The San Francisco Giants had scored just five runs in their past five games before Friday night. Five losses that pretty much ensured their irrelevancy in the late-season push for the postseason, sinking them three games below .500 — their worst winning percentage of the season. But this wasn’t rock bottom. Of course not. Nor was an unresponsive offense the only way this team could lose a ballgame. There are a million ways to not score as many runs as your opponent, and the Giants, plumbing the depths of their own extraneousness, found another way on Friday in a 7-6 loss against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The game was weird at first. The line-up was putting runners on base and figuring out ways to bring them home. That kind of satisfaction felt foreign. It had been awhile. Offensive closure? A r

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