CHICAGO — If you’re a baseball fanatic, you’ve met someone who’s taken the idea of “baseball is boring” and made it a part of their personality. They’re too far gone to change their mind, but if there’s a chance to convince them, use Tuesday night’s game as an example of the sport’s magnificent bounty of nonsense. Distill it down into a single sentence, even:
Baseball is the kind of sport where a team can be one out away from a completely normal win, then end up winning it in ways that haven’t happened in a century, if they’ve ever happened at all.
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The final result was the Giants defeating the Cubs 14-5, but it could have ended 5-3 or 5-4 about a half hour earlier. It could have ended up as a brutal, 6-5 loss with a broken-bat hit in either the ninth or 10th inning, but that would have been a standard bullpen meltdown, the kind that every team typically experiences throughout a season. Instead, it became a game that made smoke come out of the supercomputers at Elias Sports Bureau. I’d like to think that there’s a flashing red light in Jayson Stark’s home that goes off when there’s a game like this. The neighbors might complain about the sound the alarm makes, but it’s not about them.
The Giants scored nine runs in the 11th inning, which was …
• The most runs the Giants have scored in any single extra inning in franchise history.
• Tied for the most runs the Giants have scored in extra innings, period, with the previous games happening in 1929 and 1940.
• The most runs ever scored in extra innings at Wrigley Field, which had seen 843 regular-season extra-inning games before Tuesday night.
It wasn’t just the quantity of runs that led to historical tidbits. Cubs reliever Ryan Pressly allowed all of those runs without recording an out, which makes him the first pitcher to do that since Hank Borowy of the 1951 Tigers. Christian Koss entered the game in the top of the 11th as a pinch runner for LaMonte Wade Jr., who was scheduled to be the automatic runner. Koss would later bat in the inning, making him the first player in San Francisco history to enter as a pinch runner and get a plate appearance. The New York Giants had it happen six times, and the first one to do it for them was Jim Thorpe.
Baseball is the kind of sport where you’re an out away from reading a nice article about Justin Verlander, but you end up thinking about Jim Thorpe instead.
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The Giants don’t get into the land of statistical tomfoolery without extra innings, and they don’t get into extra innings without the standard kind of baseball weirdness before that, so start from the beginning.
The Giants scored two runs in the second inning on a Matt Chapman walk, a Wade single and an infield single from Heliot Ramos that led to a wild throw to home plate. The error allowed Wade to scamper to third, where he scored on a Patrick Bailey sacrifice fly. In the third inning, Jung Hoo Lee hit a two-run homer, and in the fifth inning, Brett Wisely drove in a run with a safety squeeze that could have been a double play. Verlander threw five innings and left with a 5-3 lead, in line for the 263rd win of his career and first as a Giant.
Jung Hoo Lee – San Francisco Giants (4)
pic.twitter.com/HzbOOkS01G— MLB HR Videos (@MLBHRVideos) May 7, 2025
See? Baseball can be normal when it tries. Which isn’t often.
The Giants got scoreless outings from Randy Rodríguez, Camilo Doval and Tyler Rogers in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, respectively, and they turned to Ryan Walker to get three outs before he allowed two runs. He couldn’t get those three outs, walking two batters before giving up a single to Justin Turner that cut the lead to one. With left-handed batter Kyle Tucker coming up with two outs and both the tying and winning runs on base, manager Bob Melvin went to Erik Miller for the save. Tucker singled up the middle to tie the score instead.
Walker would get the hold, and Miller would get the blown save, which doesn’t seem fair. Verlander wouldn’t get the win, which also doesn’t seem fair. After the game, Walker said, “I literally apologized to him today. I was like, dude, I’m sorry. I’ve ruined this twice for you already.” Verlander, for his part, put some of the blame on himself, saying, “I’m somebody who never really expects a lot of wins when I go five innings.”
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The win eventually went to Miller, though, which was definitely fair, considering that he kept the Cubs scoreless in the bottom of the 10th inning. With the winning run on third base and one out, Miller overpowered Pete Crow-Armstrong with three sliders, then got Dansby Swanson to hit a 103 mph line drive right to Matt Chapman. It had an expected batting average of .720, which seems low. The Giants were about a foot away on either side of Chapman from not blessing us with historical weirdness.
But you’re here for the historical weirdness, of course, and there’s video evidence:
As soon as Miller got out of the 11th inning, Kyle Harrison started warming up. Before the game, Melvin was asked about the ideal situation for Harrison to pitch his first major-league game this season — and his first ever game out of the bullpen at any level — and he said: “It depends how the bullpen is set up. We’re down a couple guys, so he’s probably our length guy at this point in time. But that could be early length, it could be up (in the score) length, it could be down length. You’re never really sure.”
It wasn’t length that the Giants needed, though. It started as a high-leverage situation. After Miller preserved the tie in the 10th inning, Melvin said Harrison “was coming into the game, regardless. Not exactly the soft landing we were talking about earlier.” When Harrison threw his first warmup pitch, he was thinking about how to get three outs without the automatic runner scoring the winning run from second base.
Then he was thinking about how to get three outs without the automatic runner scoring the tying run. Then he was thinking about how to get three outs with a three-run cushion for his first big-league save. It kept going like that for a while, and he ended up pitching in a blowout.
“Control what you can control,” Harrison said after the game. “My mindset is just to go out there and throw strikes.”
Giants catcher Patrick Bailey and pitcher Kyle Harrison celebrate after the 14-5 victory against the Cubs. (Matt Marton / Imagn Images)
The fun facts and wacky baseball tidbits are fun and wacky, alright, but they don’t mean much in the big picture of the 2025 season. If you ignore the historical weirdness, the most important part of the game was Harrison’s return. He threw 11 pitches, topping out at 97 mph and striking out two of the three batters he faced. It was the best version of himself, the one that Giants fans have been looking forward to since he was the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball.
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You should not ignore the historical weirdness, however. That’s one of the reasons you watch, after all. Now go spread the word about this strange and amusing sport. Text the baseball-is-boring person first.
(Top photo of Heliot Ramos sliding safely into home for one of the two 11th-inning runs he scored against the Cubs: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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