Chris Haft
MLB.com
This wasn't supposed to happen.
Not with Matt Cain on the mound. Not when the usually stale offense had scored 26 runs in the last three games. Not when the brooms were ready to sway in the night sky as chants of "We're in this!" rang out.
Not to the Giants. Not now.
Alas, the Rockies had something else in mind -- a 4-3 win Wednesday against a streaking San Francisco team, to be exact, averting a three-game Giants sweep.
Wish granted. Barely.
After tallying just three hits in the previous eight innings, the Giants equaled that amount in the ninth frame, staging a dramatic rally that quickly erased a shutout while fans turned China Basin into a playoff-like atmosphere.
Three consecutive singles off reliever Franklin Morales catapulted the late-inning surge, giving the Giants their first run of the night. Troy Tulowitzki's throwing error allowed another run to score one batter later, and, with no outs and runners at second and third, a familiar hero came to the plate against a familiar pitcher in Rafael Betancourt.
Enter Edgar Renteria -- the same guy who pulled through in the form of a game-winning grand slam off Betancourt on Aug. 30 to give the Giants what was arguably their biggest win of the season to date.
"You talk about one of the better clutch hitters," manager Bruce Bochy said. "I mean, he's the guy you want up there."
Yet so did Betancourt -- for revenge reasons, of course.
"I remember the last time I pitched here, I gave up the grand slam," Betancourt said. "I made Frankie [Morales] look bad. I made Jim Tracy look bad. I made the whole team look bad because I gave up the homer. Tonight, I was able to pick up the whole team."
The same could not be said of Renteria, who popped out to freeze both runners and record the inning's first out.
Randy Winn narrowed the lead even more with a run-scoring groundout to make it a 4-3 game and bring Nate Schierholtz to the plate.
"I was just trying to foul off anything close and get a good pitch to hit," Schierholtz said. "It's something you want to be doing, be up in the ninth with the winning run on."
You also want to hit the ball. After bringing the count to 3-2, though, the Giants outfielder swung through a fastball to end the game.
"I battled there on 3-2 and then swung on a bad pitch," he said. "It was one of those things -- it was the biggest bat of the year for me. I didn't feel too much pressure, I just wanted to put a good swing on it.
"I just didn't get it done."
Fingers can't solely be pointed at Schierholtz, though. A lackluster offense struck out eight times and failed to do much of anything all night, and what had made the Giants so dominant recently -- timely hitting -- ultimately failed them Wednesday.
"They fought hard there in the ninth," Bochy said. "We created a great situation and just came up short. We had some other opportunities. It was really the productive out that got us tonight. The boys fought back hard there, we just missed it with the timely hitting.
As they did in the sixth inning. With no outs and runners at second and third, the top tier of the lineup -- Andres Torres, Freddy Sanchez and Pablo Sandoval -- proceeded to strike out against starter Jorge De La Rosa and end the inning.
"With the right hitters up there," Bochy said, "those are big strikeouts. Their starter, he was tough. When it comes down to execution, tonight we were off."
De La Rosa was definitely on all night. He scattered just three hits and two walks while not allowing a single run and striking out nine through eight, leaving the Giants helpless in their bid to support starter Matt Cain.
"This was probably the best game of my life," De La Rosa said. "Not of my career."
Meanwhile, Cain struggled with the long ball, giving up two of them en route to a four-run, six-inning performance -- marking the second time in his last three starts he has given up four through six.
"I thought he had great stuff," Bochy said. "He just made a couple mistakes there. I felt good with Matt out there, while we ran into a guy who was on top of his game."
Numbers aside, Cain knows a loss is a loss. And he -- along with his teammates -- knows that instead of greeting Chavez Ravine just 1 1/2 games back in the Wild Card race, the Giants will now enter a three-game set against the Dodgers on Friday trailing Colorado by 3 1/2 games.
"You know every run counts in that situation," he said. "It's definitely frustrating. It doesn't matter if I get the win. I want to get the team the win. No matter how we do it, it just needs to get done."
Despite the setback, Cain and Co. find solace in the fact they still have 16 games to make some noise in the Wild Card standings. Furthermore, their ninth-inning show proved to be quite telling of their ability to battle.
"We've still got time, and we can think about what happened tonight and learn from it," Cain said. "These guys never quit. They kept battling and battling, and I think that really shows what this team is about. We'll go down to the last out, whether we're in it or not."
From: MLB.com
 Colorado (83-64) Won 1 | Colorado 4, San Francisco 3 |  San Francisco (79-67) Lost 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Standings thru 9/16/09 | Recap: COL | SF | Wrap | Gameday |
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