By the 4th inning on Saturday, it felt a little like Friday’s game was repeating itself. Swap Nathan Eovaldi with another trending right-hander in Tyler Mahle, and the sluggish San Francisco Giants were in for an afternoon of swinging uphill.
Hard contact produced little, or even caused problems for them. In the 1st, with a runner on base, a line-drive left Willy Adames’s bat at 99 MPH with a nasty sinking action that Texas shortstop Nick Ahmed nearly over ran. He somehow got his glove around it, but the baseball had so much action it spun out of Ahmed’s pocket…which turned out to be incredibly convenient.