S.F. gives retribution, takes a loss
It’s tough to keep track of all of baseball’s unwritten rules, especially because they’re not written anywhere.
There’s one that everybody in the game lives by: You drill our top guy, we drill your top guy.
And so it went a day after Buster Posey got popped on the helmet by the Diamondbacks’ Taijuan Walker. The Giants’ Jeff Samardzija answered in Tuesday’s 4-3 loss by popping Paul Goldschmidt.
It’s how baseball has policed itself for generations.
Until further notice, it’s over. Posey got hit, and the Giants responded. Or is it? Posey went on the seven-day concussion disabled list. Goldschmidt
simply went to first base.
Samardzija said he wanted to pitch inside after Goldschmidt homered off him Thursday in Arizona but said nothing when asked if the pitch was retaliation.
Manager Bruce Bochy was asked about the pitch and said, “I don’t have anything to say about that.”
Without Posey, the Giants had Aaron Hill batting fourth and Nick Hundley catching. Bochy was planning to rest Brandon Crawford, anyway, so the lineup was missing two major pieces.
“We just couldn’t get a big hit. We left too many guys on base,” said Bochy, speaking of the 13 stranded runners. “We need to start getting these guys in.”
The Giants trailed 4-0 until Joe Panik’s RBI double in the eighth off reliever Jorge De La Rosa, who plunked pinch-hitter Conor Gillaspie before striking out Gorkys Hernandez to end the inning.
In the ninth, Hundley doubled to score Hunter Pence, who drew a one-out walk off Fernando Rodney. Eduardo Nuñez singled home Hundley and stole second, but the game ended when Crawford, pinch hitting, struck out.
Samardzija lasted into the seventh and struck out seven batters — “It feels good when late in the game, your pitches are even better than in the beginning” — but the difference in the game was simple:
The Diamondbacks’ center fielder made a fantastic play, and the Giants’ center fielder didn’t.
Jake Lamb hit a bases-loaded triple in the third inning, a ball that seemed catchable but that Hernandez missed by inches. Had Hernandez made the catch, it would have been the second out and no worse than a sacrifice fly.
Instead, it stood as the game’s decisive moment.
“I was pretty close. I almost got it. It happens,” Hernandez said. “I try to do the best I can for Samardzija and the team.”
Said Bochy: “He’ s a gifted center fielder. It looked like he had a shot there. He just didn’t come up with it, and that was the difference in the game probably.”
The next half inning, Arizona’s center fielder, A.J. Pollock, showed how making a running-to-the-wall catch is done. He did it to rob Hill.
Hernandez, playing for Denard Span because Arizona started a left-handed pitcher, not only came close to preventing three runs, but he also came close to producing four runs. With the bases loaded in the second inning, he hit a ball to the left-field warning track.
Samardzija drilled Goldschmidt on the backside, and Goldschmidt knew the drill. He dropped his bat and took first without hesitation, and the game went on.
Posey said before Tuesday’s game that he didn’t think Walker hit him on purpose. Even so, it wasn’t surprising that Samardzija responded as he did, following the age-old tradition of the unwritten rule.
Both plunkings were in the first inning on the second pitch of the plate appearance.