The San Francisco Giants have not developed a reputation for intelligence early this season, but on Tuesday they did something very, very smart. They jumped on Yoshinobu Yamamoto early.

You’re familiar with Yamamoto. You hoped he was as good as everyone said he was when the Giants appeared determined to not be outbid for his services two years ago. You feared that he was as good as everyone said he was when he instead signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. You confirmed that he was as good as everyone said he was when did his best Madison Bumgarner impression last fall while leading the Dodgers to a second consecutive championship, collecting a World Series MVP award and a top-three Cy Young finish along the way.

So the Giants did the sensible thing. They pounced before Yamamoto had time to realize where he was.

Willy Adames led off the bottom of the first inning with an infield single, and took second on an error by shortstop Hyeseong Kim. Luis Arráez followed by doing the one thing he does better than anyone on the planet: hitting a single.

Yamamoto was just seven pitches in, and found himself both in trouble and unsure what had happened. Lost in a haze of confusion and crisp Bay Area fog, he proceeded to walk Matt Chapman, loading the bases with no outs.

The Giants are not always prepared to capitalize on these situations. You might go so far as to say that they’re rarely prepared to capitalize on these situations.

But they capitalized on this situation.

On the very next pitch, Rafael Devers looked nothing like his old self, as he barely made contact on a get-it-in fastball, ever so lightly dusting a foul tip into Dalton Rushing’s glove.

But on the pitch after that, Devers looked very much like his old self, dipping below the zone to grab a sinker and still smacking it loudly into the outfield, scoring a run.

The Giants had achieved the rare act of capitalizing, and had a rarer act left in their back pocket: adding on.

Casey Schmitt hit next and flew a ball into left field, scoring a run on a sacrifice fly which, it turns out, was the absolute best-case scenario for the Dodgers. Despite it being a fairly routine fly ball for Teoscar Hernández, center fielder Alex Call flew full speed after it, robbing his teammate of catch and instead gifting him a head-on collision. Miraculously, Call hung onto the ball. Even more miraculously, neither player was injured on the type of play that catches an entire stadium’s collective breath.

After the dust from that had settled, Jung Hoo Lee wisely seemed to predict that Yamamoto would be a little out of sorts, and so he jumped on a first pitch curveball that hung up in the zone, and toasted it into right field, scoring a third run.

Just like that, the Giants had put a three-spot on Yamamoto and forced 26 pitches out of him. The ref was counting to 10, and the star pitcher was wobbling his way back to his feet and falling against the ropes.

And then Yamamoto retired the next 10 batters he faced, quickly and with almost dismissive ease, and went around the lineup two full times before giving up another hit.

Things got entertaining when he did finally give up another hit, though. In the sixth inning, the Northern California rain started to come down in droves. But being the grandson of one adverse weather condition apparently gets you in with all adverse weather conditions, as Lee was utterly unbothered by the large amounts of water falling on his face, and again hit a single to right field, this time with two outs and nobody on, giving him his sixth multi-hit game in the last 10 contests.

Heliot Ramos followed and, I’m pleased to report, the swing that he found in Washington D.C. appears to have made the trip back to the West Coast, as he worked the count full before blasting a 108.5-mph single right back up the middle.

Which is where the fun — and pain — began.

Lee, who had a two-out jump, who knew that the wet baseball would be hard to throw, and who had watched for innings on end as none of his teammates could get a hit off of Yamamoto, decided to try to score.

From first.

On a single.

A hard-hit single that was directly to the center fielder.

More accurately, Héctor Borg took all of that into consideration, saw the speed at which Lee was flying at, and watched Call lazily get the ball back in, and decided what the hell, let’s get funky.

Funky indeed.

It didn’t work, but it was fun. And in Borg’s defense, it took a wonderfully-thrown relay by Alex Freeland and a perfect tag by Rushing to retire Lee, and I’d put the odds of that not happening as higher than the odds of Drew Gilbert getting a rain-soaked hit off of the second-best pitcher in the National League when they’re in a flow state that we sports mortals simply cannot relate to.

But Lee was out indeed, and in more than one sense of the word. He walked off the field gingerly, and was replaced two innings later by Jerar Encarnación. Thankfully, the Giants did not sound concerned about the injury, which Tony Vitello described as a banged-up right quad. Unfortunately, the Giants do not have a great track record with expressing a lack of concern in an injury. But that’s an issue for another day.

