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Giants are intent on keeping calm and rolling with Ryan Vogelsong

SAN FRANCISCO – The bottom of the ninth inning here, the air had cooled, and Buster Posey had a fastball to hit near the middle of the strike zone.

The swing looked decent enough, and the sound of the bat on the ball was hopeful to the people here, and the ball was indeed airborne, and so there was a cheer from those souls at AT&T Park, but Posey knew better.

Giants manager Bruce Bochy walks back to the dugout after a pitching change Friday night. (USA TODAY Sports)
Giants manager Bruce Bochy walks back to the dugout after a pitching change Friday night. (USA TODAY Sports)

“I knew just the end of the bat,” he said. “I knew right off the bat I missed it.”

After a few weeks spent on the right side of those critical inches, the San Francisco Giants have been on their wrong side for two games. It might not seem like much – the width of a ball here or there, a couple losses either way – but it’s something now, here, at the end of a Friday night game won by the Kansas City Royals, 3-2, in a World Series led by the Royals, two games to one.

Alex Gordon settled under that fly ball in the ninth inning. The fastball Royals closer Greg Holland threw near the middle, they don’t come around that often. Not from him, not from the back end of a bullpen that’s as good as there is. Granted, this fastball arrived at 95 mph, out of mechanics Posey himself described as “kinda funky,” and yet that fastball – thick in the zone on a one-ball count – is about all the best hitter in this series could hope for. And he missed it.

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So when Posey curled across the diamond toward his dugout, his Giants one out closer to their first World Series deficit since ’02, he wore something like a grimace. He’d missed it, maybe just missed it, but there it was nevertheless, the pitch the Giants had to have to the hitter they had to have it to.

“I didn’t think all that,” he said.

Posey is 2-for-13 in the series. He does not have an extra-base hit in the postseason. And the Giants’ offense, after livening up near the end of the NLCS and in the first game of the World Series, is beginning to look like it needs a touch of voodoo again. Perhaps this is why the Madison Bumgarner rumor gained traction Friday night, that being that Bumgarner and not Ryan Vogelsong would start Game 4 Saturday. It never made sense – not in starting the ace on three days’ rest and not in the way Giants manager Bruce Bochy conducts his ballclub – and yet these notions are born wispy but breed strong in the postseason.

For one, Bumgarner has not started on fewer than four days’ rest as a professional. For another, the Giants are not in danger of imminent elimination. There’ll be a Game 5 in which someone would have to pitch. Finally, the postseason riding of Bumgarner has pushed his full-season innings total nearly to 260, which seems like plenty.

[Photos: Best of World Series Game 3 - Giants at Royals]

(All that said, there’s rain in the forecast for Saturday, so there is a possibility Bumgarner pitches Game 4 – on Sunday.)

In the quiet of a very quiet clubhouse, Bumgarner stood off to the side and denied a report he’d demanded that Bochy start him Saturday night.

“I would never ever say anything like that,” he said.

Bochy has been around too long to be pushed into a poor decision. A short-rest Bumgarner start would signal panic, and a lack of faith in Vogelsong, and could further stress the Giants’ short bullpen, all amounting to blood in the water for a Royals team that is two wins from something remarkable.

Yes, Bochy said, there’d been a conversation or two about the Giants’ pitching options moving forward. Yes, Bumgarner, when asked, said he was a go. No, Bochy said, it would not be best for his ballclub or this series.

“[Bumgarner] is going to say he’s available,” Bochy said. “That’s who he is. [But] it’s not like he pushed real hard.”

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Ultimately, he said, “We’re not going to change things because we lost.”

The Giants' Buster Posey went 0-for-4 with an RBI in Game 3. (AP)
The Giants' Buster Posey went 0-for-4 with an RBI in Game 3. (AP)

Instead, the plan is to go with Vogelsong, who pitched well in Game 4 of the division series against the Washington Nationals and not well in Game 4 of the NLCS against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Giants presumably will have Yusmeiro Petit at the ready. He piggy-backed Vogelsong’s latter start with three scoreless innings. He hasn’t pitched since.

“You know,” reliever Jeremy Affeldt said, “Boch has always shown a lot of trust in all of us. He knows these are guys who’ve been through the fire with him. And he has trust in those guys. We trust Boch and we trust the decisions he’s making. A lot of us are succeeding in our careers because of the trust he’s shown in us.”

At the end of three games, the Giants carry one big inning, one lousy inning, and one missed fastball. Well, probably more than one. But, they were that fastball away. Mush it together, and it amounts to a two-games-to-one deficit, and a start ahead for the fourth man in line, and a sense that it’s the game that decides if the Giants are going to stay competitive in this series or hand the ball to Bumgarner in desperation.

Or, it’ll rain.

“We’ve got all the confidence in the world in Vogey,” Posey said. “He’ll be prepared.”

As Bochy said, “We’re going to keep things in order.”

It’s how they’ve won this before. It’s how Bochy has kept them directed before. No reason to change now, not when the options carry more vulnerability.

“Yeah,” Posey said, “I think he’s always shown a lot of faith in all of us. It turn, it gives us a lot of confidence.”

They are who they are. In Game 4, they are not Madison Bumgarner, but Ryan Vogelsong. And that’s best for the Giants.