Giants beat Cardinals 5-4 in 10th on wild throw (w/video)

SAN FRANCISCO - Gregor Blanco stood before his locker in the Giants clubhouse, still wearing his game uniform, and turned to face a throng of reporters and cameramen.

Before he could tackle the first question, though, his young son, also named Gregor, began squealing. “Papi! Mi Papi!” the boy shouted, leaning over a stool and watching the screen of a smart phone that was showing replays of his father in action against the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 3 of the National League championship series.

Here’s what young Gregor saw: Gregor Blanco the elder laying down a perfect bunt in the 10th inning. Blanco watching the throw sail past first base just before he got there. Blanco being mobbed by teammates on the infield at AT&T Park, the hero of his team’s latest improbable win.

Scoring dramatic runs at the end of games isn’t enough for the Giants. They have to do it on wild pitches, small-ball run manufacturing and, as in Tuesday’s 5-4 victory, on a throwing error that allowed the winning run to score in extra innings, after San Francisco had managed to fritter away a 4-0 lead.

“Baseball is definitely a sport where you never know what’s gonna happen next,” said reliever Sergio Romo, who came on to get the final out and earned the win, one game after being tagged with the Game 2 loss in St. Louis. “And in the playoffs, it’s definitely blown up a little bit more. There’s a little more emotion attached to it as well. I mean, we’ve scored runs on passed balls, throwing errors, on line drives, on doubles, bloop singles.”

Romo sighed. “Baseball,” he declared. “It’s amazing.”

And the Giants have particularly amazing lately. And this NLCS against the Cardinals – well, it’s sort of off the charts.

Tuesday’s winning rally was set up, appropriately, by mistakes that turned into gold. Brandon Crawford led off the bottom of the 10th with a walk against St. Louis reliever Randy Choate, bringing up Juan Perez, who had entered the game as a pinch hitter in the seventh and stayed in the game in left field.

Giants manager Bruce Bochy ordered a bunt, but Perez failed to lay it down in fair territory. Twice. So with the count at 0-2, Bochy let Perez swing away, and he wound up rapping a solid single to left field.

“Perez, he couldn’t get a bunt down and gets a base hit,” Bochy said. “Now you’re playing with house money, I guess.”

“He might have planned it, you never know,” San Francisco first baseman Brandon Belt joked about Perez.

That brought Blanco to the plate with two on and no outs.

Blanco is one of the best bunters on the teams, but he, too, fouled off the first pitch from St. Louis reliever Randy Choate, a nasty lefty. The next attempt was a beautiful bunt to the left of the mound, though. Choate ran it down, wheeled and threw the ball past second baseman Kolten Wong, who was covering first. Wong stretched his 5-foot-9 frame as far as he could, but it wasn’t enough.

Crawford scored the winning run on the throwing error, handing San Francisco a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series.

“Anybody can score on base hits, you know,” Giants starter Tim Hudson said.

Game 4 is Wednesday at AT&T, with Ryan Vogelsong starting for the home team and Shelby Miller going for St. Louis.

The Giants felt that Game 3 never should have been this close.

Cardinals starter John Lackey retired the first two batters of the game, then swiftly found trouble. Buster Posey smoked a tailing single to right. Pablo Sandoval and Hunter Pence each recovered from an 0-2 count, Panda fighting back for an opposite-field single, Pence for a line-drive double into the right-field corner that scored a run.

Lackey then walked Belt, loading the bases for Travis Ishikawa – a man not accustomed to having tables set for him. Ishikawa drove Lackey’s first pitch, a 94-mph fastball, sky-high to right field. St. Louis’ Randal Grichuk retreated close to the wall, then backed away and let the ball carom off the bottom of the padding.

The bases cleared, and the Giants were up 4-0 practically before the pregame introductions had concluded.

But the Cardinals, as they usually do, chipped away. Wong, their newest postseason slugger, blasted a two-run triple in the fourth inning - to the same part of the wall as Ishikawa’s shot, but even deeper. Jhonny Peralta slapped an RBI single over the glove of the sliding Sandoval in the sixth, and Grichuk chased Hudson with a seventh-inning home run that drilled the left-field foul pole.

Meanwhile, Lackey not only settled down, he started mowing down Giants like a regular-season Clayton Kershaw. After the Ishikawa double, Lackey pitched 51/3 innings and gave up just one hit – a single by Hudson.

“I thought he did just fine through the first two innings, but we just had a good approach up there,” Belt said. “We might have gotten away from our approach a little bit, and he capitalized on it.”

Cardinals relievers Marco Gonzales, Pat Neshek and Seth Maness were just as tough. Only Choate stumbled.

The Giants have enjoyed more than their share of good luck lately. But as the equally opportunistic Cardinals might attest, Bochy’s team has consistently put itself in position to take advantage of what falls in its lap.

“It’s been a big topic on how we have scored on wild pitches and passed balls and things like that, and my answer is: It doesn’t matter,” Ishikawa said. “As long as we’ve got that W and the game is over, that’s all we care about.”

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at phil.barber@press?democrat.com.