Yamamoto returned for the seventh inning and struck out Gilbert, Patrick Bailey, and Adames, in order, all looking, capping an exceptional night that had felt impossible just six innings earlier: seven frames, six hits, no extra-base hits, two walks, and seven strikeouts.

But the Giants had not only jumped on him early, but stacked more than half of their baserunners in one inning, using sequencing to get a few runs on the board. And now all that was left was to rely on the pitchers, and hope that they could teach Yamamoto about the glorious and dreadful (but today just glorious) art of The Caining.

It’s funny. When you watch sports with a rooting interest, you inherently see everything through the lens of your team. The old adage that hitters don’t hit home runs, but rather that pitchers throw them, is emphatically true when your team is pitching. And it’s a crock of manure when your team is at bat.

Such it is that when we think of a Caining — or a Webbing, to use the parlance of the youths — we associate it with the Giants hitters being feckless numbskulls incapable of the teensiest shred of offensive life. We never really frame it as a great pitcher showing off their talents at the Giants’ expense. But really, it’s both.

Enter Landen Roupp.

Roupp’s season has been a revelation, and with every start he inches a little further away from “encouraging start to the season” and a little closer to “wait a dang minute, this guy might be really, really good.” But he hadn’t faced a team like the Dodgers this year, and this felt like the test. And it felt like he knew it was a test, and was screaming the answer when he opened the game by striking out Shohei Ohtani, something he would do twice on the day.

It also felt like Roupp was yelling his answer when, after ceding a two-out first-inning walk to Freddie Freeman when Bailey chose not to challenge a pitch that probably was strike three, Roupp calmly took his spot on the mound, glared at the opposing hitter, and needed just two more pitches to end the inning.

But it was the third inning where Roupp really stated his top-of-the-rotation case, when he struck out Freeland swinging, then struck out Ohtani swinging, then struck out Kyle Tucker swinging. That’s a whole lot of hundreds of millions of left-handed dollars (a few even not deferred!) that Roupp mowed down easily, with both a demeanor and a talent that look more and more like Bumgarner with every passing day.

Yet while Roupp’s excellence was the main story of LA’s stuck-in-first offense, it was the fourth inning where the Caining really transpired. That’s the inning where the Dodgers and their fans shook their heads and questioned how this could happen to them, while Yamamoto sat somewhere on the bench wondering why his own teammates hate him so much.

Freeman opened the inning by drawing a walk. Hernández worked three balls before rolling over a pitch, hitting it softly into a fielder’s choice. Max Muncy walked. And then the play that briefly shifted momentum: Rushing took a 3-1 curveball, called for strike two. He challenged, and won by what could generously be described as an eyelash. Suddenly the bases were loaded, and there was just one out.

And then Roupp walked Kim, putting the Dodgers on the board and doing nothing to ease the danger of the situation. But after falling behind to Call 2-0, Roupp battled back and, thanks to an infield defense that lived up to its potential and paycheck, got a gorgeous inning-ending double play.

Roupp’s fifth inning was much cleaner, as he took down the side in order, sandwiching an Ohtani fly ball with Freeland and Tucker strikeouts. It was an outing that, true to the Bumgarner comparisons, was as steeped in grit as it was in talent. He needed a career-high 106 pitches to get through just five innings. He threw just 58 of those pitches for strikes. He walked five batters, including a run home.

But he gave up just one hit — a soft two-out line drive by Kim — and that one run was the only one he would allow.

Against the Dodgers.

Baseball enthusiasts and keen eyes alike will note that Roupp pitching five innings still left four innings unaccounted for, and the Giants were legally required to give those innings to the bullpen, which really added to the Caining/Webbing of the Yamamotoing. No Dodgers fan will sleep well tonight with the thought that the Giants bullpen preserved a lead for four innings, and, armed with that knowledge, you should sleep well tonight.

But Vitello pressed the right buttons, and, more importantly, the arms delivered.

Against an almost entirely left-handed lineup, Vitello turned to lefty killer/killed by righties southpaw Ryan Borucki for the sixth, and it was the perfect time to go in that direction. Borucki easily dismissed of three lefties — Freeman, Muncy, and Rushing — and did so with such comfort that you barely noticed that a righty (Hernández) snuck in there to bop a double that went nowhere (righties are now hitting 8-15 with four extra-base hits against Borucki this season).

