Matt Chapman: ahead of the curve

There’s a point when a curveball isn’t a curveball anymore.

Braves reliever Pierce Johnson found that point in a 1-1 count to Matt Chapman with 2-outs and a runner on in the bottom of the 9th. Johnson threw 15 pitches today and 12 of them were curveballs. Last night, he threw 15 pitches and 14 of them were Charlies. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. One and one equals two. I think, therefore I am…100-percent sure Johnson will throw a buttload of curveballs.

Any reasonable human being would sit on the right-hander’s signature pitch, and Chapman, as a reasonable human being, stepped into the box on Saturday and looked for nothing but the breaking ball.

He got three of them. The first one was outside. The other one too far in, maybe a little low. The third was just right.

Johnson hooked one into the dirt Friday night, and he hung one Saturday afternoon. Chapman’s walk-off shot was his first as a Giant, his 12th homer of the year, and pushed his OPS above .800.

The San Francisco Giants have now won 12 one-run wins at home this season. It’s their eighth walk-off. Both figures lead the Major Leagues. San Francisco has now played 13 consecutive games decided by two or less runs and have won seven of them.

Of course, Heliot Ramos had his hand in the decisive rally. With 1-out, Ramos shot a 2-2 curve up the middle to put the tying run on base and give the Giants only their fourth hit on the day. Johnson then flashed two fastballs to Wilmer Flores before he popped up the curve in foul territory. It’s clear Flo was sitting on the pitch, and he just missed it, making contact a fraction of a second too late and skying it into the air.

In the 8 innings prior, Flo was the only semblance of offense against dominant Braves starter Bryce Elder. His solo shot in the 4th was the first run of the game and the last hit for San Francisco before Ramos’s 9th inning single. The homer was Flores’s first since his three-homer, 8 RBI onslaught against the A’s on May 16th.

The Braves had the 2-1 lead going into the 9th thanks to the work of their starter. The pitching duel between Elder and Logan Webb was a duel of sinkers, of paint, of heavy offerings.

Webb came out hot, striking out 9 through the first four innings. He shut down a runners at the corners with a one-out situation in the 3rd by K-ing Ronald Acuña Jr. with an elevated cutter, then getting Drake Baldwin to chase a 3-2 change-up well-below the zone. Webb rode that momentum into the 4th when he stopped the heart of the Atlanta line-up, fetching called strike-3s on Austin Riley, Matt Olson and Marcell Ozuna.

But with a new lead to support, Webb promptly gave up a game-tying shot to Michael Harris II to lead off the 5th. In the 6th, the top of the order slapped three groundball singles to lead off the frame. Webb nearly navigated out of the chop unscathed, getting Matt Olson to pop out for the first out, but Ozuna hit a grounder poorly enough for him to win the race to first as the baseball made its way around the horn.

A series of frustrating events we’ve seen before. Vintage Webb in a way, unexceptional contact finding holes, setting up a run on a bad break. Cause of death: balls in play.

But Webb isn’t quite the Webb of recent years. He’s a strikeout guy now. With the addition of the four-seam and cutter giving him more play at the belt, hitters have been strung between the north-south poles of the strike zone. They just can’t look for pitches down as much as they had before, and it’s helped expose a lot of weaknesses in opponents swings. The strikeouts are piling up because of it. Webb’s whiff rate is the highest it’s been since 2021, thanks in part to the 50.8% chase whiff rate. The strikeout of Harris to end the 6th was his 10th of the day and fourth double-digit K total of the season. He now has 101 total over 87.1 IP — good for fourth most in MLB, and second most in the NL behind Washington’s MacKenzie Gore.

Yes, Webb was his dominant self at home on Saturday, but Elder was better. Subtle and efficient, Elder quietly matched Webb frame-by-frame and, when given the lead, snuck beyond him in the later innings. He needed just 76 pitches to get through 6 innings, and a hair over 100 to throw 8 complete. He surrendered just 3 hits and 0 walks while logging a career-high 12 K. For Elder, everything he threw was down. He probed the corner low-and-away with his sinker and slider. Mike Krukow fawned over the performance from the broadcast booth, noting that if Elder did miss, he missed below the knees. Nothing, other than that 2-2 slider to Flo, was left up and out over the plate.

A flawless outing that couldn’t be maintained by his relief.

With Saturday’s come-from-behind win, the Giants will have the opportunity to play for the series sweep on Sunday.