What we learned as Fitz, Yaz homers fuel Giants’ win vs. Phillies originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
PHILADELPHIA — About 20 minutes into Monday night’s game at Citizens Bank Park, the Giants were behind 3-0 and Spencer Bivens was getting loose in a hurry. In the moment, it was easy to think of all of the potential repercussions if Landen Roupp got knocked out in the first inning.
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The Giants probably would be forced into their first roster move of the 2025 MLB season to get a fresh arm for their bullpen. Roupp might spend a sleepless night wondering if his time in the rotation was over after three starts.
At 9:27 p.m. in Philadelphia, the Giants gathered on the mound for their third handshake line in four days on this tough trip. Roupp picked up first win of the year.
The Giants, who beat the Phillies 10-4, seemingly can do nothing wrong at the moment, and they responded to the three-spot from the Phillies by scoring six in the top of the second. That allowed Roupp to settle in, and he allowed just one more run the rest of the way while throwing more curveballs than most Phillies hitters have ever seen.
The response to the early struggles was swift. Tyler Fitzgerald hit a three-run homer into the seats in left to give the Giants a 5-3 lead in the second inning, and Willy Adames followed with his first as a Giant.
After Roupp and Randy Rodriguez buckled down to keep runners in scoring position, Mike Yastrzemski hit a two-run moonshot to add insurance runs in the top of the seventh. The blast was Yastrzemski’s first against a lefty since his walk-off Splash Hit against the San Diego Padres’ Ray Kerr on June 19, 2023.
The Giants improved to 12-4 on the season and 3-1 on the trip, which spans 10 days and includes series against three teams with winning records.
Roupp is a four-pitch guy now, but with his back against the wall in the fourth, he went to his bread and butter. The right-hander’s curveball is one of the best in baseball, and when the Phillies got a pair into scoring position with no outs, Roupp threw a curve on five of the next eight pitches. There were boos at Citizens Bank Park when he got out of the inning with no damage.
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Roupp opened the fifth by throwing five straight curves to Bryce Harper for a strikeout. After Kyle Schwarber popped up a curve, he threw four curves and a sinker at Nick Castellanos. The Phillies finally caught up, and Castellanos crushed the final one into the left field seats.
Overall, Roupp threw 56 curveballs, the most in a big league game since Rich Hill threw 59 on May 13, 2016. Roupp and Hill are the only big league pitchers to throw more than 55 curveballs in a game in the last 10 years, and it certainly worked for Roupp on an offense-heavy night. He got 15 of his 20 swinging strikes with his best pitch.
Roupp was charged with four earned in five innings and struck out eight. He has had two shaky starts and one good one, but the stuff has generally been good. Through 15 innings, Roupp has 20 strikeouts.
Everyone involved has been hesitant to say Adames has been pressing. He’s seemingly as laid-back as any Giant, but there’s a natural desire to try and live up to a massive contract, and Adames certainly hasn’t looked like his old self through two weeks. He entered the night with a .186 average and no homers, and he hasn’t even been particularly unlucky.
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With the ballpark still reeling from the Fitzgerald blast, Adames jumped on a middle-middle cutter from Taijuan Walker and hit a soaring solo shot to right. The homer was Adames’ first in 135 plate appearances, the longest drought of his career. With Adames and Fitzgerald (who finished a single shy of the cycle) now on the board, Patrick Bailey is the only Giants regular still looking for his first blast of the year.
The bottom of the seventh might have been the strangest scoreless inning of Erik Miller’s career. With the Giants holding a four-run lead and two runners on, J.T. Realmuto hit what looked to be a three-run homer, but the ball curled just foul. Realmuto then thought he had drawn a walk to load the bases for Max Kepler, who already had two hits, but he was rung up by home plate umpire Tony Randazzo on an outside slider.
It was a hell of a frame job by Bailey, the game’s best framer, but still a huge break for the Giants. It went down as the eighth scoreless appearance of the year for Miller, who was taken in the fourth round by the Phillies in 2019 and is a reminder that the prior regime really did do some good work. Miller was acquired in a 2023 swap for Yunior Marte, who had a 6.92 ERA last year and is now pitching in Japan.
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