Vitello stacked his lefties, turning to Matt Gage in the seventh, who got two quick outs before walking Freeland.

That brought up what was, at the time, the most intriguing bullpen decision by Vitello, and one that you rarely ever see. With his lefty reliever cruising, looking good, and having thrown just 14 pitches, and with a trio of left-handed hitters up next, the Giants skipper trudged out to the mound, took the ball, and brought in a different lefty. The oh-so-rare lefty-replacing-lefty.

But if you know anything about Erik Miller, it’s that no one on earth has proven as capable of getting Ohtani out, and so Vitello turned to his secret weapon. And in a cruel twist of fate, Ohtani hit a soft infield single to keep the inning going.

Just long enough for Tucker to strike out swinging.

Vitello’s decision to turn to Miller was unconventional, but it was both savvy and analytically sound. What happened in the ninth, however, was a bit more controversial.

After a smooth eighth — Miller retired two batters, and left one runner on for Keaton Winn, who absolutely obliterated pinch-hitter Will Smith, with a nasty sequence of sinkers and splitters — Vitello had a choice to make. I assumed it would be a four-out save opportunity for Winn, who has had perhaps the most electric stuff of anyone in the bullpen this year.

But no. Vitello turned to Ryan Walker. The same Walker who was fresh off a blown save in a similar opportunity. The same Walker who has flirted with disaster enough recently that you can hear — even through the TV — the reaction in the stands as the nerves kick in.

Arguably the biggest selling point of Vitello was his ability to manage players and get the most out of them. Bob Melvin lost his job because once the Giants started slumping they simply couldn’t stop, and that wasn’t just a team issue: it happened at the team level because it happened so frequently at the individual level.

That’s why Vitello is in San Francisco where, he admitted before the game, he finally stepped out to enjoy the local culture on Monday night.

I don’t want to give all the credit for good baseball plays to one of the few people in uniform who wasn’t making baseball plays, but I had to wonder: had Vitello’s motivational ways worked some magic on Walker?

He looked fantastic striking out pinch-hitter Andy Pages, who has been one of the best hitters in baseball this year, on just four pitches. Perhaps Vitello’s show of trust was helping him settle in.

He looked excellent getting Call to fly one out to left field, never falling behind in the count. Maybe Vitello, who has refused to name a closer publicly, has said the perfect things privately.

He looked dynamic striking out Freeland with an other-worldly sinker, then unleashed the roar of someone who felt like himself for the first time in a while. Like someone who has made no attempts to hide that they want to be the closer, and that they believe they should be the closer.

The buttons correctly pressed. A Caining on the other foot. Another data point suggesting Roupp is That Guy. Some timely hits. And a bullpen that maybe isn’t so bad, after all.

Most importantly, LA beaten. By a delightful 3-1 margin.

For my first recap at Lookout Landing, I signed up for a Tuesday Night Against the A’s, and Tuesday Night Against the A’s I got. The Mariners fell 5-2 on Tuesday night in what can only be described as a “tough one.”

The bats just never got going for the hometown nine against Jacob Lopez, who entered the day with an ERA north of six. He went 5.1 innings, allowing two runs on seven hits, despite only generating three whiffs in 35 swings. His first and only strikeout of the day came against J.P. Crawford in the sixth — the final hitter he faced on the evening.

Luis Castillo walked the first hitter off the game in Nick Kurtz, and it did, in fact, haunt. Kurtz got a massive jump to steal second base and move into scoring position. Then, with two outs in the inning, Tyler Soderstrom took advantage of a slider left in the middle of the plate, lacing it into the right field corner for an RBI double to make it 1-0.

“I always say the leadoff walk is like a free base, because for me it’s a 70-75% chance they’re going to score,” Castillo said. “They made me battle, and unfortunately, the run scored. But it was really important to get back to myself, attack with first pitch strikes, attack every batter and get ahead, and we were able to do that.”

Castillo still gave up some hard contact, but he settled in and seemed to go as his slider did, saying himself that the pitch felt better tonight. He generated eight whiffs with that pitch alone, and 14 in total. He struck out six — five of them were the first batters he retired. The A’s had trouble stringing together hits against him to do any damage.

The Mariners got the first couple of hitters on in the third, with Rob Refsnyder and Cal Raleigh singling. A Julio Rodríguez flyout was able to advance Refsnyder to third, setting up a Josh Naylor sacrifice fly to tie the game up at one.

