Sale, Devers combine to win Game 1 for the Giants
The Giants’ offense never truly erupted, but it struck with the precision of a scalpel, doing just enough against Reds starter Joe Ryan, who pitched with the poise of a seasoned October hand. Finally, in the seventh inning, Rafael Devers secured for the Giants something other than a zero on the scoreboard with a two-run dinger. In all San Francisco scratched out just six hits, and Cincinnati matched that hit total but without Devers’ power, with their own six knocks scattered like fireflies that never quite formed a constellation.
Chris Sale was the looming figure of the night, a left-handed specter who bent the game to his will for 8⅓ innings and holding the Reds to a single run. He walked only three, struck out eight, and ceded just six hits, carving through a lineup that featured the firepower of Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani, Bobby Witt Jr. and Pete Alonso as if he had seen them all in some earlier dream. When he finally handed the ball to Mason Miller for the last two outs, it felt less like a change in pitchers than the next verse in the same grim song.
The Reds did have their chances, and the names in their order read like a slugger’s convention—Soto, Ohtani, Witt, Pete Alonso, Christian Yelich. Meanwhile Ryan spun together 6⅔ innings, and while he yielded six hits and nine strikeouts with just a single walk, the Giants won the battle with one swing of Devers’ bat. Josh Hader followed with 1⅓ spotless innings, four batters up and down, a clean, late sheen that kept the deficit from growing but came a few beats too late for the visiting offense.
At the top of the Giants order, Francisco Lindor and Kyle Tucker set the tone with disciplined at-bats, combining patience with line-drive authority that forced Ryan into the stretch early and often. Kerry Carpenter and Daulton Varsho added the kind of extra-base thump October demands, each notching doubles that shifted the geometry of the game and set the table for the heart of the lineup. Every gapper seemed to echo off the park’s broad alleys, a reminder that in this ballpark, speed and angles can be as deadly as brute strength.
The game’s fulcrum came in the seventh, when suddenly the Devers home run turned a one-run deficit into a 2–1 advantage that felt much larger against Sale’s command. Cincinnati’s bats answered with hard outs rather than rallies, their loudest swings dying on warning tracks and in the gloves of outfielders shading deep.
By the late innings, the night had settled into the quiet tension that only October can muster, with every pitch an argument and every foul ball a stay of execution. Sale’s exit in the ninth to a roar from the San Francisco crowd gave way to Miller’s brief, ruthless cameo, and the Reds’ final hopes flickered and vanished on routine plays that looked anything but routine in the scorebook’s stark light.
When the last out thudded into a Giants glove, Game 1 belonged to the home team, a taut, old-fashioned opener that left both sides knowing this series would be won not just by stars, but by the thin margins where pitching, patience, and timing meet.
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