Giants see West go to Dodgers again
Enter final week with half-game lead over St. Louis for wild card
SAN DIEGO — The Giants’ infielders perched their toes on the lip of the grass as Cory Gearrin’s sinker arrived at 93 mph, and did exactly what it was designed to do.
It elicited such weak contact from Will Myers that the Padres’ right-handed hitting All-Star hesitated to start toward first base. In the seventh-inning shadows, it was tough even for him to make out what had happened.
The ball skidded down the first base line and into right field. It drove home the tiebreaking run in the Giants’ 4-3 loss Sunday afternoon. It was an inside-out swing that left the Giants on the outside looking in.
No, the Giants did not blow another lead in the ninth inning, but it was just as catatonic when the bullpen let one slip in the fifth and fell behind in the seventh.
When the result is a fourth consecutive N.L. West title for the archrival Los Angeles Dodgers, and another hole in the grass on a three-team limp to a wildcard game, the play-by-play Eduardo Núñez left the game in the seventh inning with a right hamstring strain after stealing his 40th base of the season. amounts to legal fine print.
“You knew it was coming,” said Giants manager Bruce Bochy, whose club actually was eliminated from the division race moments before making the 27th out, when former San Francisco prospect Charlie Culberson’s walk-off home run at Dodger Stadium set off a celebration there.
“So we’re battling for the wild card. It’s inevitable, the way the second half has gone,” said Bochy. “So that’s going to happen. You understand that. You always want to win your division, but our goal now is to win games and get there and have a shot at it.”
The Giants (82-74) fell out of a tie atop the N.L. wild card standings and now trail the streaking New York Mets by one game. The Giants remain a half-game ahead of the Cardinals, who lost to the Cubs, for the second wild-card spot.
They also might have lost their brightest spark, third baseman Eduardo Núñez, who left the game in the seventh inning with a right hamstring strain after stealing his 40th base of the
TUESDAY’S GAME
Colorado (German Marquez, 1-0) at Giants (Matt Moore, 11-12), 7:15 p.m., CSNBA
N.L. WILD-CARD RACE
(Top two teams advance) W L 73 74 74 GB +1.0 — 0.5 season. Núñez already was playing through an oblique injury; he will get an MRI exam but kept alive hopes he could play Tuesday’s opener of a season-ending homestand.
“I wish I’d stayed at 39,” Núñez said, ruefully.
The Giants find themselves here, in a place where swim goggles and cigars have no utility, because of an inability to win series since the All-Star break. They have played 21 of them and captured just three.
They have not plunged in the standings so much as sunk into them as if into a tar pit, and as any woolly mammoth would tell you (if it could), trying harder to escape only compounds the problem.
They are 8-17 in one-run games since the All-Star break. They were 20-10 in such games before the break.
The Giants’ rotten run began here at Petco Park, when they arrived out of the All-Star break with baseball’s best record (and a 6 ½-game lead in the N.L. West) but were swept on their way to a six-game losing streak.
Since then, they haven’t lost more than four in a row. It’s been two out of three, then three out of four, two out of three, with the occasional four-game split to provide a flicker of hope.
They needed to do better than that in their final regular-season road series here.
Rookie Ty Blach made his first big league start, stepping in for the injured Johnny Cueto, and did well to hand over a 3-2 lead to the bullpen after three innings. But the Padres chopped across a run on George Hontos in the fifth, and Myers put them ahead in the seventh to split the four-game series.
Black, a strike thrower who impressed in the Pacific Coast League, has a habit of skipping off the mound and jogging back to the dugout. He had to do quite a bit of scrambling as well. He pitched a scoreless first inning despite giving up a double and walking three, escaping in parwwt because of a double-play grounder sprinkled into the mix.
Black showed moxie in the second inning, persevering through a 14-pitch battle with Myers that ended with a strikeout on a 93 mph challenge fastball.
That little victory only came after the Padres had scored a run on a single, a sacrifice and a two-out hit from recent call-up Manuel Margot. They got another in the third when Adam Rosales hit a 325-foot cheapie to the opposite field that barely snuck over the fence in the right field corner.
“I was just a little quick with everything,” said Black, who also committed a balk.
“It didn’t seem like him,” catcher Trevor Brown said. “He’s really good at getting over his front side and finishing his change up when he gets his hand out in front.”
The Giants went ahead with a three-run third inning that included a clutch hit from Buster Posey and a very big mistake.
Brown hit a leadoff single, and Blach’s sacrifice attempt died in front of the plate. Padres catcher Austin Hedges dropped the ball and bumped into Black as he lunged a second time for it. Then his throw to second base sailed into right field for an error as Black ran safely to first base. The Padres argued for an interference call that did not come.
Núñez singled to load the bases, Kelby Tomlinson hit an RBI ground out and Posey lined a two-run single to right field off left-hander Clayton Richard.
But the Giants could not add to their lead, and the bullpen could not complete the gauntlet-running task of recording 18 outs while protecting a one-run margin.