Castillo’s night was over after five innings, allowing two runs on five hits. The only other run allowed came on a solo shot to right by Jeff McNeil in the fourth. Though they weren’t able to do much tackling on in the early going, the A’s were pesky as usual at the plate, managing to spoil many of Castillo’s potential put-away pitches.

“The pitches were were I wanted them to be, but when you have an aggressive team like that that makes a lot of contact, they like to swing,” Castillo said. “But for me, what I took from that is those pitches they fouled off were exactly where I wanted them to be. Sometimes those are fouls, and sometimes they go for pop ups or roll outs, but for me, I knew those pitches were where I wanted.”

Raleigh showed another flash that he may be beginning to heat up, depositing a solo shot of his own into the ‘Pen — his fourth of the year — to once again tie the game at two. It was his second homer in as many days.

Every time the A’s jumped out in front, the Mariners had an answer. Well, until the third time. Then they didn’t.

Eduard Bazardo entered in the sixth inning to make his 11th appearance on the season. Back-to-back doubles from Soderstrom and Jacob Wilson to lead off the inning gave the A’s the lead right back, and this time they wouldn’t relinquish it. Bazardo would take the first regular season loss of his career.

On the brighter side of things, Mitch Garver continued to flex his ABS challenge muscles behind the plate. He notched three more successful challenges for his pitchers on Tuesday, but also lost his first appeal of the season, in the words of Aaron Goldsmith on the broadcast: “by the width of a credit card.” It registered on ABS as missing by less than a tenth of an inch.

The A’s would tack on in both the seventh and ninth, with a Shea Langeliers solo homer and a Wilson RBI single, respectively.

The Mariners failed to mount a late rally and went down quiet in the ninth. They’ll return to T-Mobile Park tomorrow afternoon for a Wednesday matinee, looking to preserve a game from the series before heading to St. Louis.

PHOENIX — Well, maybe Munetaka Murakami won’t have a difficult time making that transition from Japan to Major League Baseball after all.

In the meantime, is he ever making a whole lot of teams look foolish for ignoring him in free agency.

Murakami made more history Tuesday night by homering for the fourth consecutive game in the Chicago White Sox’s 11-5 rout over the Arizona Diamondbacks — a 434-foot shot —going where no Japanese player has ever gone before.

He is not only the first Japanese-born player to hit nine homers in his first 23 games, but also the first player since at least 1900 to produce nine homers and more than 20 walks in the first 23 games of a career.

The only Japanese players who have ever homered in four consecutive games at any juncture in their career are three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs All-Star outfielder Seiya Suzuki.

MUNETAKA MURAKAMI HOMERS FOR A 4TH STRAIGHT GAME! pic.twitter.com/68FsSqpqi1

— MLB (@MLB) April 22, 2026

Murakami, 26, is looking just like the dude who was Nippon Professional Baseball’s premier slugger, breaking the legendary Sadaharu Oh’s single-season home run record with 56 homers as a 22-year-old, and winning two MVP awards.

Sure, the season is just three weeks old, but the strikeouts and swing-and-miss rates that spiked since his historic 2022 season, with teams concerned whether he’d make enough contact to even provide power, now are regretting that they allowed the White Sox to virtually steal Murakami with a modest two-year, $34 million contract.

Murakami is soft-spoken and humble about his early heroics, saying he simply is happy that he’s contributing, but his bat is doing a whole lot of talking.

Murakami is hitting .234 with nine homers — just one behind MLB leader Yordan Alvarez of the Houston Astros — with 17 RBI and a .978 OPS. He has struck out 33 times in 97 plate appearances, but he has also walked 22 times, giving him a .398 on-base percentage.

He is everything the White Sox could have imagined, and much more.

After a truly insane nine innings of baseball, the White Sox (9-14) won their second game in a row, taking the first game of the series against the Diamondbacks (13-10), 11-5. The South Side bats were on fire, the pitching was solid, and the defense was making diving plays all over the place — it would probably be easier if I told you what didn’t happen. It’s been a minute since I was this excited watching the Chicago White Sox play baseball, so bear with me as I am still slightly in shock.

