GIANTS DIG GIANT HOLE
With breakdowns on all fronts, team in precarious spot
A five-game winning streak that had breathed some life into the San Francisco Giants’ moribund season expired Wednesday at the hands of Clayton Kershaw, who toyed with them for seven scoreless innings as the Los Angeles Dodgers cruised to a 6-1 victory.
Losing to their longtime tormentor and the consensus top pitcher in the major leagues won’t bring the Giants much shame. Their status as a fourth-place team desperately scrambling to regain their footing is a different story.
Even after the recent surge, San Francisco ended the first quarter of the season on pace to finish 67-95, which would be its worst record in more than three decades.
That’s a precipitous drop for a club that had climbed to the upper levels of the game’s elite with three World Series crowns this decade, not to mention a string of 510 consecutive regularseason sellouts that dates to 2010.
Those crowds have been nurtured by consistently competitive and compelling teams. Only once since 2009 have the Giants failed to post a winning record, and they wound up first or second in the National League West six times in that span.
But this season’s unexpectedly woeful performance, exacerbated by the extended loss of staff ace Madison Bumgarner to a dirt-bike accident April 20, has raised the question of which direction they should take. After all, according to Baseball-reference.com, only three teams have ever lost 24 of their first 36 games — as San Francisco did before the streak — and recovered to make the playoffs. The last time it happened was in 1989.
Should San Francisco consider moving assets such as right-hander Johnny Cueto, who can
“We’ve let ourselves get beaten in a number of different ways, so our focus is to continue to try to play better baseball.” Giants GM Bobby Evans, saying the club isn’t thinking about unloading players at the trade deadline
opt out of his contract after this season, and utilityman Eduardo Nunez, who’s a pending free agent?
Naturally, neither the players nor the club’s brass is publicly ready to pondering such possibilities.
“We’re still two months away from even thinking about that. We’ve got a lot of baseball we have to play before we get to that point,” general manager Bobby Evans said. “We’ve let ourselves get beaten in a number of different ways, so our focus is to continue to try to play better baseball.”
The Giants (17-25) have shown a knack for wrecking a season that began amid high expectations of a fifth playoff appearance since 2010. Their offense is averaging 3.38 runs per game, second lowest in majors, and the pitching staff ERA of 4.39 ranks 10th in the NL. Even their vaunted fielding unit has failed to live up to its reputation, with a -6 Defensive Runs Saved figure that rates 10th in the league.
New closer Mark Melan- con, signed to a $62 million contract to address a vital need, blew the save in an opening-day loss, then served up a tying two-run homer to former Giant Hector Sanchez in a ninthinning meltdown that resulted in a loss to the lowly San Diego Padres. He was just activated from the disabled list.
Perhaps the nadir came on the first weekend of May, when the Giants were outscored 31-5 at Great American Ball Park while getting swept by the Cincinnati Reds as part of a five-game skid that cemented them as the majors’ worst team at the time.
Right when they seemed primed for burial, though, the Giants showed gumption in outlasting the Reds in a 17-inning win Friday at AT&T Park that became the genesis of their longest stretch of success this season and only the second time they won as many as two games in a row.
“That 17-inning game was really big for us,” said All-Star catcher Buster Posey, batting .378 with seven homers but only 11 RBI. “That would have been a haymaker to the gut to lose that one. So hopefully we can get on a roll.”
The roll did materialize until Wednesday, most of it propelled by a rotation that delivered quality starts in all five victories. But now comes a challenging trip that should serve as a better gauge of where San Francisco truly stands as it goes up against the NL Central-leading St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs over seven games beginning Friday. The Giants are 6-15 on the road, where the staff holds a dreadful 5.82 ERA.
Evans points out the club still relies on a core of players — among them Posey, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt and Joe Panik — who are in their prime. The club also has gotten a spark from top prospect Christian Arroyo, a versatile infielder whose .209 batting average belies his impact.
But with Bumgarner not due to return until August and Cueto’s ERA rising to 4.50 after taking the loss Wednesday, it’s not clear San Francisco has the tools to climb out of its crater in a division that has become much more balanced with the emergence of the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks as contenders.
Their improvement makes it even more imperative for the Giants to parlay their recent hot spell into an extended turnaround and play with a sense of urgency, even in mid-May.
Manager Bruce Bochy doesn’t want to see the same mind-set as last season, when San Francisco entered the All-Star break with the best record in the majors, then went into a prolonged slump that nearly cost it a playoff spot.
“I learned from last year that when you’re going through struggles, you have to be careful that you don’t say, ‘We’ll be OK, we’ll be fine. There’s a lot of baseball left,’ ” Bochy said. “We don’t want to get that mentality. That’s not going to be the thing that stops it. What stops it is your sense of determination and how bad you want it.”
The next few weeks will provide a measure of those.