Dismal offense silenced again
PHOENIX — On one hand, outfielder Mac Williamson did enough in 11 minor-league games to force his way back to the Giants. On the other hand, it’s a sad comment on a $196 million team with a supposedly beefed-up offense that it needs to turn to its farm club for a jolt in mid-April.
The numbers are staggering. Thursday night’s 3-1 loss to the Diamondbacks marked the 10th time in 18 games the Giants have failed to push across two runs. They have scored a majorsworst 51 runs while hitting .156 with runners in scoring position, also worst in the bigs.
Forgive manager Bruce Bochy for thinking that number was worse.
“A buck-twenty with guys in scoring position, that’s not going to cut it,” Bochy said after the Giants fell to 7-11 and lost their third straight series. They are still looking for their first series win.
Now, on the verge of falling into irrelevancy as they did last April, the Giants will have a different look when they start a three-game series in Anaheim on Friday night.
Jeff Samardzija will come off the disabled list to make his 2018 debut. His left fielder almost certainly will be Williamson, who is traveling to Anaheim to join the taxi squad. His promotion seems like a formality.
Williamson hit six home runs in his 39 Sacramento at-bats while batting .487 (19 hits). The 27-year-old righthanded hitter has not had many chances to establish himself in the majors, and when he has, he has not produced.
With a new swing that he developed in concert with the same coach who turned the Dodgers’ Justin Turner into an offensive force, Williamson crushed the ball in spring training before he did likewise early in the minor-league season.
Bochy, asked if those changes can translate into big-league production, said, “We may find out.”
The Giants would have to make two moves to accommodate Samardzija and Williamson.
They made the first one after Thursday’s game, optioning Derek Law to Sacramento, a move they could afford after Ty Blach gave the Giants six bullpen-saving innings.
For the second move, Hunter Pence appears headed to the disabled list with a rightthumb injury that goes back to a dive in the home opener April 3.
“Who knows?” Pence said when asked if the thumb was behind his terrible start, which includes one hit and 12 strikeouts in his past 20 at-bats.
“It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” Pence said. “I want to get this taken care of. If you’re not able to get out and help the team, you’ve got to get it right.”
Blach continued a fine run by Giants starters but lost when he threw a fastball down the pipe for an A.J. Pollock homer in the sixth that broke a 1-1 tie.
Reyes Moronta hung a changeup to Ketel Marte for a seventh-inning homer that sealed it for the Diamondbacks.
The Giants scored on Brandon Belt’s second-inning homer off Zack Greinke in Belt’s first at-bat after his gamewinning homer against Brad Boxberger on Wednesday.
In Belt’s final at-bat before he turns 30, he faced Boxberger again, with two on and two outs in the ninth, and fouled out.
The game might have hinged on a long Joe Panik drive to right-center in the third with a man aboard that Chris Owings caught just before an onrushing Pollock, the center fielder, kneed him in the head. Owings held on to the ball.
So it goes with an offense that has manufactured just one run without a homer over the past 42 innings and needs what Bochy described as a “shot in the arm.”
Mac Williamson, you’re up.