Without Ball Traveling Far, Giants Beat Nationals to Earn Trip to NLCS
SAN FRANCISCO - Never mind the jagged contour of the right-field wall or the tricky winds off McCovey Cove - the most treacherous part of AT&T Park is the square patch of turf on the infield.
For the Washington Nationals, it seemed to turn into their own Bermuda (grass) Rectangle.
The unexplained and unbelievable happened, and as a result the Nationals' World Series hopes vanished Tuesday night in a 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants, who won this National League division series, three games to one.
The Giants, who are trying to win their third World Series in five years, will face the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series. They reached that round by scoring all their runs Tuesday without the baseball ever leaving the infield - on a walk, a ground out and a wild pitch.
The decisive score came in the seventh after Bryce Harper's home run had tied it for Washington. With the score tied, 2-2, Joe Panik and Buster Posey singled for the Giants with one out. The rookie Aaron Barrett relieved Matt Thornton and walked Hunter Pence to load the bases. Then Thornton truly came unglued, bouncing a fastball to Pablo Sandoval that skipped past catcher Wilson Ramos to the backstop. Panik raced home to give the Giants a 3-2 lead.
With the count 3-1 on Sandoval, Barrett proceeded to walk him intentionally. But his looping throw went over Ramos's head to the backstop. Ramos got a fortunate bounce off the backstop and fired the ball back to Barrett, who tagged the sliding Posey out at the plate.
The Giants made it stand up, but not without some drama. Harper drew a two-out walk in the ninth off the Giants' closer, Santiago Casilla, but Casilla got Ramos to bounce out to second for the final out to the delight of the crowd, which twirled orange towels as the Giants celebrated near the pitchers' mound.
If it pained the Nationals to watch the celebration, it was not their only cause of regret that originated from the center of the infield.
Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez booted a double-play comebacker that opened the door for the Giants to score twice in the second. When Ryan Vogelsong followed the error with a run-of-the-mill bunt down the third-base line, third baseman Anthony Rendon made no effort to call off Gonzalez and throw out Vogelsong at first.
As a result, both players stood and watched the ball die in the grass, and the bases were loaded.
Gonzalez then walked Gregor Blanco, who was 1 for 19 in the series, on four pitches. Panik's groundout brought in another run.
The Nationals were expected to be well equipped to reach the franchise's first World Series because of their deep pitching and an offense that was the third most productive in the National League. But during the series, the Nationals scored nine runs and batted .164.
Most of their offense came from Harper, the boisterous young left fielder, who continued to build on his promising career. He drove in both runs Tuesday, the first with a smart piece of hitting, poking a double down the left-field line that beat the Giants' shift, then blasting a towering home run down the right-field line that landed in McCovey Cove.
It was Harper's third home run of the series.
The defensive play of Tuesday's clincher went to Hunter Pence, the Giants' right fielder, who crashed into the outfield padding to snag Jayson Werth's drive in the sixth inning. It was the last pitch for Vogelsong, who was superb after struggling in September.
Werth was the last batter he faced, and the trip back to the dugout was surely an emotional one for Vogelsong because it may be his last as a Giant - the team that drafted him, traded him away, got him back and revived his career. An unlikely hero of their 2012 World Series team, he is now 37 and an impending free agent who floundered down the stretch. He is unlikely to return, and he most likely started Tuesday only because Yusmeiro Petit was pressed into service during Game 2, which lasted 18 innings.
'I had those feelings towards the end of the season,' Vogelsong said the day before his start. Noting that he didn't finish the regular season the way he wanted to, he added, 'I really just need to focus on making pitches and execution and pay attention to detail.'
Vogelsong did that exceedingly well. He did not allow a hit until the fifth, when Ian Desmond's leadoff single was followed by Harper's double. But Vogelsong escaped without further trouble.
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