Bullpen failure again dooms punchless S.F.
By Henry Schulman
PHILADELPHIA — The fans came to Citizens Bank Park for a ballgame Saturday and stayed for an Avett Brothers concert. Or, they came for an Avett Brothers concert and were forced to watch the Giants play the Phillies.
Those who cared about the opening act saw what Giants fans have witnessed all year. The same lineup that scored 10 runs in the series opener Friday night managed one run on four hits over seven innings against Ben Lively in his bigleague debut.
That allowed the Phillies to hang with Johnny Cueto long enough to rally for a 5-3 win. The Giants scored twice in the ninth to give the Avett Brothers more time to tune their instruments.
“It’s always disappointing when you lose,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “To get one run there till late makes it more frustrating, because that has been our way. We have a pretty good game or two, then get shut out. We’ve got to get some consistency here.”
The Phillies managed to get the postgame handshake right, although they would have been forgiven for rustiness. They
won for only the seventh time since April 27.
Now, the Giants need to win Sunday behind Matt Moore to avoid the embarrassment of dropping a series to the Phillies, who have lost their past 10.
There are myriad ways to measure the awfulness of the Giants’ season. Here is one: Cueto took his fifth loss despite a good, 112-pitch performance. Last year he totaled five losses. This defeat had a weird twist. The Giants’ inability to score more than once against Lively put Bochy in a spot in the seventh inning of a 1-1 game, which the Phillies had tied in the sixth on a Tommy Joseph homer, the first run allowed by the Giants in 23 innings.
Joe Panik singled to open the seventh. With one out and Austin Slater batting, Bochy sent a pinch-hitter on deck to bat for Cueto, who expected he was done.
But when Slater ended the inning with a double play, leaving him 1-for-8 in his two bigleague games, Bochy sent Cueto back to the mound for the seventh with 108 pitches thrown. It did not go well. Maikel Franco and Andrew Knapp singled. Bochy then called for Hunter Strickland, whose week is ending as badly as it started.
Freddy Galvis, whose afternoon began when a Denard Span one-hopper deflected off his glove and hit him in the face, lined a first-pitch single to give the Phillies their first lead of the series.
Strickland got an out, but Cesar Hernandez singled to load the bases. The righty tried to bounce a curveball to Odubel Herrera but left it up, and the Phillies center fielder crushed it to the wall in right-center for a three-run double and a 5-1 lead. It was the kind of big hit the Giants consistently have failed to produce.
Cueto would not use the “you’re done, you’re not done” episode as an excuse, saying, “I thought I was not coming out to pitch again. Bochy told me to go out and pitch. You have to be ready. You can’t tune out.”
Similarly, Strickland would not blame all the noise over his Monday drilling of Bryce Harper for any mental letdown on the mound.
“I left a couple of pitches up. They got hit,” Strickland said. “Hats off to them.”
Hats off to the Giants for the ninth-inning college try. They scored twice off Hector Neris, with Brandon Belt’s double starting the rally. Brandon Crawford and Aaron Hill, who batted for Slater, hit RBI singles.
Bochy sent Nick Hundley to the plate with two outs as the potential go-ahead run. Onetime closer Jeanmar Gomez replaced Neris and secured a one-pitch save, as Hundley bounced into a force to get two disappointing teams off the field and one good folk band on the stage.