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Man.
I'm not sure if we'll get a more annoying game than that for the next decade. I suppose we have to curate the different kinds of annoying games. They can include:
- Cainings
- Those games in which the Giants get a million hits, but never the right one at the right time
- Blown saves
- Dozens of hard-hit balls that find gloves
You get the idea. There are a thousand different ways for a game to annoy you, and you've seen them all over the years.
So you thought. This one is a new addition to the genre. The Rain For 15 Minutes, Four-Hour Rain Delay Loss was annoying enough. But for a brief moment, there was hope. The vanguards of justice listened to the Giants' pleas, and they were merciful. Lo, how they were merciful. And there was hope again. The Giants scored a quick run, and there was more hope. There were runners all over the place in the ninth, and there was even more hope.
Hope ... is a dangerous thing.
The Giants scored one run on 11 hits. Add that to the hope, the snarly tarp, and the 40-hour delay, and that's the perfect storm of annoying. Courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com, here are the last 10 times the Giants scored one run or fewer with 11 hits or more:
Rk | Date | Tm | Opp | Rslt |
1 | 2011-09-23 | SFG | ARI | L 1-3 |
2 | 2009-08-20 | SFG | CIN | L 1-2 |
3 | 2007-08-09 | SFG | WSN | L 1-3 |
4 | 2007-04-06 | SFG | LAD | L 1-2 |
5 | 2006-05-06 | SFG | PHI | L 1-4 |
6 | 2005-06-04 | SFG | NYM | L 1-5 |
7 | 2005-04-20 | SFG | ARI | L 1-2 |
8 | 2003-06-13 | SFG | KCR | L 1-6 |
9 | 2003-05-25 | SFG | COL | L 1-5 |
10 | 2002-09-15 | SFG | SDP | L 1-4 |
Those all link back to the box score of an annoying game. A frustrating, miserable, mess. Each out was a unique grain of sand in your butt crack, just irritating the hell out of you. But none of them had a wet, lengthy delay in the middle that snatched away your feeling of hope before handing it back to you before snatching it away from you again. That game was like a new George Lucas cut of Phantom Menace that was even worse than the original movie.
One last annoying thing: Bad teams with good bullpens. The Cubs can throw a couple of hard-throwing, good relievers out for the last two innings, and that's obnoxious. If you're going to be bad, commit to it, dang it.
The good/bad news is that there's more baseball in a couple minutes. Maybe a pitcher will hit a dinger.