Woeful trip ends with another loss
ATLANTA — Big-leaguers don’t get much sympathy if they grumble about travel schedules. They fly first class. Stay at the best hotels. Travel with a team cook. Never carry baggage.
Still, sometimes the travel gets ridiculous. The Giants waited through a 1-hour, 26minute rain delay Thursday night, fell to the Braves 12-11 in a game that ended at 12:39 a.m. Friday and were to fly all night, arrive in San Francisco around sunrise and sleep fast because they’re opening a homestand Friday night.
That the Giants went 1-7 through Colorado and Atlanta, their worst trip of the season, wasn’t exactly the preview for a happy flight. The Braves and MLB would have done the Giants a favor by agreeing to a day game Thursday. But a night game?
“That’s terrible,” said Matt Cain, the player rep and losing pitcher. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just bad. There’s really nothing else to say about it. It doesn’t make sense to have the schedule this way.”
The good news for the Giants is, they’ll never need to do that again. The rest of their Eastern trips end with day games, and starting next season, the collective bargaining agreement will assure all games in the East will be played in the day if a team has a game in the West the following day.
The bad news for the Giants is, they’re in last place and sinking by the day.
They’ve lost nine of 10 and 18 of 23, and how ’bout that AT&T Park “sellout streak”? This is team that’s on pace to lose 104 games — the franchise record is 100 — and increase the empty seat count, making fans consider a day at the beach instead of a day at the yard.
Thursday’s series finale at SunTrust Park didn’t do much to sway folks from the NBA draft, at least for a while. Cain lasted four innings and gave up seven runs on 10 hits, including three home runs, and reliever Bryan Morris gave up another five runs without completing an inning.
“It’s a horrible trip for us,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “A lot of tough losses. We had some good things, great comebacks, but couldn’t hold on. You win one game on an eightgame trip, that’s not a good trip.”
One pitcher who performed well was Kyle Crick, who made his major-league debut with 21⁄3 shutout innings. Crick, who converted to relieving after struggling with command as a starter, issued no walks. Twenty-six of his 33 pitches were strikes.
“That’s what I started out with in spring training, to see how many strikes I could throw,” Crick said. “It worked for me in spring, so I took that mentality to the season and carried it on.”
Buster Posey hit a home run and and doubled twice, and Joe Panik and Brandon Belt also homered. The Giants built a 5-2 lead, but Cain gave it up quickly. The Braves went ahead 12-6 by scoring eight times in the fifth, starting with Brandon Phillips’ homer.
Also in the inning, Lane Adams hit his first big-league homer, a three-run shot against Morris.
The Giants made it interesting with some late runs, as they did a few times on the trip. Three in the eighth, two in the ninth. But it mattered little. Hunter Pence grounded out with two runners on to end it.
It was the third game on the trip the Giants scored at least eight runs and lost. It happened twice in Denver.
Now comes the homestand and visits by the Mets and Rockies.
“This is definitely a tough task in front of us,” Pence said. “It’s a grind. It’s not easy. So we’re going to try to make the best of it.”