Joe Panik Walkoff Double Keeps The Giants Alive

Joe Panik’s 13th-inning double to drive in Brandon Crawford gave the Giants a 6-5 win over the Cubs on Monday, keeping San Francisco’s season alive. The even-year cockroaches now have won 10 straight games while facing elimination.

But what East Coast fans who gave up around midnight—and everyone who had better things to do with five hours and four minutes of their lives—might be wondering is: How the hell did this happen?

The first mistake was evolving from single-celled organisms in the primordial ooze to sentient beings who care about zero-sum contests like this. After that, humanity did a lot of things wrong, a few things right, and on Monday night there was a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs.

Madison Bumgarner failed to Madison Bumgarner in the most spectacularly unpredictable way possible: Giving up a three-run pitcher-on-pitcher dinger to Cubs ace Jake Arrieta in the second. Denard Span scored in third and then again in the fifth on RBIs by Buster Poesy and Brandon Belt, respectively.

At one point, still trailing 3-2, the Giants got boned by a replay failure that seems like an especially colossal waste of time in retrospect.

In the bottom of the eight, Brandon Belt and Buster Posey both reached to put two on with no outs. In an over-eager effort to clinch, the Cubs tasked Aroldis Chapman with a six-out save. This backfired.

That guy you couldn’t pick out of a lineup even after his Wild Card heroics, aka Conor Gillaspie, who had never seen a triple-digit pitch in the majors, tripled on Chapman’s 101-mph offering to tie up the game and give us all a chance to learn this charmingly benign fact about him.

With Giants fans still twittering about Even Year religion, Kris Bryant fucked up all our Tuesday plans with two-run dinger in the ninth on Sergio Romo’s gift pitch right down the middle. It was agonizingly close.

Four innings later, Panik finally, blissfully, sent everyone home. Until Game 4 tomorrow. Or rather, later today.