It’s a short list.
There’s no way to proclaim Matt Chapman’s game-ending defensive play Friday the best in baseball history. There are too many considerations, too many unknowns. Did it save a no-hitter, like Robin Yount’s catch in 1987? Was it the difference between a walk-off for the other team, like Mike Tauchman’s catch just last season? And what about the plays from the decades before every game was televised or even on radio? You don’t know whether Boob Fowler made a perfect throw to his catcher, Bubbles Hargrave, in the ninth inning to rob Stuffy McInnis of a game-winning hit*.
* All real players from 1925
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So give up the declaratives and the absolutes when it comes to crowning Chapman’s play the best ever. Just know that it’s on a short list. A very, very short list.
It’s the best defensive play to end a game I’ve watched from beginning to end. There’s a national anthem and a ceremonial first pitch and a “Play ball!” and 27 outs later, the baseball game is over. I’ve gone through that progression thousands and thousands of times. I’ve never seen a better 27th out than this:
Just when you think you've seen it all from Matt Chapman… pic.twitter.com/qnuvicYThX
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 25, 2024
It’s everything. It’s the play, in isolation, stripped of context. It’s the bare hand, and it’s where Chapman was set up before the ball was hit. It’s the off-balance throw and the save by LaMonte Wade Jr. at the end. But it’s also the context, the loaded bases, the full count, the save behind the save to keep one of the silliest and most improbable comeback streaks alive. It’s the fact Chapman has made an absolutely absurd play in each of those comeback wins.
It wasn’t that long ago that the San Francisco Giants were a defensive mess. They were absolutely abysmal in 2022, and though they improved last season, it was never something you thought of as the kind of strength that could tip the scales in a close race for a postseason spot. In this game alone, Luis Matos made another play at the wall to save at least one run, if not several. Thairo Estrada made a brilliant play in the ninth to keep the inning from getting even weirder than it already was.
Here’s another short list: The history of Giants grand slams when down by exactly three runs. It’s not that uncommon to have a situation in which the bases are loaded and the htting team is down by exactly three runs. Hit a dinger, take the lead. Seems so simple when you put it like that. Everyone’s thinking it. But it almost never happens.
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It’s happened 17 times in franchise history now. Patrick Bailey was hunting a sinker down the middle with a 2-0 count Friday, and he got it. These are the kind of grand slams you can recall decades later. It’s one thing to remember Mike Yastrzemski saving the day in 2021, but I’m still thinking about Edgar Rentería’s second-greatest Giants homer. Milt May hit a grand slam in the ninth inning of a game that didn’t mean a durned thing for the postseason chances of the 1980 Giants, but it was still one of the 50 greatest homers in franchise history.
Wait, here’s another short list: Teams that have come back from three straight deficits of four runs. The Giants (via Elias Sports Bureau) shared the other teams that have done this.
But of those teams, the Giants were the only ones to have two of their comebacks in the eighth inning or later. A lot of the other ones followed a pattern of falling behind early, with a slow, steady climb in the middle innings. The Giants are the late-inning champs of those comeback champs.
My first thought is that a comeback like this is akin to a no-hitter, where it takes a combination of luck and skill. The inning started when Yastrzemski squibbed a ball so awkwardly that he didn’t start running right away. It rolled down the line and hit third base. Fair ball. Rally started. Every great comeback needs the slot machine to come up with a few cherries.
Except, wait, three comebacks in a row? Rarer than a no-hitter. Heck, the Giants had one of those in Citi Field not that long ago. It’s more like a perfect game, except, check that, there are just three other teams up there on the comeback list and there are 24 perfect games in major-league history. So a team doing this three games in a row is more like an unassisted triple play?
Kinda. But it’s not as common.
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All of it belongs on different short lists. For the last three games, the Giants have been at the four-way stop sign of weird, hilarious, rare and fun. Right now, the Giants are the Road Runner, running off a cliff without falling. They’re refusing to look down and they’re saying meep meep as fans along the Eastern Seaboard pull their hair out and curse their Acme-brand relievers.
In the last three games, the Giants have stared at win probabilities of 3.5 percent, 2.6 percent and 2.9 percent. Multiplying those together, you get .0026 percent. A quick Google search suggests those odds are similar to the odds of predicting the correct Final Four teams in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. And you’re feeling cocky when you get New Jersey A&M upsetting Dabney State in the first round.
Not-so-fun fact: Not one of those comeback kids up there finished over .500. The ’32 Cardinals and ’61 Red Sox both finished in sixth place, and the ’99 Marlins went 64-98. None of this has to mean anything in the big picture.
In the here and now, though? The Giants are at the nexus of exciting and improbable baseball. They’re taking these short lists and sending them through a Large Hadron Collider to see whether they can uncover the secrets of baseball. They’re far away at the moment, but it’s incredibly stupid fun while it lasts.
(Photo of Matt Chapman throwing to first for the final out: Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
