Bryant, relentless Giants wear down Mets’ pitchers
SAN FRANCISCO — For the last six months, the Giants’ organization has built and executed a marketing campaign around the resilient nature of the 2021 club.
Posters of Giants players next to the word “resilient” hang around the city, “#ResilientSF” hashtags accompany every social media post and manager Gabe Kapler has spent plenty of his postgame press conferences highlighting the resilience the team has shown after potentially crushing losses.
If there’s a better adjective to describe this club, which defeated a weary Mets team 7-5 on Monday at Oracle Park, relentless might be the only one.
Months past the point when they were expected to tumble down the standings and fall back to reality, the Giants haven’t stopped winning behind a relentless offense that finds a way to grind down opposing pitching staffs on a nightly basis.
After chasing Mets starter Rich Hill with five consecutive hits in the fourth inning, the Giants turned to their stars to carry them the rest of the way as Kris Bryant launched a pair of home runs, Brandon Belt came off the bench and hit a pinch-hit blast and Brandon Crawford finished the game with four hits including an RBI triple.
After the Mets scored three runs in the top of the fifth off starter Kevin Gausman, the Giants regained control of the game in the bottom of the inning when Bryant drilled a 2-1 slider off reliever Miguel Castro over the center-field wall. Bryant’s two-run blast marked his second homer in a Giants uniform and his first since his debut game in San Francisco.
Alex Dickerson was the runner who scored on Bryant’s home run as he reached on a double that nearly cleared the brick wall in right field on a fly. Dickerson has struggled at the plate for much of the season, but with his sixth extra-base hit of the month on Monday, the left-handed hitting slugger is now 11-for-31 with an OPS above 1.100 in August.