The 133rd and last pitch Matt Moore threw Thursday night wound up eventually in the outfield grass, 26 outs followed by that lone hit, and when his manager hurried from the dugout to come rescue both the pitcher and his own conscience, Moore smiled and thanked him for the chance at it.
New to the San Francisco Giants and 38 starts removed from Tommy John surgery, Moore had tried to finish Corey Seager with an inside fastball, and Seager had floated that pitch into short right field, and even when the game was over and the Giants had avoided a sweep and shook each other’s hands in the middle of the infield, Dodgers fans in the bleachers chanted Seager’s name.
The Giants know as well as anyone there’s no such thing as inevitable in baseball, not on the good side or bad, and so a bad-luck hit kills a no-hitter on the 133rd damned pitch, and a three-game deficit in the NL West becomes two, and a month of games still await, six of them against these Dodgers. They’ve won a World Series from behind before, just two years ago, so they’ll just go ahead and play this thing out and count it up at the end.
They’ve been a messy team for going on two months, the result so far being that they’ve given up 10 games to the Dodgers when they had only eight to give. The hits haven’t fallen when the pitching is stout, and the pitching leaks when the line drives come, and sometimes at the end of the day there’s no answering to the last play. As many times as not since 2010, the Giants are not the prettiest team, but they do look great in the parade, and it appears they’ll head into September on a similar path. They left Dodger Stadium late Thursday night headed for home, where they’ll play three against the dreadful Atlanta Braves and two against the equally dreadful Arizona Diamondbacks. The Dodgers stayed behind for four against the Chicago Cubs, which is no way to spend a long weekend.
Moore arrived three-and-a-half weeks ago from Tampa Bay at a cost of Matt Duffy and two minor leaguers. His first four starts resulted in a 4.70 ERA and three Giants losses. He was different Thursday night in a 4-0 win, sure of his fastball and curveball, easy into the strike zone, a couple times saved by center fielder Denard Span, and otherwise consistently away from the bat barrels of a team that had scored 32 runs over four games. This was the start that introduced him to a clubhouse that very much needed to get out of here with a win, as there’s no telling if the Dodgers believe in inevitable.
“I haven’t seen a lot of worried faces,” Moore said of his time with the Giants. “There’s no panicked talk of, ‘What’s going on?’ They are who they were way before I got here and way before this rough patch. … It’s a sense of confidence.”
Manager Bruce Bochy admitted he felt uneasy watching Moore’s pitch count rise to career-high levels, and he kept checking with Moore, who kept assuring him all was well, and you know he just looked so comfortable out there.
“It’s hard to deny [him that],” Bochy said.
Beyond that, Bochy said, “This game was probably as big a game as we’ve had all year. We had to win this game.”
Moore’s mechanics never changed, his velocity did not suffer, Span kept rolling around making catches, you know, sometimes it just seems, well, inevitable. Until it’s not. Again.
Moore grinned.
“In that moment, leading up to then, it was just fun,” he said. “At times it’s hard to actually enjoy yourself. Today it’s about as close as it comes to just having fun with it.
“Giving up a base hit right there is part of the game. It was a fun ride all the way up to that point.”
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