The Giants lost, but they were polite enough to lose quickly

Jeff Samardzija was good, but he was a victim of bad timing, and the Giants couldn’t score for him, so they lost a tough one. I did not copy and paste this, but I will next time.

In Friday night’s game, we had all sorts of fun developments. Samardzija threw a quality start and lost again. Hunter Pence fell a bunch of times, and now he’s hurt. The Giants were shut down by Robbie Ray, but it really doesn’t matter who was on the mound. After scoring eight runs on Monday night, the Giants have scored six since then, winning exactly zero of those games.

Would it surprise you to learn that the Giants are the sixth-best team in baseball when it comes to quality starts? Perhaps. A chunk of that has to do with the ballpark, but that can’t explain it away completely.

Would it surprise you to know that the Giants lead baseball in quality starts they’ve lost? No. No, it would not.

The 2017 Giants are outstanding at losing games in which their pitchers aren’t to blame. It’s their niche. It’s like my parents said, “get that thing out of your mouth and also focus on one thing until you get really good at it.” The Giants are world class in scoring just enough to lose, unless they’re allowing just enough runs not to win.

This is how you get to 100 losses, people, and it reminds you that elegant doesn’t have to be ugly’s antonym, because the ways the Giants have done both. Update on the chase!

ROAD TO 100
13 games left
8 losses needed
The Giants need to go 6-7 or better to avoid 100 losses

At this point, I kind of want to marinate in it. It’s like getting stabbed in the belly with a broken bottle in a bar fight. When you’re telling the story, you want to be able to lift your shirt and show a gnarly scar. You don’t want to pull up the shirt and have perfect skin, which forces you to mumble and say, “Yeah, but you should have seen the blood when it happened.”

GIVE US THE GNARLY SCAR. BRING ON 100 LOSSES. I DON’T CARE ANYMORE.

The Phillies lost, though. C’mon, A’s. Help us out.

At this point, let’s just rank the best parts of the game and get out of here:

1. Jeff Samardzija was efficient. Pitched well, he did. His FIP is 3.52, which seems more in line with how he’s pitched this season.

2. Quick game! They only wasted two hours and 25 minutes of the only life you’ll ever have.

3. Whatever happened on this play:

4. Stan Lee was there!

5. Joe Panik got a double in the first inning! Nrrrrooom, look at that ball go.

6. Clean inning from Steven Okert.

7. Samardzija got a hit and scored a run!

8. The four through eight hitters were 0-for-17 with 11 strikeouts.

9. That means that Samardzija had a better offensive night than every hitter from Buster Posey down.

10. I went another day without thinking about that video where the guy pokes what looks to be a little ball of fuzz and a MILLION BILLION BABY SPIDERS START STREAMING OUT AND SCAMPERING EVERYWHERE.

11. Aw, dammit.

That’s all I got. Go home. There is nothing interesting to glean from this game.