Major League Baseball

Mark Purdy:

Published Oct. 9, 2010 11:10 a.m. ET

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You knew it couldn't be that easy. Not for the Giants. Not for the team that spent the entire regular season sending its fans to a flop sweat festival. Eighty of their games -- almost half the schedule -- were decided by two runs or less.

Thus, when the Giants took an early 4-0 lead Friday night over the Atlanta Braves and sailed into the eighth inning ahead 4-1 and poised to take a 2-games-to-none lead in a best-of-five playoff series ... well, that wasn't the smell of garlic fries in the air. It was the smell of incredulous doubt. This was too good to be true.

Right?

Right.

Eventually, the Giants would go on to lose the game 5-4 in 11 innings. And getting there definitely wasn't half the fun. It was no fun at all.

The game went into extra innings because of what happened in the top of the eighth, when any vision of a cruise-control victory went sideways. Atlanta opened the inning with two singles off Giants' reliever Sergio Romo. This led manager Bruce Bochy to what might be construed as a panicky move. He summoned closer Brian Wilson.

Usually, Wilson is asked to get three or four outs at the end of a game and nail down a victory. This time, Wilson would need to get six outs. In his four seasons with the Giants, he has never had a six-out save. He wouldn't get one this time, either. Which is why the Giants wound up going into extra innings with the score tied and the fate of the series hanging in the balance.

In a Giants' clubhouse full of personality, Wilson could be a character on "The Simpsons." Late this season, he grew a full beard and, one way or another -- he's coy about this -- made sure the facial hair was blacker than the ink on Barry Zito's paychecks. This spawned an entire cult of fans who showed up at AT&T Park wearing fake beards.

Alas, on this night, their hero exfoliated. After an error by third baseman Pablo Sandoval allowed one run to score, Wilson gave up a double to Braves shortstop Alex Gonzalez that tied the game. And suddenly, it wasn't October. It was midsummer. Oh, no. Not again.

But how could it be any different, really? For the first 14 innings of the series, the Braves had gone scoreless and might as well have left their bats home in Atlanta. And, early on Friday, the game's biggest suspense occurred in the top of the first inning, when catcher Buster Posey and third baseman Pablo Sandoval collided hard with each other while chasing a pop fly in foul territory.

Posey made the catch but fell down in a daze and needed a few minutes to recover -- as did Sandoval -- as the two solid men slammed their chests and heads against each other. As it turned out, Posey and Sandoval hit each other harder than any Atlanta player hit a baseball against Matt Cain, the Giants' starter.

Also, for the longest time it appeared that the Giants' hero would be none other than Pat Burrell, the Big Banger from Boulder Creek. Burrell, a graduate of Bellarmine Prep in San Jose, was picked up back in May after being cut by the Tampa Bay Rays and had become a power-hitting force for the Giants.

At Bellarmine's home diamond, Burrell was famous for hitting monster home runs over the left-field fence that would interrupt track and field practice on the 400-meter running surface.

In the bottom of the first inning Friday, he hit a homer so hard, it almost reached the Bellarmine track 50 miles away. Instead, it came to rest high in the left-field bleachers.

But you knew that sort of good stuff couldn't continue indefinitely, either. And it didn't. The extra innings would finally finish off the plot.

Contact Mark Purdy at mpurdy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5092.

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