Just plain bad

San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Landen Roupp (65) is taken out in the 4th inning during an MLB game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. (Photo by Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

One of the magical things about writing about baseball for a living is that, against all odds, every game seems to have its own story. 162 times a year the San Francisco Giants play someone, plus a few dozen more times in the spring and, on a few blue moon occasions, a handful of times after the regular season. And almost every time, a story somehow emerges. In great games and awful ones, through promising seasons and lost ones, baseball almost always delivers.

You’ve heard of scorigami. Well, this is a phenomenon I refer to as storygami.

And sometimes it fails. Sometimes they just lose in such bland fashion, in the midst of such a bland season, that I find myself itching to just clean the toilet so I can procrastinate writing about what happened.

That happened on Tuesday, as the Giants lost 8-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers in a game that was far more one-sided than the one-sided score suggests. The Giants just … lost. As you’ve come to expect them to do. As they’ve proven themselves far too capable of over the past few months.

Perhaps the story was that it was a doomed day for the Giants. It began, after all, with the news that Casey Schmitt has a torn meniscus , and will almost certainly miss the rest of the season. It continued with the sadness that Trevor McDonald will undergo Tommy John surgery , and will almost certainly miss the entirety of next season. It peaked with the revelation that Harrison Bader suffered an injury setback after the second serious scooter crash of his big league career. And then it nestled into bed with a long, lifeless, feckless, dreamless, hopeless, joyless loss.

Which I suppose we now have to talk about.

The Giants have a tendency to lose games in the first inning. Their pitchers are 18th in the Majors in first-inning ERA, while their batters are 25th in first-inning OPS. This tends to create three common outcomes in the first inning: the Giants set the tone for a loss; the Giants narrowly avoid disaster, suggesting that this is their lucky day and they have a trick up their sleeves; and the Giants narrowly avoid disaster, suggesting that this is their lucky day and they have a trick up their sleeves, only to point their finger and laugh at you for buying that nonsense.

This game was the third. It started in dubious fashion, when Landen Roupp gave up a ground ball to the first batter he faced, Brice Turang, but then failed to cover first base in time, resulting in a leadoff single. Jackson Chourio was next and settled for a more traditional single, putting two runners on with no outs.

But thanks to a pair of ground balls — one of which resulted in two outs — Roupp escaped the inning unscathed. And in the bottom half of the inning, after the Giants quickly had two outs recorded against them, Heliot Ramos hit a pop up in the infield that resulted in the most glorious and artful of pop up dances, before ultimately falling behind first baseman Andrew Vaughn, gifting Ramos a single. After Rafael Devers scorched a single of his own, the Giants had a pair of runners on base … and were so close to capitalizing on the Brewers’ gift.

This is where the game transitioned from the second of those aforementioned possible outcomes to the third. The Giants had escaped disaster, gotten lucky, and pulled a rabbit out of their hats, and you thought maybe they actually were going to play a decent game … and then Jung Hoo Lee struck out and it all came crashing back to reality.

From there, it was one disaster after another, but in deeply uninteresting terms. Following the Devers single, the Giants would turn the lineup over twice before registering another hit, when Willy Adames knocked a single in the seventh inning. By that point, the game was already over, due to a series of two-out flubs and self-made failures. In the third inning, it was a leadoff walk that Roupp issued that scored, after a two-out single. That gave the Brewers a run to get their engines started, and the next inning they would really take off.

It started off calmly enough, with Roupp retiring the first two batters of the fourth inning. But he would never retire the third. He walked a batter, gave up a stolen base, hit a batter, allowed an RBI single, gave up another stolen base, and walked another batter. And with that, his night was over, with just 3.2 innings in the books.

The two-out thunder cared not for the shift from Roupp to JT Brubaker, as Turang roped a two-run single on the very first pitch that Brubaker threw, cashing in a pair of inherited runners and pushing the score to 4-0.

A few innings later, Brubaker would, like Roupp before him, begin to leak oil with two outs. In the seventh, he quickly retired two batters, then gave up back-to-back singles. Tony Vitello, who currently has a misdemeanor charge for what he did to Keaton Winn’s right arm and a felony charge for his crimes against Matt Gage’s left arm, mercilessly pulled the plug at a season-high 57 pitches for Brubaker.

But the eyebrow-raising arm usage was only just beginning. In came Jason Foley, a perfectly acceptable choice for the situation, even though he promptly gave up a triple to score both of the runners he inherited from Brubaker before quickly ending the inning.

That seemed likely to be it for Foley, given a host of things I’ll get to in a minute, but no, he came back out for the eighth. No big issue there: he’d thrown just four pitches in the seventh.

Foley gave up a one-out double in the eighth, and then a single, and then a run-scoring fielder’s choice. The score was now 8-0, but hey … at least there were two outs. Except, as we’ve already learned, that’s where the Giants really failed to execute.

With a runner on second and two runs already in, Vit...

Indexed and credited by AIPROPX. Originating outlet: Yahoo Sports. Open at source →