CHICAGO -- The San Francisco Giants were so desperate for offense by the fifth inning on Saturday night that manager Bruce Bochy asked Madison Bumgarner to go grab a bat and take his chances as a pinch hitter.
The move wasn't particularly surprising, which tells you something about Bumgarner and something about the state of the Giants' offense. It was Bumgarner’s 11th career pinch-hit appearance, and their other options at that point were Kelby Tomlinson, Gorkys Hernandez and a hobbled Eduardo Nunez. Bumgarner has twice as many career home runs (14) as Hernandez and Tomlinson combined.
The big left-handed pitcher had one of the Giants' hardest-hit balls of the evening, a one-hop grounder that third baseman Kris Bryant misplayed into a two-base error. But to do more than that to try to save the Giants' season, Bumgarner will have to wait until Monday, when he starts Game 3 at AT&T Park in San Francisco.
"We've got a lot of confidence with him on the mound," Giants catcher Buster Posey said. "We'll try to go out and win that one and go from there."
The Giants didn't score during that fifth inning. In fact, their only runs came during a short burst of power in the third inning of Saturday's 5-2 loss to the Chicago Cubs, which dropped them into a 2-0 hole in the National League Division Series.
The Giants have been outscored by just four runs in this series, but the gulf between the teams seems massive. Bumgarner's practically bankable October brilliance -- he is working on a string of 23 straight scoreless postseason innings -- could turn the tide in the series. In a five-game series, momentum lasts for only one game. But the Giants are not going to survive and keep their even-year narrative alive unless they can show at least a little pop in the batter's box at some point. They have to win three more games, not just one. Not every elimination game is the same.
They're facing a team without a weakness, and they have looked anemic, to put it kindly.
"We do need to get this offense going a little bit," Bochy said.
The Cubs play stifling defense, which makes their starting pitching look even better than it is. They have a closer, Aroldis Chapman, who is virtually impossible to hit. If they have a soft spot, it's the same as most teams: middle relief. But on Saturday, the Giants knocked Kyle Hendricks out of the game, literally, in the fourth inning, when Angel Pagan's liner clipped Hendricks' right forearm.
After that, the Giants managed just two hits over 5â…“ innings, only one inning of which was pitched by Chapman. It was the longest scoreless outing for a Cubs bullpen in a postseason game since the month after World War II ended.
So now it comes down to Bumgarner, October's biggest star, against Jake Arrieta, last season's Cy Young winner. The only reason it appears to be a mismatch in the Giants' favor is the time of year. It's not as if Arrieta and his upper-90s fastball offers much of a respite for this power-starved Giants lineup, at least on paper.
"They have a nice pitcher. We have a nice pitcher going that day," said Cubs manager Joe Maddon in his typically jaunty manner. "It should be a fun evening."
It would be absurd to count the Giants out at this point. This is what they do. They are 9-0 in elimination games since 2010, the year they won the first of their three World Series titles in consecutive even-numbered years. This Cubs team -- steered by Maddon and the front office of Theo Epstein -- doesn't look like it is overlooking many details these days, however.
Here's what Maddon said about these Giants, who seem to fight most skillfully when they are cornered: "They're pros, man. I've said that from the very first day the respect I have for that group. You see how they react to different moments. They never panic."
The Giants missed their chance to put pressure on the Cubs by winning one of the two games here. So now rather than trying to lower the hammer with Bumgarner, they need his best just to survive.
"Now we have our work cut out," Bochy said. "But the fact that we have been in this position before -- we're going home, and hopefully we can get things rolling here."
Posey seemed about as interested in discussing the Giants' hitting woes as he did in justifying pitcher Jeff Samardzija's unwillingness to throw a curveball early on in his start. He acknowledged that the top of the Giants' order needs to be more productive to have a chance in the series, but he avoided the topic of Samardzija's pitch selection.
The Giants haven't been hitting much, even when they win, so it proved problematic when Samardzija put them in a 4-0 hole by the second inning. It was so problematic, in fact, that Bochy -- not known for his patience with struggling pitchers in the postseason -- didn't wait around to see how he would fare in the third inning.
That made for the shortest start of Samardzija's nine-year major league career, at just two innings. A couple of bloop hits, one of which came off the bat of Hendricks and drove in two runs, didn't help. In fact, three of the Cubs' five runs were driven in by pitchers; reliever Travis Wood later hit a solo home run off reliever George Kontos.
If anything, the Cubs -- with the exception of Javier Baez -- haven't looked all that comfortable in the batter’s box. Neither of their MVP candidates, Bryant or Anthony Rizzo, has gotten going yet. Rizzo still doesn’t have a hit.
Bumgarner is tasked with keeping those guys and the rest of the Cubs' lineup quiet, but if he is the Giants' best shot to provide a little power, this could be a short series.
