It took 17 yes, 17 innings to score a winning home run at AT&T Park last night, and it took Buster Posey to hit it. Scoring the winning, walk-off homer to beat the Cincinnati Reds 3-2 after five hours and 28 minutes, Buster hit what was the latest late-game home run in the history of the Giants franchise since moving to San Francisco and that's just one of those fun bits of baseball trivia that the three or four fans left in the stands last night can tell their grandkids.
The game ended at 12:45 a.m. this morning, having started on the previous day, and as the Mercury-News quips, "How difficult is it for the Giants to beat the Cincinnati Reds? So hard that it takes two days to get it done."
With 17 innings that means that most of those last eight were scoreless, and the Giants had exhausted their entire bullpen at that point, as the Associated Press reports.
And everyone should probably be grateful that Posey put the game out of its misery. "I was just glad it was over,” Posey tells the Merc. “It gets to the point where you’re playing this many extra innings where your body hurts. There’s no way around it. It just hurts... fortunately, I got one [pitch] I could handle."
That pitch came from Reds pitcher Robert Stephenson.
“I think Buster had enough,” manager Bruce Bochy said to the AP. “That was huge for us.”
So far this season, the Reds were four for four in their meetings with the Giants, and losing after that long of a game, even if it is only May, had to hurt. "To play 17 and lose, it’s a lot different feeling in the Giants’ clubhouse right now than it is in ours,” says Reds manager Bryan Price, speaking to the AP.
"It wouldn’t have been fun to lose this,” Posey tells the AP. “We were out of pitching, fortunately got it done there."
So far this terrible season the Giants have won 7 out of 16 home games, and they've only won 13 games overall, putting them at the bottom of the National League West and a full 10 games behind the Colorado Rockies. The only team doing worse than the Giants in the entire MLB at this point is the Atlanta Braves.