Monday BP: Relive the walk-off homers

Hello and happy Monday morning, San Francisco Giants fans. Here’s hoping it’s a good week of baseballing.

If you read my recaps of Giants games, you’ll notice that I often put video highlights in them, either in the form of tweets or uploaded videos from the Giants’ website. It’s a fun thing to do. Who doesn’t want to watch an awesome video of the home run that’s being described?

But baseball highlight videos are often lacking compared to, say, basketball or football highlights. Baseball is a slow-moving game, and that slowness not only adds context, but builds tension. It’s a necessary part of the game.

Highlights eliminate that slowness. Sure, a video of a nasty breaking ball for strike three is still fun, but reducing a three-minute, 10-pitch battle to a six-second, one-pitch clip misses a lot of the magic of the sport.

So I was excited to find that the Giants put out longer videos of their two exciting plays from last week: Thairo Estrada’s walk-off home run against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Brandon Crawford’s walk-off home run against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

They feature the hitter prior to the batter, for context. They feature the entire at-bat, for tension. They show the whole celebration that followed.

It’s a much better way to relive two of the best moments from the season. So let’s do exactly that and relive them.

What time do the Giants play today?

The Giants have a rare Monday off day. They visit the Detroit Tigers tomorrow for a two-game series.