By Jeremy Harness

Oh, how quickly things can turn around.

The night before, the Giants must have felt that the baseball gods were working against them, but less than 24 hours later, they were feeling the exact opposite.

They filed a protest with Major League Baseball following the incident on Tuesday night, which saw a 20-minute rain storm turn into a four-hour rain delay due to the fact that the grounds crew at Chicago’s Wrigley Field could not get the tarp down in nearly enough time.

As a result, the game was called, which was ruled a 2-0 win for the Cubs after only four-and-a-half innings of play. The odds were stacked against them, since the last time a team had won a game protest was way back in 1986.

However, moments before first pitch Wednesday, the Giants got word that they had won their protest. As a result, the loss has come off the record for now, and that the two teams will play the remainder of that game on Thursday before their regularly-scheduled contest.

The Giants used that positive momentum by going out Wednesday and burying the Cubs, 8-3, as starter Jake Peavy continued to pitch very well and now has a two-game winning streak.

Unlike the better part of his Giants tenure, the Giants’ offense gave Peavy plenty of support. They pounded starter Edwin Jackson for seven runs on eight hits in only 2 2/3 innings.

Peavy took it from there. He went seven solid innings and, although he surrendered 10 hits, he minimized the damage very effectively and gave up only two runs while striking out eight hitters and not walking a single batter.

Joe Panik, who is quickly establishing himself as the team’s possible long-term solution at second base, had three hits to increase his batting average to .295. Meanwhile, Travis Iskikawa, long considered to be a 4-A player (too good for Triple-A but not quite good enough for the big leagues), also collected three hits while driving in three runs.

To make things even better, the Dodgers fell to the San Diego Padres Wednesday night, which narrowed the Dodgers’ lead in the National league West to three games.