BALTIMORE — There is no ceremony when a major-league team becomes mathematically eliminated.
The magic numbers and breathless countdowns? The clubhouse preparations? The plastic sheeting over the lockers, the chilled-down beverages that will be sprayed more than sipped, the advance reservation with the carpet cleaning company? Those are for the teams headed to the postseason. You do not clinch elimination as much as you quickly nod in acknowledgment and dress in silence for the next flight. And when the mathematical end comes with nine games on the schedule, as it did Thursday afternoon when the Giants got walked off by Orioles slugger Anthony Santander in a 5-3 loss at Camden Yards, even the disappointment and dismay are muted.
Tony Taters #Walkoff!
The @Orioles win it on Anthony Santander’s 42nd home run of the season! pic.twitter.com/DhmIZXT8TF
— MLB (@MLB) September 19, 2024
The Giants have already come to terms with their own resignation. They’ve known for weeks that they didn’t win enough, didn’t play smartly or cleanly enough in the field, didn’t pitch well enough, and didn’t rise to the occasion often enough when their hitters had the opportunities to change a game with a well-timed hit. They are 74-79 and very much representative of that record. They reside in a distant fourth place in the NL West and very much deserve their place.
“The little things, man,” said catcher Patrick Bailey, after calling for a backdoor slider from Ryan Walker that found the top of the right-field wall instead of his mitt. “You win those one-run games with defense, baserunning and executing in situations offensively. We’ve obviously done a poor job of probably all three this year. We shouldn’t expect to win too many close ones when we’re not doing the things we can control.”
Mathematics might defy narrative structure, but, given how they’ve fallen short all season, the Giants’ mathematical end on Thursday was more predictable than an ’80s sitcom with a morality arc. They saved some of their best at-bats for the end. They came back to tie the game in the ninth when Bailey and Heliot Ramos led off with walks against reliever Seranthony Domínguez and Casey Schmitt’s wind-aided single landed between two diving Orioles outfielders. They had every chance to push ahead.
But Donovan Walton popped up a sacrifice attempt — the second consecutive at-bat in which he critically failed to get a bunt down. Then pinch-hitter Mark Canha hit into a double play. And the Orioles won it in the bottom of the ninth against Walker, who hadn’t allowed a run since July 27 and hadn’t given up a home run all season in 38 road appearances. Santander worked a tenacious, eight-pitch at-bat that included four two-strike fouls before connecting for his 42nd home run of the season. The Orioles mobbed him and sprayed him with water as he stepped on the plate. In a handful of days, the Orioles will have occasion to spray something more potent.
“It was a great at-bat,” said Walker, whose continued emergence as a late-game weapon has been one of the better developments for the Giants this season. “I was throwing every pitch I had: up, in, out. He just got a piece of everything. Made one bad pitch and he did what he’s supposed to do.”
The Giants are in their current situation because not enough of their players did what they were supposed to do. They might continue to lack a franchise anchor like Barry Bonds or Buster Posey and they’ve failed in their attempt to acquire one at top retail prices. But this is not a roster that expected to play at a talent deficit when the season began. They committed more than $400 million over the offseason, more than any team except the Shohei Ohtani-led Los Angeles Dodgers, and appeared to augment every area of the roster that might have been covered in scaffolding. But they learned how difficult it is for a team to coalesce when you combine a new outside hire to manage, Bob Melvin, and a roster that includes three major free agents who showed up more than midway through spring training.
Their payroll exceeded the luxury tax threshold for the first time since 2017 yet they will miss the postseason for the eighth time in 10 years since their last World Series championship in 2014. They are a franchise still grappling to become relevant again on the national stage and to rekindle passion among their fans. Even with a solid uptick in attendance this season, the Giants are nowhere near drawing 3 million fans again — a benchmark that they achieved for nine consecutive seasons from 2010-18 and haven’t approached since.
