Time Again For October Baseball, by Chuck Strom

When I grew up, the prospect of seeing the San Francisco Giants play in October seemed outside the scope of reality. In 1971, at the tail end of the Mays-McCovey era, they lost the National League Championship Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates in four games. I was eight years old at the time, and the event failed to register in my memory. The Giants’ next October appearance did not happen until 1987 when I was twenty-four, when they lost the NLCS to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Since then, the Giants have been a little more regular in their visits to the playoffs, but the experience of waiting so long to see them play meaningful games has led me to regard them as rare treasures that could disappear at any time for much of what is left of my life.

Despite this, I hesitated to make the trip to see the Giants play the Washington Nationals in the National League Division Series. The Nationals had owned the Giants in 2014 with a 5-2 record, and this time they were not benching Stephen Strasburg for the playoffs. With the memory still fresh of the 9-0 massacre I’d witnessed in 2012, I was not eager to spend money to see the Nationals administer the coup-de-grace on the Giants’ season. I changed my mind, however, when Jake Peavy, a veteran whom the Giants had picked off the Boston Red Sox junk pile before the July trade deadline, won his first playoff start in six career tries against Strasburg in Game 1. I bought my ticket for Game 3 the following morning, and when the Giants followed with an 18-inning victory in Game 2 at Nationals Park in Washington, I allowed myself to dream of seeing the victory celebration I had missed when the Giants lost Game 5 of the 2010 NLCS to the Philadelphia Phillies.

Game 3 was on a Monday afternoon, which I liked except for having to deal with the extra weekday traffic. In one of the serendipitous coincidences of baseball, the starting pitchers were the same as those who had faced each other in Game 2 of the World Series: Madison Bumgarner and Doug Fister, the latter having signed with the Nationals in 2014. The night before the game, I pulled out my DVD and watched Fister to see what the Giants could expect. Fister was six feet eight, but despite his size, he relied more on breaking pitches than overpowering fastballs. He also worked fast, hardly allowing batters to get set before a pitch was on the way. The Giants would have their work cut out for them.

My seat was in the second row from the top of the upper deck behind home plate. It was prime Bob Uecker territory (“Great seats, hey buddy?”) but a good vantage point for the pre-game festivities. The overhang on top also provided much-needed shade. It was uncharacteristically hot in San Francisco, and many of the fans in the sun were using their orange rally towels to cover their heads. The teams lined up on the baselines for the national anthem with a big Stars and Stripes in the outfield and a fireboat spraying a fountain out in the bay. Just after two o’ clock, Bumgarner came out to the mound and started the proceedings.

It was clear from the beginning that both Bumgarner and Fister had good command and would dominate the game. The closest the Giants came to scoring off Fister was in the second inning, when shortstop Brandon Crawford hit a fly ball with runners on first and second that Bryce Harper caught at the wall. Other than that, there was little drama for the first six innings. At one point, I realized that the game would likely be decided on a late-inning mistake, and given the Giants’ recent October history, I liked their chances to prevail in that situation. I watched the afternoon shadows creep between the mound and home plate and figured that the hitters would find it harder to see the ball, giving the pitchers an additional advantage they hardly needed.

The end came quickly when the Giants disintegrated in the top of the seventh. Ian Desmond singled for the Nationals to start the inning, and Bryce Harper walked to put men on first and second with no one out. The Nationals’ catcher, Wilson Ramos, despite not having bunted in three seasons, managed to get a slow roller down toward the first base side of the mound, where Bumgarner snatched it up. The smart play in that situation would have been to get the sure out at first. Though that would have meant runners in scoring position with only one out, the Giants could have intentionally walked the next hitter and brought up Fister with the bases loaded, which would have either forced Fister out of the game for a pinch hitter (not a bad move for the Giants given how he was pitching) or allowed Bumgarner to pitch to Fister and get out of the situation with little or no damage. Instead, Buster Posey, who as catcher was responsible for directing the play, yelled for Bumgarner to throw to third to get the lead runner. It was a classic high-risk, low-benefit play that had disaster written all over it. When I saw Bumgarner turn in the wrong direction, I wanted to reach out from the stands to stop him. Bumgarner had to rush the throw, and the ball went into left field. Two runs scored and Ramos ended up on second. The third baseman Pablo Sandoval turned his ankle on the play and ended up on the ground for several minutes before getting up. The crowd went quiet. Bumgarner, probably rattled by what had happened, then gave up a hit to the next batter for another insurance run. I put my head down. It was all over. Tony Bennett came out during the seventh-inning stretch and sang God Bless America. The Giants went down quietly in the bottom half of the inning, and I left the park soon after that.

If there was any consolation for seeing my third playoff loss in a row, it was that Ryan Vogelsong, whose signed baseball card sits on my desk where I can enjoy it every day, got another taste of October glory, scraping out five and two-thirds innings the next evening and allowing the Giants to edge by the Nationals 3-2 and close out the series. The win assuaged me, but when I heard announcer Jon Miller describe the celebration after the final out, as the Giants took a victory lap around the field and high-fived fans as they went by, I felt jealousy for those who had managed to get inside the park that night and wondered if I would ever get to see a celebration in person. Maybe the next even-numbered year.

– Chuck Strom