Hypothetical recap: Giants drop a snoozer

With the MLB season suspended due to the coronavirus outbreak, there are no baseball games and limited baseball news. So I’m creating a hypothetical season — complete with news and recaps — until baseball resumes. All news and recaps will have the hypothetical tag, so you can at least know when you’re suspending reality. And you can click “hypothetical season” above the headline to see everything that has happened in this “season.”

Some baseball games are interesting. I’d even posit that most baseball games are interesting.

But not all games are.

Whether you’re the 1998 New York Yankees or the 2013 Houston Astros, every team has some boring games. You kind of just hope they don’t occur in the second game of the season.

Alas, we can’t always have nice things.

The San Francisco Giants dropped their second game of the season to the Los Angeles Dodgers 7-2, in a game that simply didn’t have much to offer. At least from the Giants perspective.

It wasn’t bad, per se. There were even good things. Mike Yastrzemski took Walker Buehler deep for a solo home run in the fourth inning, which would have been more exciting had it not broken up a perfect game. Mauricio Dubon - who started the game on the bench while switch-hitting Yolmer Sanchez got the start (his inability to hit in Spring Training continued) - came in as a pinch-hitter and lined an opposite-field double that scored Hunter Pence. There was some poetry involved in the young Giants prospect knocking home the old franchise legend.

It just wasn’t interesting.

By the time the Giants got on the board, Jeff Samardzija had already allowed three runs. In all, Samardzija allowed seven hits and four earned runs in five innings, which found that sweet spot that Samardzija finds so often. Not good enough to be good, but with enough good (zero walks, eight strikeouts, and 15 swings and misses) to keep from being a catastrophe.

I’m not saying I wanted a Samardzija catastrophe. I’d rather his starts offer something promising. But damn if that middle ground isn’t boring.

From the start of the game - reigning MVP Cody Bellinger hit a first inning home run for the second straight game to start the season, offering shades of a (much, much, much better) 2018 Joe Panik - it never really felt like Samardzija and the Giants could win. But it never got out of hand enough that you could turn the game off and turn on Tiger King, or something.

It just was. Such is baseball, sometimes.

The bullpen gave up some more runs. The offense hit enough singles to hold your attention, but not enough to look like an offensively competent team, and the Giants lost.

The Giants are now 0-2. They’ll try to salvage the series tomorrow night.