CHICAGO — Imagine that you’re manager Bob Melvin, trying to plan out the Giants’ pitching strategy before Wednesday’s game. The Cubs have been the highest-scoring team in baseball this season, and there’s always a chance that the wind might be blowing out of Wrigley Field. Even if you know how everything played out — the Giants won, 3-1, in a nice, tidy and normal game, unlike the night before — the idea should still give you hives.
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There are three potential bulk-inning relievers on the Giants’ active roster, but it wouldn’t have been ideal to use any of them on Wednesday afternoon. Spencer Bivens pitched in two out of the previous three games, including a 2 2/3-inning stint on Monday. Hayden Birdsong was hit hard in his first outing on two-day’s rest, and it wouldn’t have been fair to put him right back in the same situation. Kyle Harrison threw only 11 pitches in his relief outing the night before, but it was also the first relief appearance of his career, and there’s no telling how he would have responded to his first back-to-back appearance.
With the numbers crunched, and all of the different permutations explored, there was only one good option: Hope like heck that Robbie Ray could get them deep into the game. Even with an off-day as a safety net, nothing positive was going to come from a short outing. Not for this specific game, and not for the weeks to come.
Ray got the Giants deep into the game, throwing six innings and allowing just one run, which allowed Melvin to use Camilo Doval, Tyler Rogers and Ryan Walker for the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, respectively. It was close to the best-case pregame scenario.
“Six (innings) was perfect today,” Melvin said after the game.
For his part, Ray wasn’t thinking much about the predicament the Giants would have been in if he couldn’t get out of the early innings.
“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” Ray said. “Just going out there each inning, one pitch at a time, trying to attack the zone, attack the hitters the way I wanted to.”
The wind was fierce enough to evoke memories of Stu Miller and Gavin Lux, as it turns out, but it was blowing in. If a ball was going to be hit over the fence, it would have to be blown over the first-base dugout and 10 miles south into the Rate Field bleachers. That might be hyperbolic, but not as much as you might think.
Ray didn’t change anything to take advantage of the wind, though, sticking with the original game plan.
“Nothing really changes (with the weather),” he said. “This is a really good hitting team, and today the game plan was just to mix everything up, keep them off-balance. Not necessarily try to pitch down in the zone, but just a steady mix of everything.”
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That mix consisted of 41 fastballs, 26 sliders, 22 curveballs and nine changeups, with all of them getting at least one swing and miss. Ray’s velocity started on the lower side, but ramped up in the middle innings, similar to his previous two starts. His bid for depth was jeopardized by a high pitch count in the early innings, but it looked worse on paper.
“I honestly didn’t feel like I threw that many pitches,” he said. “It was pretty crazy. I went to the dugout after that third inning, looked up and saw that ’65’ and … it just didn’t register.”
Ray’s early-season performance highlights a glaring omission in the Krukow and Kuiper glossary from last offseason. The term that’s missing is “win day,” which is how Mike Krukow describes the feeling in the clubhouse the day a certain pitcher is scheduled to start. Right now, it’s applicable to Ray, not just because he moved to 5-0 on the season, but because the Giants are 8-0 in his starts. They’re 24-14 now overall, with Ray’s outings accounting for a cool third of those wins.
The last pitcher in franchise history with a longer team winning streak was Bill Swift in 1992, with that team going 11-0 in his first 11 starts. The last Giants pitcher to start a season with a personal record of 5-0 in his first eight starts was Tim Lincecum in 2010. When a former Cy Young winner starts a season 5-0 with the Giants, they win the World Series. Hey, it’s never not happened yet.
(Also, there have now been 20 Giants pitchers to go 5-0 or better in their first eight starts, including Carl Hubbell, Christy Mathewson and Juan Marichal. The list also includes Bill Voiselle, Bill Connelly, Billy Pierce, Billy O’Dell and Bill Swift, which is strangely unsettling.)
Team wins are team wins, of course, which means that Ray had more than a little help. Wilmer Flores had yet another two-out RBI hit in the first inning, and LaMonte Wade Jr. and Christian Koss added RBI hits in the fourth. Doval pitched a quick seventh inning, and Rogers needed only six pitches to get through the eighth.
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Walker came into the ninth for the save, which was notable not only because of his struggles just 18 hours earlier, but because he threw 25 high-stress pitches in that outing. He allowed a leadoff single to the first batter he faced on Wednesday, but he got Justin Turner to hit into a double play four pitches later, and it ended up being the drama-free save that he (and probably you) desperately needed.
“We felt really good about the last three guys, as far as where they’ve been,” Melvin said. “Tyler’s had only a few games here in the last 10 or 12 or so. Doval just has a rubber arm, and we really wanted to get Walker back in that situation, so it worked out about as well as it could have.”
The series was just the Cubs’ second series loss of the season at Wrigley, and it was the Giants’ first series win on the road since their trip to Yankee Stadium. It doesn’t have to continue being a win day when Ray pitches, but if he keeps it up, the Giants marketing department will have some work to do. You can’t do an animal theme for him, like panda hats, because the team in Tampa would have the rights to that. There are plenty of puns to work with, like Ray of hope and Ray of light, but nothing that can be turned into a plastic giveaway for the first 20,000 fans. A bobblehead that grunts when you push a button? Not sure, but there’s time to figure that out.
Until then, Ray will just be the one responsible for Krukow-esque “win day” feelings in the clubhouse. Capping off a series win against a contending team, on a day where the bullpen desperately needed a quality start, is how win days are born in the first place.
(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
