Last night, the Giants played a shockingly great game, stunning an excellent Padres bullpen with 3 runs in the 8th to tie the game and a Mike Yastrzemski walk-off homer in the 9th to win it. There were heroes all over the place for the Giants: Yastrzemski, of course, but also Alex Dickerson, who homered and scored 3 runs, Brandon Crawford, who had three hits, and Donovan Solano, who hit the game-tying 3-run homer.
After ceding a 6-2 lead to San Diego, the game was everything you could have hoped for, with solid bullpen performances leading to late-inning rallies which led to a dramatic ending and a big home plate celebration where everyone was doing their best to social distance. It was, in short, exactly the kind of baseball game you’d have hoped to see when baseball came back.
And yet.
There is no taking away the excitement of the way the game turned out, or the fun of the comeback. There is, though, a question: just what did any of that mean?
In a normal baseball season, this wouldn’t be a question at all. These are the best of the best, in peak physical shape, competing against each other at the highest level. In 2020, though, these are most of the best of the best — miss you, Buster — in reasonably good physical shape — oh, to have more than three weeks to get ready for the season — competing against each other at a pretty high level — have you seen the mistakes the Giants have been making in the field?
It’s not that this calls into question the results of the game or makes any part of your experience watching it invalid. It’s that this is a fundamentally different thing than baseball was last year in ways that people are generally ignoring. Pitchers still being stretched out to 80 pitches during the regular season are inherently more unstable than ones who got to 95 pitches in their last tune-up in the Cactus League. Hitters who haven’t found their timing yet are facing pitchers who haven’t found their control. The whole point of the major leagues is that we don’t see that kind of thing, and here we are, seemingly seeing nothing but that kind of thing.
And through it all, every individual matchup carries the hidden question, “Can you use this for anything next year?” When Tyler Rogers walked Manny Machado in the top of the 9th, you could chalk that up to a guy with a funky delivery but sub-par stuff not matching up well against one of the best hitters in the game. But that’s not necessarily right, is it? Maybe Rogers isn’t fully into game shape yet, so his control isn’t there yet. Maybe the umpire, also not yet in game shape, missed a pitch that he ordinarily wouldn’t have missed and that threw off the whole AB. There’s no way to tell who is actually better.
I mean, we shouldn’t be extrapolating based on one plate appearance anyway, but we’re ignoring that for the moment.
And being better — being the best — is the hallmark of what drives these guys. That’s gone this year, an impossibility. Assuming Brandon Belt and Evan Longoria are back today — and let’s hope so, both in the spirit of wishing people good recoveries from injury and also, oh man, could the Giants use some more offense — they’re going to be behind the rest of the league, but they won’t have the time to spend catching up. So what will it really mean if Dinelson Lamet gets Longoria to swing through high fastball after high fastball? Maybe a 100% Longoria doesn’t do that. Maybe he does. But that uncertainty is baked into every game we’ll see this year, and that changes the context of what’s going on.
This is a weird year, and in a way, it’s fitting that we have a weird baseball season to go along with it. Maybe in any other year, Yastrzemski doesn’t homer to win the game off of Matt Strahm. But maybe he doesn’t do it on any other day this year either. It’s probably a little unfair to even ask the question, because the question implies an interesting answer, and “Yes, this affects the season” is a whole lot more interesting than “No, this doesn’t matter at all.”
Still, the question has been on my mind this year. Isn’t this different than it usually is, even setting aside the DH and expanded rosters? Isn’t there a whole lot more variance in the expected outcomes of an AB, or a game, or a season? Does pure talent, the kind that inevitably wins out in the long run but is iffier in the short run, matter less than it usually does?
I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know if it makes sense to ask the question. I just know it was damn fun to watch Yaz’s home run ball sail into the water. That’s enough, even if I have the sneaking suspicion that it’s not as enough as it would have been last year.