Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports
There was no Mike Yastrzemski until the eighth inning, given most of a day off after a few days that probably felt like months.
There was no milestone win to chase, Bruce Bochy’s 2,000-victory hunt becoming a hangover after the Giants helped their manager make history Wednesday.
The Giants could be excused for experiencing a Thursday letdown (until their bats awoke late), failing to sweep but still taking a series in Boston, their win Tuesday being their first win ever against the Red Sox at Fenway Park during the regular season.
What may be getting harder to excuse — if not for the Giants, then surely for teams around baseball — is Madison Bumgarner’s road performance after the Giants’ 5-4, matinee loss to close the series.
Bumgarner went over 200 innings for the season — a goal of his — a mark he’s hit seven times now. But he lasted just five innings against Boston, allowing five runs on nine hits and two walks with seven strikeouts. It was a strange outing, in which every flare seemed to find ground.
In Bumgarner’s 102 pitches, the Red Sox only batted five balls that qualified as hard-hit. He got a season-high 18 swinging strikes, but just about every Boston batter who made contact ended up on base.
If this outing was an outlier, the road struggles are not. In 85 innings away from Oracle Park, Bumgarner has allowed 50 runs — a 5.29 ERA. That shrinks to a 2.80 ERA in 115 2/3 innings at home, where his last two starts of the season will come.
That will complicate the free-agency case for the 30-year-old, who has had an effective year but pitches increasingly to fly balls, a recipe that few pitchers can make palatable in 2019. The Giants surely will extend a qualifying offer, which will partly sink his value to other teams. Will rivals want to bestow major money on a starting pitcher who struggles away from San Francisco and will cost them a high draft pick — and has that workload on his arm? In its own way, the more Bumgarner struggles, the better chance he returns to the Giants.
Thursday started particularly poorly for Bumgarner, the Red Sox going double-walk-single-single before the lefty could record his first out. Boston scored twice in the first and three runs in the second, when it strung four straight singles — mostly blooped in — from Andrew Benintendi, Christian Vazquez, Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts to make it 5-1 Red Sox.
That’s how it would remain until the Giants’ eighth-inning rally, which started with the final real Yaz moment of the series. Yastrzemski, pinch-hitting for Austin Slater, stepped to the plate to a standing ovation. It took 36 years for another Yastrzemski to see at-bats at Carl’s old haunt, and Mike gave the fans a show for the series.
The fans thought they could cheer because the 5-1 game against a meek Giants offense was no longer in doubt. And they kept standing when Yastrzemski hit a first-pitch single. But that put two on for Kevin Pillar, who hit a two-out, two-run double down the third-base line to close the gap to 5-3.
The Giants had a few more threats left in them. They loaded the bases with two outs in the eighth, but Stephen Vogt struck out.
In the ninth, they loaded the bases with no one out. But Brandon Workman struck out Brandon Crawford and Yastrzemski before he walked Pillar, forcing in a run. On a 3-2 count, Workman got Evan Longoria to chase a diving breaking ball for the final out.
Until the eighth, the Giants only had two hits, completely shut down by starter Eduardo Rodriguez, who struck out 10 in six innings. The Giants looked like they were tired, which would be understandable after the Bochy festivities of a night prior.
