Wild pitch gives S.F. 5th in row
PITTSBURGH — Buster Posey has worn the colors long enough to know what a “Giants win” looks like. He participated in many during the championship era, but not so many in 2017.
Saturday’s game had that feel. The Giants scored on an 11th-inning wild pitch by Daniel Hudson and beat the Pirates 2-1 for their fifth straight victory, matching their longest streak of the year.
“It’s five games. It’s not a high sample size,” Posey said. “But overall we’ve played well and swung the bats better. Today’s game is the kind I feel we haven’t won this year. The pitchers had a lot of traffic, they got out of jams, Slater hits a big
home run, then we squeak out a run.
“That’s the type of game we’ve been able to win over the years.”
The Giants did not swing well after scoring 31 runs in the first four games of the streak. Austin Slater’s leadoff homer in the sixth, which nobody thought was going to leave the yard off the bat, ended a no-hit bid by Chad Kuhl, who dragged a 5.58 ERA to the mound.
Denard Span scored the go-ahead run when Hudson spiked ball four to Posey off the plate for a wild pitch. Span had reached third after walking and advancing one base each on a passed ball and Joe Panik’s bloop hit to left.
The Giants won despite walking 10 Pirates. Matt Moore walked the bases loaded in the first after getting the first two outs and Hunter Strickland did the same in the ninth.
Moore escaped by retrieving an Elias Diaz comebacker that shot off his right leg and tagging Diaz out near first base. Strickland escaped in the ninth by striking out Diaz on a curveball.
The Pirates scored their run on an Andrew McCutchen double followed by a Josh Bell single.
None of the 10 Giants’ walks scored, just the third time since at least 1913 they have issued that many while allowing just one run in the game. The Pirates stranded 15 runners.
“This is one of those games we were fortunate to win. We know it,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “We dodged bullets the whole game. These were warrior efforts from all our pitchers. We found a way to keep them from scoring.”
Two of the bigger outs belonged to George Kontos and Sam Dyson, the Giants’ interim closer, who earned the save.
Kontos relieved Moore with the bases loaded and two outs in the sixth and struck out Josh Harrison to preserve the 1-1 tie. Dyson got McCutchen on a weak tapper for the second out in the 11th after Jose Osuna singled, but that hardly tells the story.
Posey had to go halfway to the mound, and a little bit toward the third-base side, before he pounced on the ball, spun and threw a no-look pass to Brandon Belt to beat McCutchen, who has wheels.
“Awesome, wasn’t it?” Dyson said. “I couldn’t have made that play from behind the plate. He’s an athletic guy.”
Slater’s third homer of the year looked like a flyout off the bat. But it carried over the center-field wall. The crowd roared thinking McCutchen had caught it, and Slater stopped at second until he was told it was gone.
Slater uses one of the heaviest bats on the team, 33½ ounces, which helps him produce what Moore called “sneaky power.”
It helps to have an intact bat, of course. Slater got some grief before the game after video revealed that he took a broken bat to the plate in the eighth inning Friday night, a finable offense in kangaroo court. Slater flied out to the warning track anyway.
“I cannot confirm or deny,” Slater said when asked if the bat really was broken. But he did say he removed it from service.
Another rookie, Ryder Jones, left the game after he was hit in the right hand with a 100 mph Felipe Rivero fastball. X-rays were negative, but Bochy expected Jones to sit Sunday to heal the bruise.