Have a day — 2 wins 15 hours apart
Long day’s journey into 2nd win
The book of baseball oddities never runs out of pages, which makes it such an intriguing read and so hard to put down.
To wit, the Giants had not won consecutive games for more than a month until they accomplished it with two victories on the same calendar day.
With sleep still in their eyes after a 17-inning win that ended at 12:43 a.m. Saturday, the Giants beat the Reds 3-1 in the afternoon for their second backto-back wins of the season.
There is no better measure for how bad the Giants have been than that winning two in a row was considered a “feat.” Manager Bruce Bochy, always trying to accentuate the positive, noted the Giants have won three of their past four. It’s a start. So what’s next? “Obviously, the trench we’re in is steep,” pitcher Matt Moore said after he gave his team des-
perately needed length just hours after the bullpen pitched nine shutout innings. “It really does come down to one game at a time, slowing ourselves down as a group and just worrying about today, and not what happened a week ago or a month ago.”
Moore gets a rare pass for busting out the “one game at a time” cliche because of how far the Giants still need to go just to reach respectability. If they try to do the math, they might cry.
They will improve their odds if they continue to pitch and catch the ball as they have in this series.
Moore held the Reds to one run in 71⁄3 innings despite allowing eight baserunners in the first four innings, which he called “as shady as it could get.” But he stranded all eight to propel him to another fine start at AT&T Park.
Scott Schebler’s sixth-inning homer was the only mark against Moore and the Giants’ staff. Hunter Strickland and Derek Law built on the great bullpen effort from the 17-inning game and got the final five outs, for Law his third save.
Meanwhile, Brandon Belt and Justin Ruggiano went deep against Lisalverto Bonilla to continue the Giants’ sudden barrage of power. They have nine homers over the past six games, representing 31 percent of their season total. Eight of the nine have been solos, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Ruggiano’s first homer with the Giants cleared the centerfield wall, and Belt’s landed in McCovey Cove for the first splash homer of 2017 by friend or foe.
“I like three-run homers, sure, but you’ll take these,” Bochy said. “I’ve said I believe we’re going to hit for more power, and that’s not just home runs. We’re getting better swings off. Our slugging needed to get better, and it has.
“That’s what we were missing. It wasn’t missing for other clubs. That’s what hurt us.”
Brandon Crawford and Joe Panik, who both played all 17 innings the night before, had an outstanding defensive game. Moore helped himself by snatching a ferocious Joey Votto liner with one out in the seventh. More accurately, the liner snatched Moore’s glove. He confessed he did not see the ball.
“I threw the ball and my hand started hurting. That was it,” Moore said.
What really would have hurt the Giants was not building on a 5-hour, 28-minute win that ended on Buster Posey’s homer. In a 2-hour, 33-minute encore, they won again playing their style of ball.
“To come out here today with everybody being gassed and putting enough runs on the board for Matty was great,” Crawford said.
Great, and necessary, for a team that has played seven weeks without coming close to gaining any kind of foothold.