Live Game Lessons: Halloween in August - Giants Pound Orioles 13-2 (8/31/2025)

A Spooky Weekend 👻 🎃

Well if I had to guess, the Orioles looked like they took a late night trip down to the Marina District to celebrate Saturday's win. Sunday was pretty ugly for them. We'll get into some details that we can learn from shortly, but first, let's just recap how weird this series was.

Friday night the Giants won 15-8 in the weekly AppleTV (thank goodness that's going away). Saturday the Orioles won 11-1 in the Fox game of the week (a 415pm local time start, we never have those). Finally, Sunday we thought we might get a normal Sunday at the yard and the Giants repaid the favor defeating the Orioles 13-2 in a game where the O's had runners reach base in 8 of the 9 innings. I didn't see any black cats running around, but there was a lot of orange and black out on the field this weekend 🎃 🐈‍⬛.

Trail Runner Leads

This was an interesting one that you needed to be at the game in order to see. The Orioles had runners on 1st and 2nd a couple different times in the game. Watch the eyes of the runner on 1st base in the video below -

You can see that he's not even looking at the pitcher as he's about to pitch. He's looking at his runner at 2nd base to see if he steals. This is going to help him get a good jump to also steal if the runner on 2nd decides to go. Why is this important?

First, understand that most times stealing 3rd is a rhythm steal put on by the baserunner and not the base coach. It's rarely called from the dugout meaning the runner on 1st normally doesn't know if the runner on 2nd is going to steal on any given pitch. Because of this, the runner at 1st is naturally going to get a slower jump. Good catchers will recognize this and instead of trying to throw the lead runner out at 3rd, he'll try to throw the trail runner out at 2nd. If he gets close to the same jump as the runner at 2nd, then the catcher will be less likely to try and get the trail side runner out.

This technique is possible because of how far back the 1st baseman is playing. You can see here he's not even in the picture. This is correct positioning, but most youth level teams won't have their 1st baseman play this deep, so you'll have to be more careful than the Orioles baserunners here.

Taking Groundballs From all Infield Positions

The Orioles played bad defense on Sunday. Three errors on rather routine plays by MLB standards and then poor Daniel Johnson slipping in the outfield on a routine flyball led to a couple runs as well. Two of the errors were committed by 3rd baseman Jeremiah Jackson, who has been great since being called up to make his MLB debut on August 1st. One of them he committed while being in the shortstop position as the 3rd baseman. Here is that play -

The Orioles like to shift a lot and they're not alone. You're seeing more and more college and even high school teams shift too. The part that I think trips Jackson up here is that it's a double play situation. Turning a double play as a 3rd baseman and a shortstop are VERY different. The ball gets on you so much quicker as a third baseman and that throw is always a strong overhand throw. Here, it looks like he gets a little in between on what he wants to do with the feed and then forgets to field the ball. If you play 3rd base, you need to make sure you're still taking groundballs at the shortstop position when your team does a fungo circuit. Especially for the double play feeds.

Previous Articles in Action

Runner in Motion

We talked about this specifically in a 3-1 count scenario, but the Giants got a runner in motion with Heliot Ramos at the plate resulting in a base hit and Drew Gilbert going 1st to 3rd. This is what that looks like when well executed -

The pitch sequence so far in this at bat was fastball down for ball 1 and then a swing strike on a slider to make it 1-1. This might have just been a straight steal that Ramos swung away on, but either way he does a good job of keeping the ball line drive/down and is able to get the runner 1st to 3rd.

Runner on 3rd, 1 out

We talked in part 2 of the contact play series about how sometimes a ball is hit too hard. Even with the contact play on, you don't react fast enough and you have to stay put. That happened here -

I know the contact play was on because earlier in the at bat Adames hit a foul ball on the ground and Ramos broke toward home plate. Here he hits it too hard for Ramos to get started toward the plate and he has to hold at 3rd.

Two hitters before this, Ramos also came up with a runner on 3rd and 1 out. We talked about not trying to elevate in this scenario and just trying to drive a hard groundball through the infield. This is why -

With the infield up this play is impossible for the 3rd baseman to make. If he's back, he's got a shot. The infielders are so close to the hitter that their range is limited and you see Ramos pick up an RBI single here.

Verlander Reaching Another Milestone

What an effort from Justin Verlander on Sunday. With the score 7-0 in the 5th, Bob Melvin had to be fighting every urge to go get his 42-year old future hall of famer as his pitch count climbed to over 120. That's a lot of pitches over any amount of innings, but to grind out 5 in that amount tells you how labored those innings were. You can see his sigh of relief and hear Giants fan's appreciation for the grind he got through below. It's not often you see a standing ovation for a guy coming off in the 5th inning -

By completing 5 innings he was able to pick up the win. Orioles hitters were pesky. They fouled off 33 pitches in 5 innings (21 with 2 strikes), but he was ultimately able to strike out 10 hitters becoming the oldest Giant in franchise history to accomplish this feat. Verlander improved his record to 3-10, but he hasn't pitched nearly as poorly as that record would indicate. He got his ERA down to 4.29 for the season and is now just 4 strikeouts behind Gaylord Perry for 8th all time in career strikeouts (3530). What an amazing career and truly special to see him battle like that in person.

Orioles Youngster a Bright Spot

Since being called up as a 20-year old last season, there has been a lot of pressure to perform on Jackson Holliday (some of you may know the family's background). He hasn't had a great season, but he's only 21. This game takes a long time to figure out. He was by far the Orioles best player on the field yesterday going 1-2 with a 2B and 3 walks (including a 7 pitch walk to start the game) and stole a bag. He ended up 4-9 on the series with a 2B, a 3B, and walked 6 times.

He saw 28 pitches in 5 plate appearances yesterday and got on base 4 times. It shows a lot of discipline and maturity to grind out quality at bats like this. If I'm an O's fan, I'm far from labeling him a bust. He also stole a base by picking a great pitch to run on, which we will break down in a later post.

Other Notes

Not everything could make the cut here. Here are a few other plays I noted that we'll take a look at in the future:

1. Picking pitches to steal on
2. Getting out to leads from 1st base quickly to avoid being picked off
3. 1st and 3rd sacrifice flies
4. Taking leads in foul territory at 3rd base
5. Sliding rules - even in the big leagues they're sensitive about this now

Hope everyone enjoys a Labor Day off that is filled with baseball!