SAN FRANCISCO _ For one night, anyway, the San Francisco Giants looked like a team that everyone may vaguely remember. A pretty darned good one.
Madison Bumgarner was dealing, and adding a little extra with the lumber. Buster Posey and Joe Panik were delivering clutch RBI hits. Denard Span and Eduardo Nunez even teamed up for a double steal.
Then, for some real spice, the Giants conjured up a mid-game trade. As he was preparing to hit in the fifth inning, Nunez was called back to the dugout, where he accepted hugs from his teammates following a trade to the Boston Red Sox. Not a bad Tuesday night for Nunez _ a couple of runs scored, a two-run double in his last Giants at-bat and a deal that sent him from last place to first.
It was not known what the Giants were getting in return for Nunez as the club had not yet officially announced the deal. One report from Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal was that the Giants would be getting two minor league pitching prospects from Boston.
Beyond the Nunez trade, which was only surprising by its mid-game timing, it's tough to say why this kind of performance hasn't happened more often for the Giants than it has, but the packed house at AT&T Park definitely reveled in a bit of good-vibe nostalgia as the Giants put a serious 11-3 licking on the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was 2-0 after two innings, 6-0 after three and 10-0 after four. Imagine that, crooked-number scoring in three consecutive innings.
The Giants were so on fire, they were reverberations 90 miles away up in Sacramento. Pablo Sandoval, playing in his first Triple-A game since rejoining the organization, smacked a double. With Nunez on his way out of town, who knows? Sandoval could be back in San Francisco as early as Wednesday afternoon.
And mark it down: On July 25, Bumgarner was well on his way to earning his first victory of the 2017 season. It's been some kind of long wait. He wasn't the Bumgarner who shut out the Pirates in that memorable 2014 wild-card game, but he was a lot closer than he looked in his first two starts after returning from his dirt-bike disaster.
The ace left-hander kept the ball in the ballpark, for starters. After giving two home runs in each of his first two starts since his return, Bumgarner gave up some hard-hit balls, but none left the yard. Moreover, he pitched tough with runners on base, stranding seven runners over the five innings and only allowing one run to score on a weak two-out RBI flare hit by David Freese.
Bumgarner allowed six hits and the lone run while walking one and striking out four.
With the game essentially over after four innings, all the attention turned to the Nunez trade development in the fifth. He'll be departing the Giants hitting .308 for the season, and one of baseball's hottest hitters since June 1. He's batting .348 since that date and in his final four games with the Giants, he went 9 for 16 (.563).
Interestingly, Nunez was hit by a pitch by Pirates starter Jameson Taillon in the third inning and appeared as if he might be seriously hurt when he dropped to his knees in the batters box holding his left arm. Nunez apparently just took a stinger on his elbow, however, as he stayed in the game and then doubled off the right-field wall in the fourth, driving in a pair of runs.
The Giants broke the game open in the third inning on Panik's bases-loaded triple and then added four more runs in the fourth. Chris Stratton, who was called up earlier in the day, pitched the final four innings after Bumgarner departed and earned his first major-league save.
