The Giants' loss to the Cards ensures their third straight winless season

Well, for the third year in a row, the San Francisco Giants are ending the season without a winning record.

The Cardinals' 6-3 loss on Friday evening handed San Francisco its 81st loss of the season. So if they won the final two games of the season, the team's highest possible winning percentage would be the dubious .500 mark.

The game felt like a season in a nutshell: a promising start that faltered due to inefficiencies and was ultimately sent off; a brief encounter with a lead unsupported by the offense.

Landen Roupp had given up just two runs over 15 innings in his last three starts, including two straight scoreless games against San Diego and Kansas City, but St. Louis proved to be a more troublesome beast. The Cardinals went after him in the 4th after forcing him to throw nearly 100 pitches, collecting 9 hits and eventually scoring 6 runs.

Imagine a squirrel slowly gnawing its way around an acorn. The ridiculous portion in the animal's hands was patiently reduced to something manageable and delicious. That's what the St. Louis hitters did to our friend Landen. They held him in their little squirrel-paw-hand claws and nibbled and nibbled and nibbled and nibbled, fending off pitch after pitch until they got a point to equalize. The St. Louis batters struck at Roupp's sinker 17 times, fouled 10 of them and put the rest in play. They hit and missed Roupp's curveball just three times, fouled eight pitches and put eight others into play. On the night, the San Francisco Arms threw nearly 200 pitches, almost 60 more pitches than St. Louis.

While opponents stumbled against the curve in previous games, batting just .198, the Cardinals appeared to be chasing the pitch.

Nolan Arenado missed an 0-2 turn for an RBI single in the first. Not a penetrating drive, but a tone-setter where the run scraped the ball off the top of his boots like he knew it was going to be there. The first taste of a very long and very short trip.

In the third round, Lars Nootbar again threw a curve below the zone over the wall in the middle with a score of 0:2. Not a bad spot location wise, just one that Nootbar saw coming from a mile away.

This is the downfall of the Tom and Jerry mix. No matter how boring the two pitches may be, there are only so many combinations and scenarios you can come up with to surprise the batsman, especially when you're facing him for the second or third time. This is new territory for Roupp, who is new to the starting game. He has a slider. He has a change. He threw 13 of them (mostly to lefties), but it's a work in progress. It's a pitch without presence. Offspeed at the plate doesn't take up a hitter's brain space, which Roupp needs to get more swing-and-miss with his best weapons.

It felt like every other Cardinals hitter was concentrating on a 2-strike count and simply shrugging off his offers until they had a pitch to tie it. Masyn Winn fouled off seven straight pitches in a 13-pitch at-bat in the fourth that ended with a game-winning double to left. Every sinker rang and every turn pounded until one caught too much of the barrel. That punch broke Roupp. Meanwhile, he even had a malfunction on the mound, having an error after the set and preventing the runner who got into scoring position first from doing so.

The Cardinals would take the lead after Alec Burleson hit a 2-out, 2-strike single into the outfield. On the very next pitch, Nolan Arenado hit a break ball to the left that bounced over the wall, allowing a ground-rule double. Not the best feeling for a young starter – he ends the season with the smell of the singed seams of his curveball in his nose. Both runners would eventually score on Nootbar's three-pointer against backup Taylor Rogers.

As for the Giants' brief encounter with a lead, that came on Jerar Encarnación's 2-run shot against Miles Mikolas in the second.

Encarnacion is big. The ball he hit over the plate on an error might even spark anticipation for the upcoming tiebreaker in 2025… However, the chase with elevated fastballs that he could no longer control on later at-bats certainly tempered that increase in heart rate.

In the third, San Francisco was up 3-2 and had runners in scoring position with no one out. A prime opportunity to extend a narrow lead by putting a ball in play… well, you know how it goes. Three unproductive outs later, the energy and momentum built up from those brief early opportunities had given way to greater force and flowed across the diamond into the visitors' dugout.