Barber: Jae-Gyun Hwang a bright spot in Giants' otherwise dim season

SAN FRANCISCO

He didn’t flip the bat.

Jae-Gyun Hwang hit the go-ahead, stay-ahead home run in his first Major League Baseball game on Wednesday afternoon, and as the ball cleared the left-field wall, he momentarily held the bat outstretched like a fencing epee. Hwang, a transplant from the Korea Baseball Organization, is perhaps best known in the U.S. for his epic flip after a crucial homer in 2015.

But this is America, where public displays of emotion on the baseball diamond are rewarded with fastballs to the thigh, so Hwang simply dropped the lumber like a microphone.

“I think he started to, and he said ‘I’d better not,’” Giants manager Bruce Bochy surmised after the game.

Hwang’s discretion was good enough for the hungry fans at AT&T Park, who embraced this newest minor-league call-up with a rousing ovation in what proved to be a 5-3 victory against the Colorado Rockies. The Giants are buried so deep in the National League West, there probably aren’t enough excavators in California to rescue them. But for one series, the team showed fight, promise and a spark of excitement.

This was, in fact, the Giants’ first series sweep of 2017, and just their second winning streak of more than two games. A reminder: We’re almost into July.

Wednesday’s victory was especially improbable when you consider who delivered it. If you had prophesied in late March - with San Francisco coming off a playoff appearance and, in the eyes of some, a successful offseason - that the lineup in Game 81 would consist of Gorkys Hernandez, Joe Panik, Austin Slater, Brandon Belt, Hwang, Nick Hundley, Kelby Tomlinson and Ryder Jones, you would have been chased away with torches and pitchforks.

True, there were extenuating circumstances. Catcher Buster Posey, shortstop Brandon Crawford, right fielder Hunter Pence and center fielder Denard Span all were allowed to sit out an afternoon game that followed Tuesday night’s 14-inning marathon by mere hours.

Still, it was a ragtag lineup that more or less summed up the Giants’ fading season. Oh, and the starting pitcher was Ty Blach, who began the year on the outside of the rotation. And Bochy didn’t really have a closer to turn to. He began the day by announcing that his usual fireman (so to speak), Mark Melancon, was headed to the disabled list with a strained forearm muscle, and that Melancon’s putative fill-in, Sam Dyson, was unlikely to pitch the ninth on Wednesday because he had fully punched his time card on Tuesday night.

So the Giants fell behind 2-0 after just three Rockies had come to the plate, then somehow rebounded for the win behind all those millennial Ryders and Kelbys and Austins. When this series started, Colorado was 47-31 and San Francisco was 27-51. And the home team pulled off a three-game sweep.

Before and after the game, several Giants talked about adopting a new mindset - or re-establishing an old one - for the series. Responding to a dreadful stretch of 12 losses in 13 games (part of a longer skid of 25 losses in 32 games), and to a Fox Sports story that painted a dreary and divided clubhouse, the Giants determined to put all those losses out of mind and focus on the next game. And then the next one.

This team isn’t good enough to make a miracle playoff run, but at least it may have stabilized itself in the short term.

And the guy who made the biggest play Wednesday was the most recent addition. Hwang flew to the Bay Area from El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday for his much-anticipated MLB debut.

“The only thing I imagined was to set my feet on the field, in the grass at AT&T Park, and never even dreamed of hitting a home run here,” Hwang said through his interpreter, Mark Kim. I have no idea whether the poetic lilt of that sentence came from Hwang (in Korean press clips he is referred to as Hwang Jae-Gyun, the traditional order) or Kim.

One thing is clear: Hwang is immensely popular with his teammates. Asked about his reception in the dugout after his sixth-inning home run off of Kyle Freeland gave the Giants a 4-3 lead, he said: “They were all very excited and happy for me, and I could feel that by the way they were hitting me on the back of the helmet.”

After the game, you could hear a raucous celebration in the home clubhouse, and you just knew it was aimed at Hwang. He and Kim both were subjected to that hallowed American tradition, the beer shower, which apparently is unknown in South Korea.

“I was actually surprised by how cold the beer was,” Hwang said.

Hundley, the catcher who hit his own go-ahead home run in the fourth before the Rockies struck back to tie the game 3-3, called Hwang “absolutely hilarious,” though he declined to elaborate. One clue: On St. Patrick’s Day, Hwang was photographed wearing a green T-shirt that pictured Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and read, “I’M SO FLY I NEVER LAND.”

“He’s just a fun guy to be around,” Hundley said.

Certainly, Hwang earned this moment. He killed it for the Lotte Giants of the KBO League last year, hitting .335 with 27 home runs, 113 RBIs and an on-base percentage of .394. He left for a chance to hit against guys like Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer.

“I’ve given up a lot back home - money, being away from family, my career, everything - just to be here,” Hwang said in the dugout before Wednesday’s game. “The only reason I did that, like I said before, was because I wanted to realize my childhood dream of playing a game in the big leagues.”

If this was a personal breakthrough for Hwang, it was big news back home, too.

“The moment the announcement of my call-up was announced, I obviously got a lot of calls, but also if you look at any of the Korean media streams, all the search words were ‘Jae-Gyun Hwang,’” the slugger noted. “And even though right now the game will be broadcast early in the morning in Korea, they had to switch up all the channels and all the programming just to be able to broadcast this game live.”

Early in the morning? Try 4:45 a.m. for Blach’s first pitch.

There is a businesslike subtext to this uplifting story. If the Giants hadn’t promoted Hwang by July 1, he could have opted out of his contract and become a free agent, and all indications were that he intended to do so. When Conor Gillaspie’s back seized up this week, it gave the Giants an easy way to keep Hwang around. Now they look like geniuses.

After the game, I asked Hwang if there were any Korean slang words for “home run.” There are about an infinity of them here. Bomb. Tater. Dinger. Going yard.

“There aren’t much slangs when it comes to baseball terms in Korea,” Hwang said, or at least Kim did. “The only thing I can think of is a shortened Korean way of pronouncing ‘get outta here.’”

Not bad, but Hwang should just go ahead and flip the bat next time. That joyous gesture translates to every known language.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.