Every Run The Giants Scored On Saturday Left The Ballpark

Bryce Eldridge doubled in the fifth inning on Saturday night. Shay Whitcomb singled in the sixth.

Neither one of them ever scored, and it made no difference at all, because nothing that happened between the home runs mattered to the scoreboard in the slightest.

San Francisco beat the Mets 9-5 at Citi Field and hit six home runs doing it. All nine runs came on those six swings. Not eight of the nine with a sacrifice fly for garnish. Nine. In the league's play-by-play for the game, the San Francisco score does not move once except when a ball leaves the yard.

Rafael Devers went out and hit his 34th in the first and his 35th in the fifth. Christian Koss hit his second in the third and his third in the fifth. Osleivis Basabe hit one in the eighth. Grant McCray hit one in the ninth.

The Giants had ten hits. Six of them were home runs. The other four were a McCray single, a Jonah Cox single, the Eldridge double and the Whitcomb single, and those four hits combined to drive in nobody. McCray and Cox did eventually score, but only because somebody hit a home run behind them, which is less "scoring a run" than "being present when a run occurred."

Anyway.

The men who did this are the strange part. Devers is the one you would guess. He is 21-for-50 with nine home runs over his last thirteen games, on top of a season that reads .258/.339/.519. Fine. That is a very good player being very good.

The other three are having the worst years of their lives.

Christian Koss came into Saturday with one home run in fifty-one games. That count is true and it hides the shape of the thing. He had no home runs at all in his first forty-two games and a hundred and twenty plate appearances, and then hit one on August 28. The two he hit Saturday, to left-center in the third and to left in the fifth, make three in his last nine games. He is batting .211 for the season and slugging .310, which is what happens when twenty-two of your twenty-eight hits are singles (they were, going into Saturday). Grant McCray has eight hits all season in fifty-six at-bats. Two of the eight came Saturday and one of them went to center field and did not come back. Basabe is at .216 with five home runs, one of which is now this one.

So four Giants homered, and three of the four are men the club is playing in September because it is September.

Tony Vitello missed most of it. The manager got run in the top of the second by home-plate umpire Jeremie Rehak, arguing a foul-ball challenge that did not go his way (Devers had already homered by then, so Vitello was present for exactly one of his team's nine runs). His team hit the other five home runs without him. Draw from that what you like; his players did.

The season says this was not an accident#

San Francisco has scored 601 runs this season, per the league's official record for the club. Across the play-by-play of all 143 games, 259 of those runs scored on home runs. That is 43.1 percent of everything this offense has done all year, arriving on 164 swings.

Sixteen times this season, every run the Giants scored in a game has come on a home run. Fifteen of those sixteen were a one-run game, a two-run game or a three-run game, which is the ordinary version of the thing: a bad offense scrapes together two solo shots and loses 4-2. Saturday was the sixteenth, and it was nine.

And they do not do this often, either. Twice all season have the Giants hit five or more home runs in a game. June 5 in Chicago, seven of them in an 18-3 win, where fifteen of the eighteen runs came on home runs and the offense also did three runs' worth of other things. Saturday, six of them, where it did none.

Now the case against reading too much into any of it. Home runs are the best possible way to score, a team that cannot put three hits together in an inning should absolutely be trying to hit the ball over the fence, and a 59-84 club already eliminated in its division has every reason to let Koss and McCray and Basabe swing at whatever they feel like swinging at. The argument that this offense is broken because it only scores on home runs has a real answer, which is that it scores.

The trouble is the other 57 percent, and what it costs. Friday night in the same ballpark the Giants put eighteen men on base, by twelve hits and six walks, hit one home run, and lost 10-6. Saturday they put twelve men on, hit six home runs, and won by four. Six fewer baserunners, three more runs. The entire difference was how many of them reached home plate under their own power.

That is not a strategy. That is a coin.

Called Shots#

Two go on the ledger.

The first is that this gets more extreme rather than less. San Francisco finishes the regular season having scored a higher share of its runs on home runs than the 43.1 percent it carried into Sunday. The reasoning is roster shape: the men getting September at-bats here are the ones who cannot hit for average and can occasionally hit for power, and the one genuinely good hitter is in the middle of a nine-homer fortnight. This is close to a coin flip and I am not dressing it up as more.

The second is about Koss specifically, and it is the unglamorous half of Saturday. He hits no more than one home run over the rest of the regular season. The case for it is most of a season: no home runs in his first forty-two games. The case against it is the last nine, which hold all three of them, and that is why this one is filed at -170 and not as a conviction. Either he is a man who had a Saturday or he is a man who found something on August 28, and nineteen games is not many in which to tell those two apart.

Nineteen games left. San Francisco is 59-84, already out of the division, and carries a wild-card elimination number of four, which is the sort of number that exists mainly so somebody can print it.

The Giants and the Mets are at it again Sunday afternoon. Somebody will probably hit a home run. It is, at this point, the only way anyone here knows how to get home.

Sources: MLB Advanced Media's Stats API, read September 6: play-by-play and box scores for Saturday's and Friday's games, San Francisco's 2026 game log and official season hitting record, the 2026 game logs for Devers, Koss, McCray and Basabe, and the National League standings.