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.”
One of my favorite things about my job is that I can abandon all pretense of objectivity.
Maybe the day will come where that will no longer be the case. Maybe I’ll get hired for a position I don’t particularly want that has some stuffy language in the contract featuring phrases like “journalistic integrity.” Maybe one day I’ll have to make sure that my suit pants are always long enough to hide my San Francisco Giants socks.
I hope not, but then again, when I was 20 I wasn’t hoping that in ten years the highlight of my week would be getting a 50-pound bag of rice from Costco. Things change.
If that day ever comes though, I can promise you one thing: I will not offer up even a modicum of objectivity or neutrality regarding Trevor Bauer. I will root for him to lose, openly and honestly. I will root for teams to hit all the baseballs he throws, and score lots of runs until he walks off the mound towards the dugout, bewildered by his baseball futility.
That’s not exactly what happened on Thursday at the Great American Ballpark, but it was close enough. After carefully studying how teams have been mollywhopping them, the Giants finally put their research into practice and tried some mollywhopping of their own.
And that’s the story of how the Giants mollywhopped Bauer, for what I can only assume will be the most satisfying non-Los Angeles Dodgers victory of the Giants season (and also the story of how I used the word “mollywhop” for approximately the 17th time this season).
There were home runs by Evan Longoria (his third of the series!) and Brandon Belt (is there a Giant you’d rather see hit a home run off Bauer than Belt?). There were doubles by Brandon Crawford and Alex Dickerson. There was Buster Posey getting plunked by a pitch (don’t worry, he’s fine) and giving Bauer a little more of a stare down than we’re used to out of kindly ol’ pacifistic Gerald.
When the dust settled on Bauer island, he was walking off the mound after 4.1 innings, 8 hits, 2 walks, and 6 runs. The camera cut to a few Giants fans in the bleachers:
Ahh yes, it was that feeling of freedom, love, and unleashed delight, permeating through the air and through your TV.
On the other side of things, Johnny Cueto was freaking spectacular, because he’s Johnny Cueto, and Johnny Cueto is
A) Really cool and
B) Not Trevor Bauer
Way to go, Johnny. Keep being both of those things.
Cueto continues to look relatively unfazed by Tommy John surgery. He’s unlikely to earn any Cy Young votes this year, but he certainly looks like a top of the rotation starter, which is good for both your eyeballs and for Farhan Zaidi and Scott Harris’ hopes of further bolstering the farm at the trade deadline.
It looked like Cueto was having fun which, combined with all the aforementioned Bauer foibles, made for a highly entertaining morning of baseball. In all, Cueto struck out 7 batters in 6.2 innings, while allowing 7 hits, 1 walk, and 2 earned runs.
That works.
The four-game losing streak is over. The sweep has been avoided. The Giants are now 7-12, which is not good, but is better than they were.
We’ll take it.