pitcher who two years ago was stuck at his 10th minor-league stop put the Giants into Game 7 of the National League Championship Series.
Righthander Ryan Vogelsong allowed only one run and four hits in seven innings and struck out a career-high nine as the Giants defeated the Cardinals, 6-1, Sunday night at AT&T Park.
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