Travis Ishikawa post season play

It wasn't lost on Travis Ishikawa that the guy who wears No.10 scored the tying run on 10-10-10.

POSTGAME NOTES: Giants’ comeback stirs feelings of deja vu for J.T. Snow, but not what you think; plus much more

Posted by Andrew Baggarly on October 11th, 2010 at 12:54 am | Categorized as Uncategorized

When Travis Ishikawa stood on second base, a thought crossed my mind.

When Ishikawa looked in the dugout, that thought took a U-turn and made a second pass.

And when Aubrey Huff’s flare landed in right field and Ishikawa came lumbering around third, that thought was pounding, pounding, pounding…

Did you think the same thought? Not-so-fleet first baseman. Ninth inning. Nobody on the roster to pinch-run for him…

This time, there was no Pudge at the plate to hang onto the baseball. There wasn’t even an on-target throw to make a play develop. There was no J.T. Snow redux from the final out of the Giants’ season in the 2003 Division Series against the Marlins – the last playoff series the Giants played before this.

Ishikawa was safe, the score was tied – and thanks to bobbling Brooks Conrad, the Giants soon would take the lead on their way to a wild 3-2 victory over the gut-wrenched Atlanta Braves.

And Ishikawa got to laugh about not having a pinch runner.

“I’ve been doing it all September,” he said. “We’ve had (Darren) Ford and (Eugenio) Velez and Manny (Burriss) and I only got pinch-ran once that month. It’s sort of become a joke. I’m just really glad Aubrey hit it in that perfect spot, and gave me a lot of time to score.”

The Giants didn’t have room for any of those speed guys on the playoff roster. Neither did they create space for Eric Young back in ’03, as Snow so helpfully pointed out following their elimination loss in Miami.

Snow is on this trip with the Giants. So I asked him if he had any flashbacks.

He said yes, he did. But not to Ishikawa’s rumble home.

Snow identified most with Eric Hinske.

“I know that feeling,” Snow said. “You’ve just hit a huge home run to save the game, the biggest home run of your life – and before you know it, your team lost. It’s the strangest feeling.”

Snow, you’ll recall, hit the three-run homer in the ninth off Mets closer Armando Benitez to force extra innings in Game 2 of the 2000 NLDS. It remains one of the clutchiest swings by a Giant in San Francisco history.

But Felix Rodriguez, who already had given up a two-run homer to Edgardo Alfonzo in the ninth, couldn’t put away the Mets in the 10th. Darryl Hamilton hit a two-out double, Jay Payton singled him home and the Mets won.

The Giants didn’t bounce back, losing the next two games at Shea Stadium to get knocked out.

In fact, that Game 2 loss to the Mets echoed what happened to the Giants in Game 2 of this current series.

But obviously, the Giants were able to bounce back on the road this time – refusing to give up after Hinske’s huge, two-run pinch homer got the tomahawks chopping and the entire ballpark shaking in the eighth. (Seriously, at that moment, it felt like the press box was going to collapse.)

Anyway, as Snow said, the analogy to 2003 doesn’t hold. “This wasn’t an elimination game,” he said.

“Besides,” he said, “Ishi’s a lot faster than me.”