It’s worth noting that the Giants endured a similar attendance dip in 2008-09, dropping below 3 million fans while failing to make the playoffs for the fifth and sixth consecutive seasons. It was only because of an upturn in both their record and their quality of play in an 88-74 season that managing partner Bill Neukom gave a bit more rope to then-GM Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy to return in 2010. Five years and three World Series titles later, it turned out to be one of the most profitable and prescient decisions that Giants ownership has ever made.
Now current Giants ownership, led by CEO Greg Johnson and an executive board that includes Posey, finds itself at another crossroads following another unsatisfactory season under president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi. There are development successes among the haze of disappointment. There are some signs of progress. There are also signals that ownership has begun to lose faith. And in terms of the record, there is no overall upswing like there was in 2009.
This year’s team provided occasional thrills including an MLB-most 11 walk-off victories, but they couldn’t sustain any good vibes for long. The Giants haven’t won more than four consecutive games all season. They weren’t consistent or dominant enough in any area to get on the kind of sustained, winning run that vaulted the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks from the .500 doldrums in late July to a commanding place in the NL wild-card standings. Every time the Giants showed flashes of playing well enough to generate winning momentum, something would get thrown into the gears. It was more of the same at Camden Yards. They scrapped and swung their way to victories in the first two games to give themselves a shot at their first road sweep of the season. Then they couldn’t finish it off.
The Giants fell to 2-9 in games in which they had a chance to sweep a series. The only two sweeps they completed came at home against the Colorado Rockies.
They were reduced to playing for pride on Thursday, but that didn’t make it any easier for Logan Webb to process giving up a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning and getting chased after he’d thrown 96 pitches through five. Webb leads the major leagues with 198 2/3 innings and his ability to fill buckets saved the team when it nearly ran out of starting pitchers in the first half. But he also looks at the games that got away from him, a strikeout/walk ratio that has plummeted from last year’s Cy Young Award runner-up season, the baserunners he left unchecked for too long, and a 3.58 ERA that does not represent who he is as a pitcher.
“I’m as frustrated as anybody in here about how I’ve done pretty much the whole season,” Webb said.
Walton’s execution mistakes aside, the Giants didn’t fumble their way to the chopping block. If the season had gone the way they envisioned, and they were sitting on 82 or 84 victories right now, they could have pointed to Thursday’s game as the kind that just doesn’t break your way. Bailey stung two deep drives that were caught by sprinting Orioles outfielders on the warning track. LaMonte Wade Jr. hit a hard drive that might have absolved Walton’s mistake in the seventh inning, when the minor-league journeyman batted with two on and nobody out and fouled off two bunt attempts before striking out. But Wade’s liner found a glove, too.
And Webb’s three-run fourth inning included a double from Adley Rutschman that appeared to hit the outside edge of the chalk line in right field. The Giants couldn’t challenge the call even if they wanted to. They’d burned their challenge in the first inning on Gunnar Henderson’s stolen base, which stood after a lengthy replay review delay.
So it’s onto Kansas City to play another youth-driven and contending American League team. Although the Giants have no reason to play Walton over Marco Luciano, don’t expect Melvin to go into full-scale youth mode just yet. The manager said he remains committed to putting his most competitive team on the field, and yes, that includes veteran free agents to be like Michael Conforto, who hit a home run Thursday. For the remainder of this final road trip, the Giants are playing teams that are fighting for playoff position. So Melvin will keep playing the team that gives the Giants the best chance to win, even if it isn’t the team that will help the Giants gather the most intelligence that can help them next year.
Webb will make at least one more start, both to respect the pennant races and because he’s on the cusp of another 200-inning season.
Perhaps the best way the Giants can start to look forward to next season has less to do with who they play than how they play.
“You’ve got to play to win every game no matter what position you’re in,” right fielder Mike Yastrzemski said after Wednesday’s win. “We’ve got a lot of guys fighting for different things in here. It’s nice to see everybody still come together and play as a team. I feel like there’s a lot of care in this room. It’s important for the fans, it’s important for our pride, because we should be playing our best every day no matter what situation we’re in.”
(Photo of Canha’s attempt to catch Santander’s game-winning homer: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
