Giants fall as Cobb has rough return

SAN FRANCISCO >> A lone banana is all that is required to tell the story of the Giants' 11-5 loss to the Nationals on Sunday.

There it was, sitting on the Giants' bench, next to strewn water bottles and shelled sunflower seeds. One banana, in a Ziploc bag, labeled “Cobb.”

The banana is Alex Cobb's mid-game snack of choice when his stomach rumbles during a start. But in his first start after 13 days on the injured list, no pick-me-up was required to get him through this game — his return to the rotation was spoiled before he could even record three outs.

By the time manager Gabe Kapler came to get him, after five runs, 10 batters and 40 pitches, with the bases loaded and two outs in the first inning, Cobb stared at his manager striding toward the mound and stoically handed him the ball without saying a word.

This was not how the 34-year-old right-hander envisioned his return to the rotation after missing almost two weeks with a mild groin strain, as evidenced by his banana, body language and his pitching line: 2/3 innings, four hits, five runs, three walks — and a balk.

“It seemed to be just a combination of bad luck, really bad pitches and just not executing that one pitch I needed to get out of the inning,” said Cobb, whose frustration mounted about halfway through a fiverun first inning that lasted nearly half an hour.

The five-run hole was too much for the Giants' patchwork lineup to overcome against Nationals starter Josiah Gray, who held San Francisco hitless for 4 2/3 innings and blanked them for all six of his frames.

The Giants' first hit of the day was 11 years and 4,012 minor-league at-bats in the making. Jason Krizan, the 32-year-old who made his MLB debut Friday, ripped a single to right field with two outs in the fifth to break up the no-hitter and record his first major-league hit.

“The best moment was everything afterward. The crowd was awesome. It was just a special moment,” said Krizan, who borrowed Joc Pederson's bat for the base hit and had his parents, wife and 2-year-old son in attendance. “The jitters weren't there and I wasn't super nervous the past couple of games. I think the most jittery I got was seeing the crowd's reaction after the first hit.”

The two-out single helped the Giants load the bases in the fifth, but it wasn't until Gray left the game and they loaded them again in the seventh that they were able to turn a rally into runs. The big hits in a five-run seventh inning came from two newcomers — center fielder Luis Gonzalez and first baseman Mike Ford — to a lineup that was missing three of its members from Opening Day and three other starters who haven't played a game this season.

The loudest cheers prior to the Giants' five-run rally came when the Warriors' final score from Game 1 in Memphis came across the jumbotron. Fans started heading for the exits in the top of the eighth, after the Nationals responded with three more runs to make it 11-5.

“First, we have to own that we can play better baseball than we did in this series,” Kapler said. “Then we can also acknowledge the way that happened, through high-quality atbats from the Nationals but also some balls on the ground that we weren't able to convert into outs.”

It's impossible to know how Cobb would have fared Sunday if Jason Vosler had fielded the soft-hopping ground ball off the bat of Nelson Cruz on the third batter of the game. Vosler could have tagged third, fired to second and on to first — a surefire double play if not an inning-ending triple play — but the ball skipped under Vosler's glove and into shallow left field, allowing Cruz to chug into second base and Cesar Hernandez to score the Nationals' first run of the game.

At the time, Cobb had thrown seven pitches. He would fire 33 more and wouldn't make it out of the inning.

“He makes that play nine out of 10 times,” Kapler said. “I think he just tried to go to the bag before he secured the baseball...vos has played a pretty high-quality third base for us. Today, obviously, wasn't his best day.”

It clearly wasn't Cobb's best day either, who suffered from some rust making his first start since April 19.

Juan Soto's hit, on the second batter of the day, was sent directly back at Cobb — at 102.3 mph off the bat — and made him jump to avoid taking a comebacker off his leg. Cobb's leap figured to be a good test of his recently healed groin — he said he came out feeling fine physically — but that proved to be the least of the Giants' concerns Sunday.