Giants give up, take back lead, beat Padres late

I don't think you could have explained this game to a civilian. You were in too deep. Try explaining a Padres/Giants game in June to a normal person. The baseball gods consulted with a focus group on meaningless to come up with the idea of a Padres/Giants game in June. This game shouldn't have riled you up at all.

So let's count the ways why it absolutely did rile us all up. Let's itemize exactly why a Brandon Belt double play in the eighth would have made us drink in an empty bathtub until it was time to go to work tomorrow.

1. Matt Cain
In the sixth inning, it looked like Cain was going to pitch a one-hitter. He gave up a hit to the leadoff hitter, but then he settled down. His breaking stuff was (with some notable exceptions) fantastic. He was pumping first-pitch strikes in all game, and the Padres never settled in.

Then there were home runs, lead changes, and when the dust settled, Matt Cain was screwed out of a win again. This would have been his 300th career win if his bullpen didn't hate him every season of his career. There would have been a plaque and a ballpark giveaway. There would have been a cake in the shape of 300 wins. It would have been magical. Instead, Cain was cained. The worst.

2. Brandon Crawford
On a day when Marco Scutaro came back from the malleted abyss, Brandon Crawford left the game with sprained fingers on his throwing hand. The Giants are the aliens from Toy Story, waiting for the claw to grab them. Also, the claw is razor sharp and it pulls them up by their hands, with blood shooting everywhere. If another Giants player is going to go down, can't they at least placate the masses with a win?

(Crawford's day-to-day, by the way. Bruce Bochy said they were hopeful for Thursday.)

3. Jesus Guzman
Jesus Guzman is the shitty guitarist who was kicked out of the band for being shitty, and now he's back with his shitty new band and acting like he's in Black Sabbath. Except he's shitty. He stinks like 2009 -- the smell of 1-0 losses, failure, and burnt possums. I wasn't supremely offended by his histrionics after the home run, but annoyed enough that a loss on that home run would have felt even worse.

4. Home runs
The Giants allow a lot of them now, which isn't cool. Cain even gave up a home run to Logan Forsythe, who is a timber magnate from Canada, not a baseball player. The Giants had to grind hits together, as usual, and the Padres kept cheating by hitting the ball over the fence where no one even had a chance to catch them. Rather unsporting. And definitely annoying.

5. Bullpen
On the same day of the Zack Wheeler game, this was the game that guaranteed several prospects were going to be scattered into the wind as a sacrifice to the great bullpen revamping of July. The bullpen was bad again, and Jeremy Affeldt allowed an eighth-inning, two-run homer for the second time in his last six appearances.

6. Padres
It was the Padres. You can't explain the Padres to someone who doesn't care about baseball.

You: Look at it.

Them: Okay. It's a piece of brown construction paper.

You: /turns on a Vampire Weekend song

Them: Okay. I don't mind these guys. They're alright.

…

several hours later

…

Them: Please god turn it off.

You: That's the Padres.

I don't know why losing a close game to the Padres is so awful. But it is.

And that's why a loss would have felt so awful tonight. That's why Brandon Belt is to be feted, and why Juan Perez is going to have his face carved on Sign Hill. It wasn't just a June Padres/Giants game. Alright, it was, but that can't express just how annoying it was.

Track I is an instrumental. It starts with an oscillating Minimoog run, ascending and descending, back and forth, until the drums kick in.

Track II is 14:01, and it's broken up into several movements or "suites." It starts with Juan Perez being bitten by a mechanical owl, who carries Perez to his maker. The maker creates a new arm for Perez out of fire and palladium.

Track III is 9:48 and about Perez's time at Western Oklahoma State College, where he hit .465 with 37 homers in 215 at-bats one season. It features a bagpipe solo from Danny Almonte.

Track IV is an 18:38 track about his time in the minors, as he traveled on the backs of wyverns from Eastern League stadium to Eastern League stadium for years.

Track V is :40, and it's mostly just sounds of Mark Kotsay's youth being hit with a mallet.

Track VI is 11:33, and it ends with Perez stabbing Yasiel Puig through the heart with a flaming sword before he flies off on a wyvern of fire.

It's mostly in the style of power-metal like Manowar or Helloween, but it has some softer moments, too.

If we're going to poke fun at Bochy for last night, it's only fair to give him credit for pinch-running Andres Torres for Buster Posey in the eighth, a move that initially drove me nuts. But Posey doesn't score on Belt's double, and who knows what happens with the tighter sphincters that come with a one-run deficit instead of a tie game. It worked out just fine.

Having fun with Perez is great. But callllm down. Greg Papa was declaring Perez the de facto starter until Christian Arroyo is moved to the outfield. A lot of people need to be visited by an apparition of a chain-rattling John Bowker in their sleep.

He's a right-handed outfielder with four tools, though. Four big tools. Sometimes that fifth one comes around in the mid-20s. Let's wait for his first walk before proclaiming him anything he might not be just yet.

Matt Cain. Still. He left fastballs up, and his hangers were hit miles. But he looked great for most of the game. Matt Cain.