Outhitting the D-backs 14-8, the Good Guys smashed six of those for extra bases: a double, triple, and four home runs. Although they exploded for 11 runs, they did still manage to go 2-for-12 with runners in scoring position and left nine on base, but we’re not talking about that right now. Nearly everyone got a hit, except for Everson Pereira and Reese McGuire, who still managed to drive in at least one run. There was so much offensive production from this team tonight that half of the lineup (five batters) produced multi-hit games.

Sean Burke mostly cruised through his start and was able to maintain control, though the same couldn’t be said for righthander Merrill Kelly. The Good Guys nearly batted through the order in the top of the first, and they wasted no time pouring runs on Kelly and the Diamondbacks, dropping a four-spot to give Burke plenty of cushion before he even threw a pitch. The Sox immediately caused trouble to start the game with consecutive base hits from Andrew Benintendi and Munetaka Murakami, and Miguel Vargas walked to load the bases. Keeping his momentum up from Sunday after mashing a long ball, Colson Montgomery squared one up and ripped a two-run double to center to give the South Siders a two-run lead, 2-0. They tacked on two more after a sacrifice fly from Everson Pereira, and Sam Antonacci drove in his first major league run with an RBI triple to make it 4-0, Good Guys.

If you thought the first inning was fun, the second was even better. Murakami continued to showcase his prowess at the plate and kicked off a two-out rally by smashing his fourth home run in as many games, joining some solid company as just the third Japanese-born player ever to homer four games in a row. Have a freaking week, Mune:

To really pour salt into Kelly’s gaping wound, Vargas followed up Mune’s moonshot with a line drive homer to left, and Montgomery clobbered a 440-foot tank to center to give the Sox a seven-run lead.

BACK.

TO BACK.

TO-BACK!

With seven runs to work with, Burke simply just had to lock in and throw strikes, and he pretty much did just that. It also helped that the South Siders added an eighth run in the top of the fifth on a Reese McGuire sacrifice fly. Burke had gotten into some hot water in the bottom of the first, but cleaned up after himself. Ketel Marte drove a leadoff base hit, making it to second a few moments later on a wild pitch to get into scoring position. A swinging bunt pulled Burke over to the first base line, and he was able to tag the runner and get the double play at the plate to end the inning as Marte was trying to sneak a run in.

Burke was otherwise scoreless through three and was efficient overall in his six innings. Geraldo Perdomo tripled to begin the fourth and subsequently scored on an RBI ground out for Arizona’s first run of the game. Just two runs allowed on five hits — including a solo home run from Alek Thomas in the fifth — and one walk while striking out three. Burke has now lowered his ERA from 4.43 to 4.10.

To help Burke and the pitching staff out, the defense was also excellent and definitely helped keep some Arizona runs from scoring, especially as the ninth inning got a little dicey. Antonacci had made a nice sliding catch out in left, and Pereira was all over the place, laying out twice for two different balls to rob a couple of base hits, making the catches flawlessly. This play, especially in the seventh, was key to shutting down any momentum that the Diamondbacks were building up, as this almost surely would have been a triple had Pereira not caught it:

Out of the bullpen, Lucas Sims tossed a hitless inning thanks to Pereira bailing him out, as the two baserunners reached base on balls, though he did strike out one. For the final two innings, righthander Osvaldo Bido made his first appearance in a White Sox uniform, picked up on waivers after being designated for assignment by the Atlanta Braves last week. Bido walked two batters but was otherwise decent in the eighth, and he fortunately didn’t have to worry too much about the lead since the South Siders tagged on three more runs in the ninth.

After checking his first MLB RBI off the list earlier in the game, Antonacci decided to cross off his first major league homer: an inside-the-park home run. The rookie ripped a ball down the left field line that ended up sort of hitting the ball boy, but Lourdes Gurriel Jr. gave up on the play, likely thinking that it would be called a ground-rule double or interference. Who knows.

Since the top of the inning was weird, the bottom half had to follow suit. Arizona started to rally, and it seemed like the game wasn’t ever going to end. Will Venable clearly didn’t want to go to the bullpen for a couple of outs with a nine-run lead, and I can not blame him for that, but Bido was struggling to throw strikes, and when he did, the D-backs were really starting to catch up to him. After two base hits, he gave up a garbage-time three-run bomb to Ildemaro Vargas, who extended his hitting streak to 19, right in the nick of time. Though Bido walked a couple more batters, he eventually was able to get out of it to close out the game, officially crediting Burke with his first win of the season.