CINCINNATI — San Francisco Giants reliever Erik Miller blew a 97.7 mph fastball by Sal Stewart to earn his first career save and finish off his team’s 3-0 victory over the Cincinnati Reds at Great American Ball Park on Thursday. That should’ve been the last time the two teams saw each other before the Reds go to San Francisco in August, but instead Miller’s enthusiastic response prolonged the current engagement.
“Sit the f— down!” Miller could be heard screaming as he walked toward the plate.
When Stewart, who hit three home runs and drove in seven runs in the Reds’ series victory, stopped and looked at the Giants reliever, Miller doubled down.
“F— you!” he could be heard saying before pointing at the bench and again saying, “Sit the f— down.” He then said “F— you” and pointed at the Reds who had come onto the field after Stewart appeared to take umbrage with Miller’s celebration. He then repeated it and continued pointing at anyone in a different uniform.
The postgame scene was followed by milling about as players discussed the day’s events, which included the Reds’ Spencer Steer getting hit with the first pitch he saw and Cincinnati reliever Connor Phillips being ejected after hitting Willy Adames in the eighth inning.
“I had my at-bat, struck out, and he came down the mound looking at me and pointing at me and just yelling,” Stewart said. “Tempers flared, things happened, and it’s all good. I’m not going to make (much) of that. We won the series and things happen, you know.”
The Giants, it seemed, had more beef with the Reds than the Reds had with the Giants.
“I got no hard feelings, it’s baseball. I got on base, it’s first and second with a chance for Rece (Hinds) to hit a three-run bomb in the second inning,” said Steer, whose interaction with Giants reliever JT Brubaker the night before seemed to start the tensions. “We’re trying to win baseball games. That’s what we’re focused on.”
In the seventh inning of Wednesday’s 8-3 victory, Steer called timeout late in the pitch clock against Brubaker. The timeout was granted, and Brubaker yelled at home plate umpire Quinn Wolcott. The next pitch, Brubaker ran down the pitch clock to the last seconds, and, before he threw it, Steer could be seen on TV saying, “Throw the f—ing ball, f–k you.” When Brubaker finally threw the pitch, Steer singled to left. Both men seemed to have words, though Brubaker’s ire appeared to be more focused on Wolcott.
“(Wolcott) said (Steer) wasn’t looking at me and I clearly thought he was,” Brubaker said after Wednesday’s game, referring to the rule that a batter must make eye contact with the pitcher before he starts his delivery. “That fueled the fire a little bit, and then when you give up a base hit, it fuels the fire a little more. I probably shouldn’t have yelled at the umpire, but in the heat of the moment, things come out.”
Brubaker also said first-year Giants manager Tony Vitello told the team he liked seeing that kind of fire and hoped it would spark something.
That spark took hold in the second inning during Steer’s first at-bat Thursday. After Eugenio Suárez’s one-out walk, Giants starter Landen Roupp hit Steer in the hip with his first pitch, a four-seam fastball. It was Roupp’s first four-seamer of the day, coming on the 25th pitch of the game. Only two of his 87 pitches on the day were four-seamers, and he’d thrown only five on the season. That included just one four-seam fastball to a right-handed batter before he hit Steer. He threw a four-seamer in the sixth to the Reds’ TJ Friedl, a left-handed hitter.
“It slipped,” Roupp told reporters after the game in a tone that could best be described as unconvincing.
When asked directly, Steer said he did think it was intentional.
“Yeah,” he said. “The guy had pretty good command of his fastball today. A big miss like that, first at-bat, first pitch, you can be the judge of that.”
After Steer was hit — in a manner that matched the unwritten rules of hitting a batter on purpose: first pitch, in the hip, fastball — no warnings were given by home-plate umpire Junior Valentine or Wolcott, the crew chief.
Putting Steer on first moved Suárez to second, giving the Reds just one of their two runners in scoring position all day. The second came in Roupp’s final inning, the sixth, when catcher P.J. Higgins led off the inning with a single for the lone Reds hit on the day. He moved to second when Roupp hit Friedl with a pitch. Roupp walked two, hit two and struck out six.
Reds starter Chase Burns was as impressive as Roupp, giving up just two hits and a walk with four strikeouts over six innings in the battle of two of baseball’s worst offenses.
The Giants put all three runs on the board in the seventh, when Elly De La Cruz’s second error in three days allowed leadoff man Luis Arraez to reach first against reliever Brock Burke. Burke struck out the next two batters, but then gave up a double to Matt Chapman and then a single to Jung Hoo Lee to give San Francisco a 2-0 lead. Casey Schmitt added an RBI double off Phillips.
With a 3-0 deficit in the eighth, Phillips allowed a liner to center that Friedl caught in the air, but then bobbled, letting it hit the ground. The umpires didn’t see it, and neither did the Giants’ bench, with Vitello later taking the blame. With two outs and a 3-0 deficit, Phillips threw a 98.6 mph fastball inside to Adames for a ball, then hit him with a 98.3 mph fastball on the second pitch. Phillips was ejected.
Afterward, Phillips was asked if he was surprised he was ejected.
“We tried to go in the first one, obviously, I missed. We tried to go in again, and it hit him,” Phillips said without answering the initial question. “There were no warnings. It is what it is. (It was the) same (umpiring) crew from last night. They know what happened last night. Then they come in and hit Spence, you know? Maybe it’s just they’re trying to not let the game get out of hand, you know?”
Cincinnati’s Sal Stewart reacts after striking out in the ninth inning for the final out against the San Francisco Giants. (Dylan Buell / Getty Images)
Both teams went quietly after that, until Miller struck out Stewart to end the game.
If there were hard feelings from the Reds, it didn’t seem to be toward anyone on the Giants. The closest anyone came to saying something about an individual after the game was when Burns was asked about pitching against Vitello, who was his coach for two years at the University of Tennessee before Burns transferred to Wake Forest, and he simply said, “I don’t talk to him.”
Even Steer, who got hit by the fastball, seemed unperturbed.
“What am I going to do? It’s not really that big of a deal,” Steer said. “I’m getting first base. I don’t see a reason to retaliate there. Like I said, we’re focused on winning baseball games. All that stuff, you know, it’s not important.”